On 18 February 2012 06:40, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
As Sue said, oe is an accepted way of saying ö if you can't easily get the umlaut. Using o is just wrong (it would be pronounced completely differently).
I would beg to disagree. And remind people that in the computer world a keyboard that doesn't have the umlaut is a very strange keyboard indeed.
Our co-belligerents of yore, the Germans may silently grit their teeth, because in their case the offence is not perpetrated that often. But as a Finn I can tell you that "accept" is not even near the mark.The problem is orders of magnitude worse, because there are surnames that have no vowels but the letters ä and ö in them. The NBA basketball player "Moettoelae" (mispelled for effect) for instance.
Sorry, I should have been more precise. I was referring only to German. As I understand it, Finnish doesn't really have umlauts. It uses the same symbol (just as English does), but for a different purpose.