On Monday 26 August 2002 11:13, Ray Saintonge wrote:
To do this the system also needs to distinguish between an umlaut and a diaresis. The famous painter Raphael is often spelled with a diaresis as "Raphaël". It wouldn't do do have him automagically turned into "Raphäl". The important thing to me is not in having the machines put in umlauts or other accents, but having the search engine regard spellings with or without accents as equivalent. This would be a great help for the searcher who doesn't know if a word has an accent or exactly what accent it has. No non-french speaking person should be required to know about how some verbs change their accent patterns, or the subtleties about an acute or grave accent on a final "e" in Catalan. The uniquely German treatment of umlauted vowels can then probably be treated with redirects.
There are also a few German words in which "ue" is *not* equivalent to "ü": "Tuer" means "doer", the actor form of "tun", and is different from "Tür" meaning "door", and "Guericke", the Magdeburger who made the vacuum pump, is written sometimes "Gericke" but never "Güricke".
phma