[Foundation-l] My public aplogies to Jan-Bart (was Movement roles letter, Feb 2012)

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:29 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 16, 2012 3:22 PM, "Theo10011" <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> > While we're on the topic, here's a public service announcement. It's
>> > Bishakha Datta, not Bishaka Datta. The single most-frequently
>> > misspelled name on our lists, AFAICT. Also, Erik Moeller or Erik
>> > Möller with umlaut. Never Erik Moller with no umlaut :-)
>>
>>
>> Oh cmon we're not going to start using umlauts (exception - heavy metal
>> umlauts?).
>>
>> Erik has to settle with having his name misspelled, unless he considers
>> changing it. ;)
>> (think of all the time-saving from looking at the alt-key codes for us
>> non-German keyboard users)
>
> 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.

The most egregiously crawing (people still often fume over the
incident in late night bar conversations) case was when we got the
Wintersport World Championships to Finland. Granted this was before
the universal standard PC keyboards and proper international character
sets. In our homegames, our sportslovers had watch these disfigured
monsters of our countrymens names crawl on the ticker and show on the
scoreboards. The ludicrous reason. Because of sponsorship deals, we
couldn't use properly functioning computersystems that we would have
plenty available suited to the task.

If you believe as Sue appears to, that "o" for "ö" is simply wrong,
all Finnish Hockey players from Finland have their names spelled
"simply wrong" What's more there is a policy page on Wikipedia that is
"simply wrong". Namely Wikipedia's policy page specifically dedicated
to how players names should be spelled in the context of the National
Hockey League.


-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]