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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 18 February 2012 06:40, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at 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.