On Friday 04 December 2009 15:42:56 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > On Freitag 04 Dezember 2009, fe...@crowfix.com wrote: > > If enough Europeans are in the habit of taking > > shortcuts and skipping umlauts and accents and cedilla and tildes, > > we don't. Because skipping Umlaut, accent&co creates a completly new word. > Probably one that is already there. > > Munster is a town > > Müenster/Muenster is a town. > > You can not drop it. Ever. Only the idiots at cnn and foxnews drop it. >
And there's always a contrary: In Afrikaans (major ZA language derived from Dutch) there are two accent characters: - deelteken: two dots above certain vowel - kappie: carat-like symbol above certain vowels In all cases, these characters are used simply as modifiers of the vowel. They change inflection or the pronounciation of the vowel, not the letter itself. Sometimes they just make spelling easier: The verb modifier to indicate past tense is the prefix "ge" and the verb for eat is "eet". So "ate" translates to "geeet". Three consecutive "e"'s looks weird so this word is written "geëet" -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
