Re: TERMS: going dotty, twice over (was: TERMS: Umlaut-Ablaut)

Quoth Raymond Brown:
> At 12:19 pm +0100 15/11/99, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >Also in the HTML standard: the vowels with dots on are expressed as
> >ä etcetera, even ï !
>=20
> Ach y fi!!
>=20
> And I suppose =FF is &yuml.
> I can only suppose that those who coined the HTML terms were monoglot
> anglophones who hadn't a clue about umlaut or diaeresis.
I can think of a good reasoning process here.  The word "umlaut" in both
English and German is acceptable for describing the two dots at _least_
over a, o, u; and by extension over the rest.  "Tr=E9ma" from the French
couldn't be used since "trema" would be a misspelling and the whole
point was that these be ascii representations.  (Dutch was apparently
not cool enough for them :(.)  And the d-word suffers from the question
of whether to spell it with an a or not.  So of the choices

  &itr=E9m; &itrem; ï &idier; &idiaer;

only ï doesn't suffer any problems.

--=20
-=3D-Don Blaheta-=3D-=3D-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=3D-=3D-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/=
~dpb/>-=3D-
The 80's -- when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy.