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

From:Don Blaheta <blahedo@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 17, 1999, 18:51
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 > >&auml; etcetera, even &iuml; ! >=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; &iuml; &idier; &idiaer; only &iuml; 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.