Umlauts appear on three German letters: ä, ö, ü. If typing non-English characters is difficult, you can substitute ‘ae’, ‘oe’, ‘ue’ respectively.
If you can’t type “JägerMonkey”, you should type “JaegerMonkey”. “JagerMonkey” is wrong.
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8 replies on “A note about umlauts”
And JaëgerMonkey, which I saw someone use recently, is right out.
Also ‘ß’ → ‘ss’.
The letters ä and ö also appear in Finnish. In that context, calling them umlauts is incorrect. Similarly, writing ae for ä and oe for ö is incorrect when the word is Finnish. If you cannot write Hämäläinen, write Hamalainen, not Haemaelaeinen.
Antti-Juhani: well, sure, but Jäger is a German word and the post is clearly about German.
If you’re lazy and use Firefox, consider using Accentuate to help you with typing.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accentuateus/
Nicholas, I suppose we could debate what this post is about, but that’d be pointless. Suffice to say that I did not mean to offend, merely to augment your point that it’s language specific.
To be honest, I have seen people make the mistake of assuming that every instance of ä and ö is an umlaut and should be treated as such.
Another tip, especially useful when you are on a computer that’s not set up the way you like it, is to just cut and paste the letter from somewhere else.
I finally figured out how to type them. If you happen to be using Fedora or a similar Gnome-based system, go to System/Preferences/Keyboard, Layouts tab, Options, Compose key position, and set it to something useful. I used the Left Windows key. Then press your Compose key, double-quote, and the vowel.
Now I cän ânnoy people by üsing them incorrectly all ovèr the place, which I hear is inçredibly annōying to people for whom they have mëaning. (Hm… and apparently that includes me. I guess I know enough French for it to matter. That last sentence makes me want to hit myself in the face.)