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From: costello@stx.UUCP (Michael E. Costello)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <1CE00001.evqsiv@stx.UUCP>
Date: 6 May 91 08:20:24 GMT
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Reply-To: costello%stx.UUCP@world.std.com
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Two minor quibbles:

In article <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de>, kleine@ira.uka.de (Karl Kleine) writes:
> Summary:
> (a) The correct plural form of Umlaut is Umlaute. You should follow the
>     tradition of using the plural form of the foreign language in
>     educated language, as you do without question for Latin, for example.

In "normal, everyday English" words that have an English usage take
English plurals. The plural of "umlaut" would be "umlauts". For example,
no native English speaker would use "mavenim" as the plural for "maven".
You are correct about Latin though.

In "formal English" (which no one really uses), diereses are used, as
you say, to separate adjacent vowels which are distinct (i.e.--not a
dipthong). One will frequently encounter (in some journals, anyway)
a dieresis over the second "o" in "cooperation."

> (b) Umlaute are letters of there own, not letters with some additional
>     funny mark on top of it.
> (c) Many fonts for non-professional typesetting (I do not have a proper
>     term) are not suitable to set German text because of missing Umlaute. 
>     Professional systems and fonts do have Umlaute as they have characters
>     specific to other languages, like the French cedilla.
> 

= Michael Costello, Meeting Director * costello@world.std.com  =
= BCS*Mac  *  The Boston Computer Society Macintosh User Group =
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