In cases when you don’t have the umlauts on your keyboard or in your font, the proper substitutions are the vowel+‘e’, so ‘ö’ becomes ‘oe’, ‘ä’ ‘ae’ and ‘ü’ ‘ue’. That’s what most probably happened when you see “Göring” spelled as “Goering”. Note that in proper names, sometimes an umlaut is spelled this way by default, the most famous example being the last name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, pronounced “Göthe”.
Yeah, I can’t find a good “ranking” on the internet of phonetic languages, but German is considered pretty phonetic when it comes to spelling. I find it easy to look at a word and know how it’s pronounced as opposed to, say, in English.
The ö sound is accomplished by shaping your mouth and tongue as if to make an o sound (like “oat” or “boat”) then attempting to pronounce an “e” (as in “bee” or “see”) without reshaping your mouth. Or so I was taught in beginning German. Hence it’s essentially œ or “oe” so that is often used outside of German as a substitute for the less-self-explanatory ö.
all that and (i think) there was an old alphabet - and def. old typewriters - that did not have the Umlaut … and neither the “scharfes S” (the beta shaped letter for short-S) … and that was the standard-workaround
This thread reminds me of the time I was looking in Jutland (Jylland, I think) phone directory for someone in the town of Aarhus. Now where in the alphabetical listing of the towns in Jutland would you expect to find Aarhus?
It was the very last town. The reason was that it has an alternate spelling Århus and the Å is the last letter in Danish alphabet. Next to last was Aalborg.
One aspect that I’d like to mention with regard to the OP’s contention that German spelling is unphonetic:
Composite words often need to be understood and correctly semantically parsed to be pronounced correctly. There are garden-path sentences in English and there are garden-path words in German.
For example, to correctly pronounce Altbaucharme you need to know from context that it is not Alt-bauch-arme (arms of old belly) but Altbau-charme (charm of old buildings). From that follows that the charme part is a loan word from French, and is to be pronounced accordingly (Germans must pronounce recognizable loan words according to the origin language, or perish in the attempt).
Another example is Montage which is pronounced differently whether the meaning is “mondays” (pronounced as German) or “the act of assembling something” (pronounced as French albeit with the final e as schwa rather than silent)
You pronounce Erblasser differently depending on whether Erb-lasser (male person leaving an inheritance) or Er-blasser (male person growing pale) is meant.
Once I understand a German word that I had not encountered before, there is no problem with pronouncing it.