Just to clear up some apparent confusion, the trema in English (as in French, it seems) always appears over the second vowel. You still see it very occasionally in naive. In older (pre WWII) books, it also appeared in cooperate. I can’t think of any other words I’ve seen it in, but I don’t read many old books.
Yes, the answer to the pronunciation of “GHOTI” is, belive it or not, “fish”!
So how is it ‘fish’? (for those who didn’t get it)
Pronounce ‘gh’ as in enouGH
Pronounce ‘o’ as in wOmen
Pronounce ‘ti’ as in staTIon
Who wouldn’t be confused?!
I am a fourth-or-fifth generation American, stuck in the Deep South until I graduate from high school. I’ve never left the country, but in my youthful dreaming, hope to move to either Germany, Austria or Switzerland by age 30. To be fair, I think my wording was a little vague in my previous post. I meant to say that I had eliminated my usage of ‘ß’, out of exasperation. However, since I’ve never communicated with a German speaker in their native language, it really doesn’t matter much. My apologies for my vague wording.
«hangs head in shame»
Gosh, NAM, you should maybe take an extended vacation there first, and see them folks in their own environment.
Some of my very bestest friends are German and I go to Germany as often as I can afford. However, that said, as a whole them Krauts can be an obstinate lot, especially when in a position of authority (as your boss, or as a Government employee from whom you need something like a stamp in your passport). Dont burn any bridges before you are sure thats what you want!
we got rid of them to make it harder for foreigners to learn our language, so they cannot take our precious jobs as easily. 
Maybe I was wrong to say “accent” marks. “Diacritical” marks may have been more correct.
And maybe instead of “European” languages I should have said languages written in the Roman alphabet. I don’t know if Greek or some Slavic languages written in Cyrillic have accents too.
Greek used 3 accents — real accents, not umlauts — the acute, the grave, and the circumflex, from Classical times until a few years ago when the Socialist government abolished Kathareuousa and instituted Demotike as the official form of Greek. The accents, and the smooth and rough breathings, were all wiped out along with the classical heritage of the Greek language. I don’t know if there are still any renegades publishing in Kathareuousa with the diacritics intact. Is it against the law? Would they have to pay a fine?
(Another tiny nitpick, but interesting, IMO)
Swedish has those special characters in order to emulate French, not because it’s Germanic. Old Swedish didn’t use those characters, but during the early 19th century, a high-ranking French marshall named Jean Baptiste Bernadotte became Sweden’s new king in order to rejuvenate the Swedish royal bloodline. Thus, a huge interest in all things French engulfed the country and the three extra letters were added to the alphabet so speakers could incorporate the sounds of French words into their speech. For example, the modern Swedish word for “hairdresser” is “frisör” and is pronounced just like the French “friseur.” The ö is supposed to sound like the “eu” sound in French.
No, just plain careless. Damn spelling.
Why do I get the feeling that if the French had invented the character sets, they would have been perfect for French but still inadequate for most other languages…
Letters with diacritics cause more problems than just representing them across different computer systems. There’s the issue of alphabetization which different languages handle differently. It’s impossible to come up with a single “alphabet” that has all the letters with diacritics from all the Latin alphabets and that would let computers correctly alphabetize any list in any language according to the order of alphabetization of that language. That is, without a lot of extra code for special cases.
The New Yorker still uses this style. I like it.
The New Yorker still uses this style. I like it.
Hmm, I just checked my dictionary,
where it says that Å was used at the fiftheenth century here
and Ä and Ö in the sixteenth century.
This is IMO utter and total bovine excrement and a good example of folk etymology. å is a sort of umlaut where aa has become one character. ä and ö have the same history as their German equivalents. It is correct, though, that the Swedish language has many French loanwords. However, they arrived here already during the 18th century.
Wouldn’t Latin itself fit this criteria?
Anyway, you might be interested in a discussion they had on this subject in alt.fan.cecil-adams: