What I find interesting is that while almost every ü can be replaced with ue, not every ue can be replace with ü. Then there is the ß as in Straße or STRASSE. Not every 'ss' can be changed to ß... Too confusing by far! I do remember learning the conversion in German language class when I was living in Germany and I just accepted it for the norm, but obviously that is NOT necessarily true.


>>I believe that is because some people translate ü to U instead of UE...
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>That's a common bad habit in many of the countries with more than 26 characters in their alphabet - they just convert these characters to the nearest English character. True, down the history of computing, the localizations were always lagging behind the software. VFP9, as great as it is, still doesn't handle Unicode.
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>For a while, I think it was in 70s, Germany opted for alternate spelling of the umlauts with the vowel sans umlaut followed by an E, so ä, ö and ü became ae, oe, ue - because there were too many computers and teleprinters out there that had only 26 characters. Probably happened while you were there.
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>My language is doing relatively OK, because we got only five extra characters, and the language is full of redundancy anyway - but you can still get into funny situations when you don't use them. A benign example: what is "spanac"? Is it "spanać" (spinach) or "Španac" (a Spanish)? Or, one tells you "tacno", probably meaning "tačno" (correct) - but he actually called you a dish (tacna - probably from German tasse).
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>It's worse with Hungarian, because it has nine accented vowels, and they carry the meaning. One nice typo I remember was, instead of "helyi közösség" (local community), "helyi közösseg" (the common local as*hole).
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>Back to cities and the general subject of this thread: how about the languages that don't natively use Latin alphabet? Should we use whatever is in common use here, or what they use themselves when labeling their exports? Is usage of colonial names an insult? These are all very sensitive matters - and I'd rather not see them regulated here. It's assumed that only those who know how to use the Web come here. Let's trust them to be able spell their cities.