> Marco Mailand, isn't there a character set such as keycaps that you can
> use to make your 'many greetings' be spelled the proper, German way.
> Correct me if I am wrong, possibly that is the way Germans write it (I
> am a German student at school, top of class all the time so far out of
> the year-and-a-half I've been taking it).
You caught me! And you're completely right:
It should be: Viele Grüße!
But I think this would never be transmitted and arrive as I wrote. All those
special characters will be mangled and transformed into whatsoever and
everybody will get something else. So what's really wrong with it:
- ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö and Ü can be replaced with ae, oe, ue, Ae, Oe and Ue as is
used in each crossword puzzle. I think that this is even allowed by the
german language and spelling definition book "DUDEN" but may be under
certain circumstances. Certainly no writer of lyrics or prosa will use this
transformation but probably every programmer :-)
- the ß (you should see a beta character here) the so called sharp s is used
in Germany and maybe in Austria only. The DUDEN allows to use double s
instead, which is standard in Switzerland since 1904 or so. The disadvantage
of ß is that it doesn't have a capital letter, because it never occours at
the beginning of a word. If someone has to write a word with ß in all
capitals he has to use SS instead. The disadvantage of using 'ss' that some
words can not be distinguished:
mass: die Masse and dimensions: die Maße
busses: die Busse and penalty/fine: die Buße
Or there appear three 'sss' in a composite word: Stoßspannung ->
Stossspannung (peak voltage)
Its probably not worth to waste more bandwith with things like this, since
all languages will sooner or later be replaced by one which is probably
english.
-- With best regards / Viele Gruesse, äh, Grüße! :-)Marco Mailand http://slsbd.psi.ch/timing
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