“I am inclined to support converting umlauts in the way requested by multiple people ("ä->ae, ö->oe, ü->ue"), despite the fact that this goes against Swedish practices.”
Note that I used Swedish as an example because I speak it. Not because Swedish is an exception. I must protest against defaulting `¨` to `-e`. Let me just cite Wikipedia on this: [1]
“Note that unlike the O-umlaut, the letter Ö cannot be written as ‘oe’. Minimal pairs exist between ‘ö’ and ‘oe’ (and also with ‘oo’, ‘öö’ and ‘öe’). Consider Finnish eläinkö ‘animal?’ (interrogative) vs. eläinkoe ‘animal test’, or Finnish töissä ‘at work’, toissa ‘before last’. In the case the character Ö is unavailable, O is substituted and context is relied upon for inference of the intended meaning.”
There are languages where the Ö is not seen as an O with a diacritic, but as a wholy separate letter. And there are languages where Ö is an O with a diaeresis, not with an umlaut.
Again, to cite Wikipedia: [2]
“Strictly speaking, the words diaeresis and umlaut refer to two distinct phonological phenomena. The diaeresis is used to denote the phenomenon also known as diaeresis, or hiatus, in which a vowel letter is not part of a digraph or diphthong. The umlaut refers to a sound shift.”
A diaeresis in use in Dutch: coöperatief; or in English: zoölogy. Neither Dutch nor English know any sound shifts caused by umlauts, ¨ is always used as diaeresis.
• Böblingen → boeblingen ✓ (this is an o-umlaut.)
• Örebro → Oerebro ✗ (this is the 29th letter of the Swedish alphabet.)
• coöperatief → cooeperatief ✗ (this is an O with diaeresis as seen in Dutch.)
• zoölogy → zooelogy ✗ (this is an O with diaeresis as seen in English.)
Also note that you will be making an exception the rule. In German the umlaut only exists for a, o, and u. So what will you do with ï or ë? What makes it a good idea to transliterate with `-e` for only some characters? Both ï and ë are used in Dutch:
• pinguïn (diaeresis used to break the diphthong `ui`.)
• skiën (diaeresis used to break the digraph `ie`.)
Even in German there will be rare instances of proper names with an `ë` and these should not be transliterated as `ee`. There is no such thing as e-umlaut. [3]
I’d like to hear from other native speakers of languages. This post pretty much covers the languages I know: Dutch, German, English, and Swedish. How many languages can we find with umlauts versus diaeresis?
---
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96#Letter_.C3.96_in_other_languages
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_alphabet#Umlauts
Martijn added on
Something I am wondering: of all the emails about using `-e` for `¨` during the transliteration, did any cite a language different from German?