The Awful German Language (1880)

At the end of the article, Umlauts are written :u, :a, :o. I've never seen them presented this way. Is this some old, typewriter artifact or just a formatting error?

It looks like Microsoft Word at some point had the convention that typing Ctrl-: followed by a vowel got the umlauted vowel:

https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/schreiben/umlaute/ https://www.novalutions.de/en/how-to-type-an-umlaut-in-micro... https://www.process.st/how-to/type-an-umlaut-in-microsoft-wo...

and IIRC something similar worked for Ctrl-' + e = é , Ctrl-` + a = à, Ctrl-~ + n = ñ, and so on.

So there's at least some association for (punctuation mark) + (vowel) = marked vowel and I could see people dropping the Control key and doing what's done here.

On further research, this appears to be Microsoft's attempt to do something like a Compose key (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...) which I had forgotten about. In turn this is sort of emulating a "dead key" on mechanical typewriters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key), although I can't tell if German typewriters actually had a dead key for the umlaut or if they actually had additional keys for ä, ö, ü like modern German keyboards do.

It's definitely not common. Either use the correct letters (ü,ä,ö,ß) or the "ASCII" alternatives (ue, ae, oe, ss).

German typewriters generally had dedicated keys for the umlauts.

Windows however does offer a "English (international with dead keys)" keyboard layout that turns :, `, ^, etc into dead keys. Word offering the same at another level of abstraction sounds like a typical Microsoft thing

> the "ASCII" alternatives (ue, ae, oe, ss)

Isn't that called romanization? Similar to turning 刘慈欣 into Liu Cixin because you can't make the characters

I've found that germans take it for granted that it works this way, but I know of no other latin-script-based language that does romanization. Granted, I don't speak very many languages, but at least among the bigger ones like French, it's not like you write cafee (add an e because you dropped an accent), it's just cafe when you can't make the é. That's actually a terrible example, I just realized, because in german you totally use kaffee (yes yes, different word but same root). Let me try again with the word naive, coming from french naïve: you'd never write naieve. Or if you don't know how to make the ï in Dutch geïntegreerd, writing geintegreerd is understood by everyone whereas geientegreerd only leads to confusion. You could argue that it's because these ï don't have an "e" quality to them, but there is no other romanization taking place either for these, it's just dropped. Only Germans romanize to preserve the pronunciation-to-spelling mapping

If it's the English international keyboard variant that I'm familiar with on either Windows or Linux, it's not : that is turned into a dead key but "

(Itś pretty annoying to write with if youŕe typing english, I can recommend toggling the keyboard layout (Alt+Shift in Windows by default) whenever you switch languages)

In very colloquial settings it would not be unusual for French people to write something like “cafer” for café, but this codes as a bit classless/uneducated.