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The Awful German Language (1880)

(faculty.georgetown.edu)
186 points nalinidash | 2 comments | 16 May 25 04:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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addandsubtract ◴[16 May 25 12:56 UTC] No.44004904[source]▶
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?
replies(2): >>44005172 #>>44005464 #
madcaptenor ◴[16 May 25 13:20 UTC] No.44005172[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>44005262 #
madcaptenor ◴[16 May 25 13:27 UTC] No.44005262[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>44007531 #
1. wongarsu ◴[16 May 25 16:50 UTC] No.44007531[source]▶
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

replies(1): >>44009636 #
2. lucb1e ◴[16 May 25 20:41 UTC] No.44009636[source]▶
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)