[OSM-talk] Announcing name searches for OSM

[Daniel Fischer]

David Earl wrote:
> The first and last are already there. I have Ø as O at present (some 
> Danish
> colleagues had in the past described Ø to me as an entirely separate letter
> that didn't have a direct equivalent, but from what you say, they were
> wrong)
No, they're right, it is absolutely a letter of its own just like the 
German umlauts and the ß are letters of their own. They all evolved from 
ligatures of two letters, so that's why they're usually transliterated 
as a sequence of two letters. It doesn't mean they're not separate. In 
fact if you take into account German collation rules, Danish special 
letters are more letters of their own than German special letters, and 
Austrians treat their umlauts better than Germans do :-)

By the way, one reason you can find places in Århus that have Aarhus in 
their name is that the letter å was only added to the Danish alphabet in 
1948. So some places that are older than that kept their old names, and 
some people who like aa better than å are also still using aa. One 
example of this is the town of Aalborg, which first got its name changed 
to Ålborg in 1948 but reverted to Aalborg in 1984.
> However, I worked out during my sleep how to manage more than one
> alternative like this, so I'll be able to make
> Koln (for convenience on non accented keyboards) and Koeln (for precision)
> match Köln for example
Note that specifically in German, writing Koln instead of Köln is 
actually wrong. Just in case you need a reason to support both, of 
course anyone speaking a language without these characters will likely 
try the closest character he knows instead so this should be supported 
absolutely. We even do this to foreign words that are officially part of 
the language including their special letters, like writing "cafe" has 
become popular in both English and German and is probably done in other 
languages too.


Daniel