A wrong corrected!

Brontë sisters finally get their dots as names corrected at Westminster Abbey: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/sep/26/bronte-sisters-dots-names-correc...

A win for the umlauts! Too bad the URL doesn't include them...

For a long time the various special letters were not allowed in URLs at all. Now they are, in theory, allowed, but the coding is a real problem, as most of them have multiple codings and making sure that they are properly recognized is difficult. (See recent bugs here.) Therefore they are generally avoided in URLs.

>4 MarthaJeanne: Ah, I didn't know they had ever been allowed in URLs! I've never seen them. I figured it would be an encoding issue.

Please! NOT an umlaut! This is Pedants’ corner after all. The two dots are a diaeresis mark indicating that the marked letter is pronounced separately from the preceding letter, usually another vowel. Long obsolete in the UK, it lasted longer in the USA.

More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

>6 abbottthomas: And 'Umlaut' indicates that the letter is pronounced differently. It only goes on a o or u.

>6 abbottthomas: But in the case of Bronte there isn't any question about whether the t and e are pronounced separately so is it really a diaeresis mark?

>8 jjwilson61: I take your point, but what else could it be? As I understand it whichever family member decided to use the mark wanted to make sure that the name was pronounced “Brontey” and not “Bront” as it might have been in some languages.