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Comment by Ndymium | Hacker News Reader

En and em dashes are easily accessible on both my laptop's and phone's keyboard layouts and I like using them, just like putting the ö in coöperate. It's sad if this now makes me look like a robot and I have to use the wrong dashes to be more "human".

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TIL that some people spell cooperate with an "ö".

As a Swedish native it really breaks my reading of an English word, but apparently it's supposed to indicate that you should pronounce each "o" separately. Language is fun.

As a native English speaker, it also breaks my reading of "cooperate". Never seen it before. I think parent is just annoyingly eccentric for the sake of it.

Most commonly seen in naïve, and the New Yorker

I admit that latter part is just for whimsy, because I think it looks fun. The dashes I like for their aesthetics and if that makes me eccentric then so be it. They shouldn't distract anyone's reading, or at least they didn't use to before LLMs.

Using umlauts to signal that a vowel is pronounced separately is common in a number of languages (like Dutch).

Yeah, I know.

It's just confusing for us poor Swedes since "ö" in Swedish is a separate letter with its own pronunciation, and not a somehow-modified "o". Always takes an extra couple of seconds to remember how "Motörhead" is supposed to be said. :)

That kind of use technically makes it a diaeresis, not an umlaut.

But it's not used as an Umlaut here, that's exactly what's confusing. Here this is used as a trema/diaeresis.

Em dashes are widely used. The diaeresis is only used in The New Yorker and those that copied their style.

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