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Comment by hdevalence | Hacker News Reader

Moreover, unless you know for a fact that the specific text you're using doesn't have any non-ascii characters. "It's English" doesn't quite cut it: what about façade, coördinate, '✓', or even '£', all of which are non-ascii.

(Of course, I'm assuming that you meant this, so it's not a correction -- I'm just taking the opportunity to explicitly mention it.)

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Both "façade" and "coördinate" use orthographs which are not present in the modern English orthography. So they aren't actually "English".

Why don't you tell the New Yorker staff they're not writing English, and see how far you get?

coördinate is so pedantic, I love it :)

I forget where I read it, but some publication in the US uses the "interpunct" to the same effect: co·ordinate.

The editor of one of the magazines MIT publishes insists on "coöperate"...which of course shows up several times in every issue.

Ha, I noticed this too. It's MIT Technology Review. Excellent magazine.

Yeah, that's the one. It's a great magazine, too bad about the editor's fetish for that letter since it's not part of the English orthography. I think it's also used in The New Yorker.

sigh Why can't English speakers just be happy with their language without trying to turn it into Latin or German or something else? It's particularly funny with the word "cooperate", since those editors are insisting on using a Germanic orthograph on a Latin-rooted word. Blegh, whatever. I don't usually care too much about language usage, but for some reason this one kind of gets under my skin.

The diaeresis in this context is not an Umlaut. It has similar roots as on ï which comes from French, I think. While äöü in German are letters with distinct sounds, the diaeresis on vowels in English usage signifies a short pause before that vowel.

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