[seqfan] Umlauts in names and titles

[Georg.Fischer]

Dear seqfans,

Fred Lunnon wrote:
> Sometimes I'm tempted to do a global edit to replace all instances
> of his name by Erdos.
> 
> Far preferable is modifying the search engine (as eg. Google has) to
> ignore accents!
and
> On 4/13/18, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The reason Georg thought there were only 32 links to the Engel paper rather
>> than 36  is that 4 of them had umlauts in the title.

Please let me comment a little bit on the umlaut/accent/foreign 
characters issues.

(1) The OEIS FAQ forbids the use of non-ASCII characters,
greek letters, math symbols etc., and I agree that such
symbols should be avoided in the sequence descriptions.
The OEIS was begun long before people bothered about
UTF-8 or other codes, and typesetting math with such codes
is very limited anyway.
(2) In German, it is perfectly legal to replace the umlauts
ä->ae, ö->oe, ü->ue (in fact, one explanation of the dots
above is that they were originally an "e" in the old script),
and the sharp ß->ss (as Swiss people do it always).

But
(3) In German it is NOT CORRECT to omit the umlauts resp. to
use the pure vowel only. This sometimes changes the meaning
severely, for example "Gärten" (= several gardens) to "Garten"
(= one garden). "Stammbruechen" is ok, but "Stammbruchen" is
wrong. I knew of several american people searching for their German
anchestors with the name "Muller" - they found none, because
in Germany there were only "Müller"s.
(4) Similiar for french, spanish etc. with the additional problem
that they have no easy replacement for their accents.
(5) Even worse, in Hungarian there are 2 dots above the "o", and
also two commas (accents aigues), and Erdös is correctly written
(c.f. wikipedia) Erdős with the latter ones. (BTW, "Erdoes" would
look strange in my eyes).

(6) The good messages are that the OEIS web server delivers
content="text/html; charset=utf-8" anyway, and that the OEIS search
machine does exactly what Fred Lunnon proposes: When I type
"Erdős" it searches for "erdos" instead and finds 755 results,
mostly "Erdős", some "Erdos".

Best regards - Georg Fischer