[Sca-cooks] Almond Milk Cheese Redux

[wheezul at canby.com]

 So it can now be found in the FOOD section of
> the Florilegium as:
> alnd-mlk-chs-msg  (16K)  4/11/10  Period almond milk cheese.  Cheese
> and butter-
>                                      like compounds make from almond
> milk.
> http://www.florilegium.org/files/FOOD/alnd-mlk-chs-msg.html
>
> Stefan
> ======

Thank you Stefan - that is sweet!  Just a question to you and the list in
general about diacritical marks (i.e. umlauts etc.).  I can code the keys
to display the marks, but it looks like my email program and some of the
list's email reader programs may strip them and replace them with question
marks and other random assorted characters.

One way around this, in case of an umlaut (the double dots shown on some
German vowels which is actually a contraction mark indicating that an "e"
belongs after the vowel)can be written as a colon.  So a: o: u: stands for
the letter with the dots on top.  I find this practice really annoys me
when I am reading because of how I recognize words visually so my
inclination is not to do it for ease of fluid reading.  However, the
question marks are worse!  I think there is some kind of movement afoot to
do away with the marks, but it seems most translation programs want the
actual letter with the umlaut present or the text is not found.  It would
be easiest to read if they were just left the marks off, but it might
wreak havoc with someone trying to do a babelfish or google translation.

Also, when I transcribe I modernize some of the spellings such as in the
case of the lines over m's, n's and other shorthand type abbreviations I
will just spell out the word.  However, I leave variant spellings alone.

Has the list had a discussion about this? Was there consensus?  If not,
what is the feeling now between the 3 options I see - umlaut with
characters and hope that ?'s won't replace them, use the sideways
diacritical indicator of the colon, or just leave 'em off?

Thanks,

Katherine