And therein lies a terrible misconception: the world does not speak English or German or Mandarin or French, but a horrible mix of all these languages. Eventual

And therein lies a terrible misconception: the world does not speak English or German or Mandarin or French, but a horrible mix of all these languages. Eventually, almost any system will have to deal with that. Simple example and a current pet peeve of mine while staying in the US: my name is spelled with an ü. I will likely try to enter that in your web form, because it is part of my legal name. A lot of systems happen to "sanitize" that input when it is passed across some invisible internal boundaries and it becomes a u. Now that system has actually changed my name. ü and u are completely different letters. The proper conversion actually is the transcription ue - two letters! If that were - say - the address for a letter to Germany, it might well return to sender because there is noone with the (altered) name living at the given address.