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I've used a domain with "uber" in it for over 20 years, and since the ride sharing service started I have quite a few issues pop up. At least people know how to

I've used a domain with "uber" in it for over 20 years, and since the ride sharing service started I have quite a few issues pop up. At least people know how to spell it now.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Yeah, how do you spell it? Über, with an umlaut like the original German word? Or do you spell it Ueber, where the "ue" stands in for an umlaut in character sets which are incapable of reproducing the glyph? Or do you spell it Uber like the American ride-sharing service, ignoring niceties of pronunciation and trading those for convenience by people who only speak English and don't know German phonology?
- klabb3 3y ago
  As someone who has a name containing a non-ascii letter living in the US, I greatly prefer simply removing the dots or apostrophe or whatever and just use the ascii version. Those transliterations like ü->ue or ø->oe cause much more problems than they solve. Yes, there are lots of letters for where this doesn't work at all, but for the ones that do, the principle of least surprise is better than phonetical correctness, imo. I pick my battles with Anglo- and US-centrism and this one isn’t worth fighting for, imo. “Whatever the letter looks closest to” has a much higher chance of a consistent interpretation. This isn’t even the fault of anglocentrism – it’s an issue between any languages with different alphabets. Heck, I don’t know Cyrillic, but at least with say Vietnamese i can go from ê->e without even turning on my brain. EDIT: oh, and reconstructing a word or sentence with missing umlauts etc is very easy to do, at least in my language. You can infer by context if there are ambiguities in 99% of cases.
- realitythreek 3y ago
  The word Uber has existed in English speaking countries for much longer than the ride sharing service. Using that spelling doesn’t affiliate you with the company. The opposite actually as the company used a common word.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Arguably, Uber is different from uber, meaning outstanding or supreme, and the former has only existed since 2011 due to a complaint from San Francisco taxis causing a rename from Ubercab.

I've used a domain with "uber" in it for over 20 years, and since the ride sharing service started I have quite a few issues pop up. At least people know how to spell it now.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Yeah, how do you spell it? Über, with an umlaut like the original German word? Or do you spell it Ueber, where the "ue" stands in for an umlaut in character sets which are incapable of reproducing the glyph? Or do you spell it Uber like the American ride-sharing service, ignoring niceties of pronunciation and trading those for convenience by people who only speak English and don't know German phonology?

klabb3 3y ago
As someone who has a name containing a non-ascii letter living in the US, I greatly prefer simply removing the dots or apostrophe or whatever and just use the ascii version. Those transliterations like ü->ue or ø->oe cause much more problems than they solve. Yes, there are lots of letters for where this doesn't work at all, but for the ones that do, the principle of least surprise is better than phonetical correctness, imo. I pick my battles with Anglo- and US-centrism and this one isn’t worth fighting for, imo. “Whatever the letter looks closest to” has a much higher chance of a consistent interpretation. This isn’t even the fault of anglocentrism – it’s an issue between any languages with different alphabets. Heck, I don’t know Cyrillic, but at least with say Vietnamese i can go from ê->e without even turning on my brain. EDIT: oh, and reconstructing a word or sentence with missing umlauts etc is very easy to do, at least in my language. You can infer by context if there are ambiguities in 99% of cases.
realitythreek 3y ago
The word Uber has existed in English speaking countries for much longer than the ride sharing service. Using that spelling doesn’t affiliate you with the company. The opposite actually as the company used a common word.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Arguably, Uber is different from uber, meaning outstanding or supreme, and the former has only existed since 2011 due to a complaint from San Francisco taxis causing a rename from Ubercab.