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I don't think the average literate English reader really knows how to parse an umlaut - I sure don't.

And while the spelling system isn't necessarily consistent I don't see why we should change words that people do know how to pronounce to ones that we don't?

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Do you mean to say that a strange character in one word keeps you from tokenizing the sentence? And hence you cannot make sense of the whole sentence because of that one character (syntax parsing → semantics)? Or do you simply mean that you don’t understand what that one single character is supposed to represent (or just sound like)?

The sound like bit.

We don’t have an equivalent vowel sound to “ü” in English at all. It’s something German learners struggle with.

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