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They can ask politely though, and spellings and names do change over time.


They can ask, but their request is stupid. The English language does not have any kind of facility for umlauted characters.


How naïve of you.

(Although, technically, that's a diaeresis, not an umlaut.)


What’s the difference?

BTW, that spelling is borderline archaic. It’s allowable, but so is “naive,” which is probably better style.

I wouldn’t use semi-archiac spellings as a precedent.


Umlaut modifies how a letter is pronounced; diaeresis tells you where a new syllable starts. I'm not sure how to pronounce "u" or "ü" in Turkish.

The problem with naive is that it's not very clear how to pronounce it: it's "na-ive", which isn't very clear. With naïve there's a clear indication that the "i" starts a new syllable.

While I agree that diaeresis in English are more archaic than not, I don't agree it's better style to leave them out. Right now there is, in my opinion, no good way to spell some words: "cooperation" is ambiguous (coo-peration, coop-eration, or co-operation?), "co-operation" looks ugly and is an abuse of the hyphen, and "coöperation" is nice but rather archaic.

A bit of effort to reduce ambiguity and match spelling and pronunciation (as far as the language allows) doesn't strike me as a bad thing.


While it’s not clear how to pronounce “naive” - that’s common in English.

Plenty of English words have little relation between how they are spelled and how they are pronounced.

We don’t usually revert to archaic spellings to solve the matter.

https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...


While naïve is less common than naive, it is not archaic; it's simply an alternative spelling that's less commonly used.

Actually, to my surprise naïve even seems to be gaining in popularity to the point it's about on-par with naive: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=naive%2Cna%C3%...

And that other words in English have unfortunate spelling is not really a very string argument. You can use this on anything.


> naïve even seems to be gaining in popularity

I wonder if this is the impact of technology. When written by hand, there's not much practical difference between naive and naïve. With English typewriters and English keyboards, writing naïve is tricky so people, presumably, just didn't bother. Now, however, a lot of written text goes through spelling correction so, if the spell checker wants naïve then it may automatically change it or suggest you do.

In my completely rigorous and scientifically valid testing of this assumption: Word corrects to naïve, Chrome text box flags naïve, Edge text box is happy with both and imessage suggests naive. So bit of a mixed bag.


> it’s not clear how to pronounce

Indeed, this is a universal property of English spelling.


The façade of your rôle in the naïve crusade against Türkiye's self-determination will not last for an æternity, my friend. You'd better update your résumé!


Agreed. They can try for "Turkiye" but not "Türkiye". That one will never be accepted.


That'll be news to Motörhead and fans.

(English band formed in London in 1975 and rocking an umlaut ever since)




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