Pages

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

The Correct Way to Spell Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap, the greatest fake/real band ever, is typically spelled incorrectly. The official spelling contains umlauts over the n and no dot over the letter i. However, there is no Unicode n-umlaut (or n-diaeresis), so you can't exactly type it. Somehow, Wikipedia managed to do it. (Note: diaeresis would be more accurate versus umlaut, since the umlaut represents a change in the sound of the letter.)

N-umlaut does occur in three languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar), Jacaltec (a Mayan dialect spoken in Guatemala and southern Mexico), and in Cape Verdean Creole.

The dotless i, or ı, occurs in Turkish, in addition to a dotted i. So of course, there are dotted and undotted capital i's as well: İ & I. The dotless i also occurs in Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tatar, and (traditional) Irish (which has no dotted i).

No comments:

Post a Comment