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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kitefarrago" data-source="post: 3204791" data-attributes="member: 91670">That's not entirely true, or  at least subject to interpretation. Certainly as far as proper names are concerned Moeller and Möller would be considered different, and people would expect the proper spelling to be upheld unless this was not possible.But, of course, the German character that come with an umlaut are not always representable in a given system ( if restricted to ASCII characters, or to old-fashioned typewriters without the appropriate keys.)Under those circumstances the accepted rule for treating umlauts is to write e after the appropriate vowel. That leads to the two words having the same pronunciation.It seems to me that whenever a language has letters that are non-standard in this way then there will be rules to deal with what to do when those symbols are not available. For German inserting the e keeps the pronunciation the same, so one can see where that rule comes from. For other languages this may not be at all approperiate.I remember well a German friend of mine who was working in the UK for a while agonizing whether he should choose his email address to replace the umlaut with ue, or just stick with the u. The first one would have been the expected thing to do in Germany, but he suspected that others would be more likely to guess the other option when trying to email him.Andrea</blockquote>