![\"German](\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/german_diacriticals.jpg\" "\\"German")
<\/p>\nI could have killed one of my pupils yesterday. He booked a last minute lesson in the only space available in my diary – at 9pm on Sunday evening. I could have said no, but he has his test coming up. But I did lay it on thick about how I was missing the World Cup final because of him.<\/p>\n
I got home in time for extra time, and saw Mario G\u00f6tze\u2019s brilliant goal for Germany. I\u2019m glad Germany won – they were the best team in the tournament, and any other result would have just been unfair. But something about the BBC\u2019s coverage rankles me.<\/p>\n
G\u00f6tze\u2019s name is spelt with an \u2018o\u2019 with an umlaut (or diaeresis in linguistic jargon). Thomas M\u00fcller\u2019s name also has an umlaut, as does Mesut \u00d6zil\u2019s, Andr\u00e9 Sch\u00fcrrle\u2019s, Benedikt H\u00f6wedes\u2019s, and manager Jogi L\u00f6ws\u2019s. The, for good measure, you have Kevin Gro\u00dfkreutz. And yet the BBC incorrectly reports these names as Gotze, Muller, Ozil, Schurrle, Howedes, and Lows (and misses out other diacritics). The German newspaper, Die Welt<\/a>, obviously uses the proper spellings.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always been better at speaking German than any other language – I can\u2019t actually speak fluently, but I can get by whenever I go to a German-speaking country (you know, order food and beer, get a taxi to take me where they serve food and beer. That sort of thing). But it was bad enough that they tried to replace umlauts with letters at one time. I used to do business with a company called Bausch and Str\u00f6bel, and in the English-speaking world they printed their name a \u201cStroebel\u201d, because in the English-speaking world people are either too stupid or too arrogant to understand the umlaut.<\/p>\n In a similar vein, I\u2019ve seen L\u00f6ws written as Loews, and G\u00f6tze written as Goetze. And it\u2019s bloody wrong.<\/p>\n I find that the same thing happens with pupils who have non-British origins. Chinese pupils especially seem to often adopt English names instead of their Chinese ones to make it easier for the Brits. I\u2019ve got a clutch of learners at the moment from India, Latvia, Lithuania, Senegal, and so on, and I make a point of learning their names and finding out how to pronounce and spell them correctly. I will go so far as to find out if they have a shorter nickname that they use themselves sometimes, but I insist on using their correct names if they are happy with that.<\/p>\n So I\u2019d expect the BBC to at least spell the names of German footballers correctly instead of just missing out critical symbols which govern the pronunciation.<\/p>\n It was still a great goal, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I could have killed one of my pupils yesterday. He booked a last minute lesson in the only space available in my diary – at 9pm on Sunday evening. I could have said no, but he has his test coming up. But I did lay it on thick about how I was missing the World […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,102,87,101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-general-related","category-news","category-world-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}