Uberratte
Kitchen, 9pm last night:
Housemate: “It smells …. more like sewage …. kind of … vegetative..”
Me: “Mmm. Organic … not corporeal …”
Housemate: “Yeah, definitely not cadaverous …”
Kitchen, 7am this morning:
Shavings. Shards of iridesecent poison pellets all through the cupboards, as though poison has just been nonchalantly walked through as opposed to eaten. Droppings. Gnawings.
Could it be that we have inadvertently bred some kind of super rat?
Does a diet of gleaned avocado and lentils make for the overcoming of warfarin and persistence both?
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oh right, you mean Überratte
Comment by mark — 5/17/2005 @ 11:58 am
no, i obviously mean the rare breed of rat known affectionally as uberratte, in the original old english.
ps: how *do* you do umlauts and tildes etc with an anglo-esque keyboard?
Comment by ann — 5/17/2005 @ 4:00 pm
on a mac umlaut is alt+u and then write the letter you want umaluted. other accents similarly, although I don’t know what characer you alt for tilde since I don’t speak any tilded languages. windoze shortcuts are imho more intuitive, except they are done by individual programs not the OS so they might not work in a browser. umlaut is ctrl+: (i.e. ctrl+shit+;) then your letter, and tilde is ctrl+~ (see the logic?)
Comment by mark — 5/17/2005 @ 8:13 pm
For most PC fonts it is Alt+220 (Ü) and Alt+252 (ü) - ie, you hold down the ALT key while typing 220 on the number section of the keyboard.
Or just use google and then cut and paste the letters u want.
Hi Ann! :)
Comment by Wizard — 5/19/2005 @ 1:33 am
Alternatively, you can ditch the umlauts altogether and just add an /e/ directly after the vowel in question, which is equally acceptable. Therefore, it would be okay to put Ueberratte and a true blue German would understand alles. Not all regions in Germany have a tradition of using the umlauts, which is why Goethe wrote his name thusly, rather than Gothe with umlauts over the o. Also, in German at least, umlauts only appear over the /a/, /o/ and /u/.
I can check all this with Ratzinger - sorry, Benedict XVI - when I see him next.
Comment by Adrian — 5/21/2005 @ 8:02 pm
I think replacing umlauts with ‘e’s is a bit gauche these days - it used to be really common because of the technical difficulty of producing them with typewriters and what-not.
Comment by mark — 5/22/2005 @ 4:33 am
I thought that the precise point of Ann’s post was how to get around the difficulties of using umlauts (if you think that pressing alt and remembering a 3 digit number is easier than whacking and /e/ after the vowel, you’re a better man than I am).
As recently as the following study for the BAVARIAN ARCHIVE FOR SPEECH SIGNALS (University of Munich, Institut of Phonetics Schellingstr. 3/II, 80799 Muenchen, Germany), the use of an /e/ instead of the cumbersome umlauts was advocated.
My final point is that it was still down to regional preference (I think the country that kick started the printing press over 500 years ago, could cope with an umlaut here and there). Let’s avoid calling regional differences (like non-umlauted vowels, funny accents, and boomerangs) gauche, otherwise we destroy diversity.
Comment by Adrian — 5/23/2005 @ 2:44 am
As a final final comment on the subject (unless I’m provoked further), I think that the following article from the Guardian by Smallweed (30 April 2005) is quite fun. Mark, you’re not from Wiltshire, are you? ;)
__________________
It is the sensible practice of this newspaper not to insert over the names of people or places every conceivable diacritical sign it can find. This rule applies both to conventional accents and devices such as those wiggly Iberian things known as tildes which, minute though they are, have the power to turn some pious and inoffensive canon into a canyon. It was with some consternation, therefore, that I read in G2 on Thursday an account of a rock band called Mötley Crüe. What precisely are the devices, of the kind that are normally identified as diereses or umlauts, positioned over the O of Motley and the U of Crue? Here in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside it is hard to find experts capable of resolving this question. Nor from this distance can I quite gauge the implications for the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, whom the Guardian normally describes as Jiri Belohlavek. This Belohlavek, when looked at more closely, is found to sport a series of diacritical-style decorations, and in circles where these distinctions are still considered significant, appears as Ji rí B elohlávek. If the model of Mötley Crüe is followed, and the new chief conductor has to be treated every time he gives a concert to the full works, I guess a clamour might shortly arise in newspaper offices for B elohlávek to be removed and replaced by another conductor with a simpler name. Leonard Slatkin, for instance. There are other possible consequences, too, for the BBC to consider. Might not rejected applicants for the post begin to assume that their chances might have been better had their names been as exotic as Ji rí’s? It used after all to be said that the real name of the conductor Stokowski was Stokes, and that only making himself sound more cosmopolitan won him a place among world conductors. Or were I for instance Paul Daniel, who in Ji rí’s absence is due to take charge of the final night of the proms, I might well suspect that the road to international acclaim might lie in spelling myself something more like Paül Dàñel.
Comment by àdrìàn — 5/24/2005 @ 4:00 am
hang on….wasn’t ann’s post about rats?? can’t help but agree with adrian on this one however - calling the use of ‘e’ instead of Ü (i just cut and pasted that - too much faffing around) ‘gauche’ is how ethnic cleansing begins my friend.
Furthermore, I believe ann stated that the rat was a ’super rat’, correcting her quite correct english with german is something of a slap in the face to our boys who fought for our current way of life and right to kill rats as we find them.
Comment by matrine — 5/25/2005 @ 11:31 am
Thanks for the tips people. You are all outrageous :)
Comment by ann — 5/26/2005 @ 12:19 pm
¨ aside, shouldn’t we or rather ann be concerned that this Überrat is not just a super rat but is in fact literally an “over rat” and has rat minions to do its bidding. right now this over rat could be extending its influence over the other rats and preparing to take over the house.
hope this helps you sleep ann ;)
Comment by luke — 5/30/2005 @ 8:13 pm
German keyboards have individual keys for ü, ä etc, and they are considered separate letters in their own right(s), so I’m sticking by my ‘gauche’ comment, racist or no - I don’t believe any German-speaker with a German computer is writing ‘Ueber’.
I am not from Wiltshire, but Somerset, which is next to Wilts. Wilts is a terrible place though, where 80s hair bands are still beyond the cusp of their ken.
Comment by mark — 5/31/2005 @ 11:03 am
hiya mark,
are you perchance on a diet of diet of gleaned avocado and lentils?
Comment by ratty — 6/2/2005 @ 2:11 pm
hiya ratty,
are you pressing post twice instead of once?
Comment by ratty — 6/2/2005 @ 2:12 pm
Mark.
Firstly, re your post (number 12), maybe Ann’s changed since I last saw her, but I don’t think she is a German speaker, nor do I believe she is in possession of a German keyboard.
Secondly, what was the point of winning the war if we don’t assert a bit of preference for anglocising words. Did the Battle of Britain ever reach Somerset?
Yes, I am back at work now. Yes, I have more free time on my hands…
Comment by adrian — 6/15/2005 @ 12:13 am