Where is this Koeln place that you speak of? It's not called that in any language. Köln or Cologne, but not some Anglicised transliteration of the German name please.
Meanwhile, Google maps seems to be living in some time warp, insisting on using English names that I didn't even know existed, such as Coblence and Mayence. Strange. It's not like the proper German names have umlauts.
next stop...
slanning on 2008-07-11T07:43:39
Fuckingborough. Terminus!
On typewriters that I used back in the day there actually was a special key to stop the carriage from moving while typing, so you could easily put umlauts and diacritics in. Don't know if english/us typewriters would have those.
Anyway, for German people (and Austrians) I'd say it is very automatic to read e after vowel as an umlaut. With my last name containing an 'oe' this is forever being pronounced wrong by Germans, as it should be pronounced like in the english word 'shoe'.
Ofcourse for english it's difficult to pronounce 'oe' correctly, witness 'Phoebe', 'Chloe' and 'shoe'. But admittedly the second one needs a trema. Which looks the same as an umlaut. But does something different. Wheeee!
