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by yasth 3777 days ago
Eh you have to understand that in dealing with loan words the goal isn't to produce cognates. It is a natural well established process in English, and pointedly doesn't carry over pronunciation or diacritics. This is so that the words text is freely interchangeable as there is a long period where the term is sometimes written with diacritics (and italicized) and sometimes not. über and ueber would seem different to people and risk confusing them.

I understand your concern, in German as in most languages words are being homogenized and losing diacritics, first among the youth and informal use, and then even sneaking in to ads and "real" use. It has caused a lot of concern, and a fair amount of pushback, but you can't expect other languages' systems to follow the reactionary rules or care about the internal politics.

1 comments

To add one point: Already by the change from Fraktur to Antiqua in Germany in the middle of the 20th century lots of subtleties got lost. For example, the words Wachstube (which can either be read as Wach-stube or as Wachs-tube) are spelled differently in Fraktur (since there exists two kinds of s), but the same in Antiqua (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wachstube.svg). Also some pairs of letters that form a common sound are indicated by a ligatur in Fraktur (as ch, ck, ſt and tz), but not in Antiqua (cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktursatz#Ligaturen_und_Tren...).