See GoedelEscherBach ---- I propose retaining this deleted page. Americans and many other English speakers who have not studied German really do not understand the German umlaut (typically have never heard of it, nor associated issues), and spelling is a definite pragmatic problem. His name actually is "Gödel" (I don't know how that renders for other people on other platforms; the "o" has a diacritical mark above it consisting of two dots side by side). "Goedel" is the closest transliteration phonetically, and typically considered "most correct" if one cannot use diacritics, but simply dropping diacritics is (A) quite common, and (B) unavoidable for people who don't know what the correct transliteration of things like "Gödel" should be; spelling it "Godel" is just inevitable for all such people (most Americans, and most non-Western speakers of English). So let's keep this and similar pages. -- DougMerritt ''This is a reasonable proposal, which led to an OffTopic, rambling PolyLingualKaffeeKlatsch now at TheAdjunct.'' ---- CategoryBook