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Why, do you know mathematicians who pronounce it (approximately) like 'caller'? I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that.
There is at least one good argument against the Kaehler spelling, as far as MO is concerned.
When you use Google to search for "site:mathoverflow.net kahler" you get results for both "Kahler" and "Kähler" but you don't get anything with the "Kaehler" spelling. Similarly, when you search for "site:mathoverflow.net kaehler" you only get results for "Kaehler," but no results for "Kahler" nor "Kähler". In other words, "Kahler" is usually better than "Kaehler" for searching purposes.
(Sadly, the primitive MO search tool treats Kahler, Kähler, and Kaehler as three different names...)
On Google (from UK), I find the following results when I seach for XXX site:mathoverflow.net where XXX is kähler, kaehler and kahler:
kahler -kähler site:mathoverflow.net yields about 173 results)I agree with the implicit request at the beginning. Let the tag include the umlaut. Possible?
I just reran José's experiment from Canada and I got different numbers:
After inspection, it appears that Google Canada does recognize Kaehler as an alternate spelling of Kähler, but not the other way around.
Then I used VPN to repeat the experiment from the US and I got results that match José's UK results:
Two short points:
Since Kähler is a German name, the correct spelling (in a German context) in case no diacritical marks are available is 'Kaehler'. (The German pronuncaiations of 'ä' and 'a' are very different, the 'ä' is close in pronunciation to a German 'e' and not at all an 'a'.) More generally, in a German text poduced under circumstances were no diacritical marks are available all the umlauts are transcribed by ajoining an 'e'. So for example 'für' (meaning 'for') becomes 'fuer' and definitely not 'fur' (which looks completely wrong in a German context); they exist for the vowels a,o,u. [Rarely there also vowels in particular 'i' and 'e' with two dots which are not umlauts, but rather the diacritical mark is 'imported' from a foreign language, mainly French, and in this case this apending of an 'e' in the absence of the diactritical mark is not performed; but rather the diacritical mark omitted.]
Having said 1. I still think that 'Kahler' might be the best choice. [Sort of following MathSciNet that while having the diacriticals marks available essentially ignores it for searches. Searching 'Kahler' will yield 'Kähler' and (of course) 'Kahler' but 'Kaehler' won't yield 'Kähler'. Also searching 'Kähler' yields 'Kähler' and 'Kahler'.] The reason for this is that while I happen to know what is going on in German, I am aware that I am totally clueless regarding the analog problem in almost all of the many other languages where similar issues exist, and the simplest fiable rule applicable over all languages to me seems 'ignore all diacritical marks for tags'.
ADDED: Or, in short: what Kevin Buzzard said (which was not arround when I started to write this).
Michael Hardy, I think this is an interesting point, and one in favor of the Kaehler you suggest. A problem here is as Kevin Buzzard (an me, more implictly) said is that one has to know this standard.
My worry and/or question (and while this being a bit off-topic I would be independently of the outcome interested to learn this in case somebody can comment) is that what we are discussing here is one (standard) convention. But, I suspect there are similar things for other languages. I somehow believe to know that in French one repalces (or at least might do so) accents by apostrophes and alike in case one does not have the accented letter available, so it would be e'tale cohomology and for the cédille one can use a comma so François would be Franc,ois. [Actually I am not really sure how much this is done nowadays, and this might be more a type-writer-age thing; yet Serre in a letter to Grothendieck asked him to use this c, construct, in combination with returning the carriage a bit, to get an almost correct ç because just c instead of ç was no good.]
The question that arises for me is where does one stop if one starts doing this. For example, what about Čech cohomology? Is there some standard way to transcribe Č ? I don't know. I could do it in LaTeX but this is still something else.
A complicated solution could be to requirer LaTeX-code (or some pseudo-LaTeX), but this seems overly complex and might really be bad for searching
Will, I suspect the French are the culprits for your confusion. A few common Latin phrases have been Frenchified (which is how Google translates franciser). Among them are a priori, a posteriori, and a fortiori which are commonly spelled "à priori", "à postériori", and "à fortiori". The French generally prefer the Frenchified spelling, but both are acceptable so long as the first is italicized and the second is not.
... until we move to SE 2.0, should that happen ...
Georges, you are right that the unaccented spelling is the only truly correct one. However, the spelling "à priori" was in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie from the 6th edition until it was suppressed in the 9th edition. The accented spelling also appears in Littré, but with a cautionary remark saying that this is wrong. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_et_a_posteriori#Graphies and references there.
Thanks for your interesting and erudite comment, François. I think that indeed the French frenchified more in the past. They didn't even stop at proper names: Jérôme Cardan for the mathematician Girolamo Cardano is a notorious example.
Bruce Arnold, thank you for the information (btw, I am an_mo_user renamed). It is however not quite clear to me what your actual suggestion is, and the fact that you quote me in part out of context does not help. Though I found some of the information you provide interesting.
To recall, the suggestion of Michael Hardy was to use 'ae' instead of 'a' for (a German) 'ä'. Using 'ä' itself is a non-option as this is not supported in tags. Likewise, 'Č' or 'ç'.
In more detail: I just tried to create the tags Kähler, Čech, François on the test site;
and while nothing was actually creteated (as I am 'new' on the test site) the system informed my that it could not create the tags kahler, cech, francois; so that it seems a given that it would have created (if I were not 'new') kahler, cech, francois and not Kähler, Čech, François.
And, trying your Čech it tells me the tags 268 and ech cannot be created.
So, while in principle it would be nice to have more characters available for tags, it is simply not so.
Thus, we are limited to characters without diacritical marks. Unfortunately, the ISO transliteration you mentioned contains characters with diacritical marks, and is thus a non-opition, too. Yet, the GOST one, which I found on the site you link to, in fact does not. So using GOST transliteration would indeed be an option for Cyrilic. Now, as the next step we only need something like this for other alphabets, too. (Whether persuing this next step is useful in view of the to be expected likelihood of success of the one afterwards, i.e. convcing people to use this, I will let others decide.)
And finally, my "...might be really bad for searching" clearly referred to the useage of latex-code or some pseudo version of it (so \check{C}ech or check{C}ech something like this); why you try to refute this by searching for Čech is unclear to me.
Bruce Arnold, thank you for the response. I only commented on the question at hand, the tags, and thus (mis)understood your first response to me differently; sorry for the confusion, good that this is clarified. In general, I agree that Unicode is a good thing.
Regarding the (new) subject of transliteration of Понтрягин. I am not the right person to discuss questions on Cyrilic, and to judge whether the comment you quote points in the right or wrong direction.
But, it is my understanding that Pontryagin and Pontrjagin both follow standards for transliteration (BSI and GOST (also DIN), resp); yet neither the one you suggest (ISO); this would give Pontrâgin.
And, it seems to me (though I could well be wrong) that ISO actually tries to accomplish what Qiaochu said, namely, stress that there is rather one than two 'thing(s)' between 'r' and 'g' (while this is harder to infer from 'ya'). So, while I can see arguments for using BSI (the site being in English and this looking nicer and being more wide spread than the i^a of ALA), I can also see arguments for GOST (along the lines of Qiaochu's comment and avoiding the non-standard letter â of ISO) or also of course for ISO.
So, in some sense, though this might be wrong, it seems to me that to use GOST is rather closer in spirit to your suggestion of using ISO, than using BSI would be, which leaves me again a bit cunfused.
Bruce Arnold, thanks for your first sentence and the explanation. But, in fact I learned quite a bit from this discussion; so, I thank you! Ultimately, for this site, in my opinion one should not worry too much about things like this. My reasoning is that while some people (e.g., me) find questions/discussions like this genuinley interesting, I can imagine that others find them tangential (in this context), in particular as this is a medium rather with quick turnover, and not like writing a book. So that trying to enforce something could annoy some.
Regarding your last sentence: yes! (though I would not single out the French, as I also heard plenty non-French trying to say French names/things).
In any case, thank you for the interesting discussion!
sisn, so you do not use MathSciNet?
Added: sorry, on second thought the above is perhaps too cryptic. First, it is not so uncommon that for searches diacritcs are ignored. Second, here this goes both ways: if you search among the tags for Kähler, you do get kahler-differentials. You would only be in trouble if you searched for Kaehler. It seems to me that the number people searching for Kahler plus people searching for Kähler will be significantly larger than people searching for Kaehler.
@Michael: I'm assuming you are in Germany right now... can you repeat the same experiment that José and I did from there?
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