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Originally Posted by Rerun
So if ä sounds like the ea in bear, why doesn't he spell his name "Beartschi"?
Very confusing.
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ä sounds like the English ea, but if you replace ä for whatever reason, only ae is acceptable. I agree, it's a bit confusing. Maybe this explanation from wikipedia helps:
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A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a, resulting in [ɛ] or [e] (for some speakers only). However, it is called "Ä" or "Umlaut-A", not "A Umlaut". With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. Bäume /bɔɪmə/ (Engl.: trees). In German dictionaries, the letter is collated together with A, while in German phonebooks the letter is collated as AE. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets. It is commonly found in Ulster-Scots writing.
The letter was originally an A with a lowercase e on top, which was later stylized to two dots.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as US-ASCII, Ä is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "Ae". This is also true for Swiss German where the upper-case "Ä" does not exist, whereas the lower-case "ä" does. The reason for this likely lies in German Swiss typewriters layout having no upper-case version of the character, producing the lower case "à" instead.
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After all, it's not that important I guess ... Bärtschi or Baertschi are correct. Bartschi isn't.