A FAQ on a subject like this will necessarily include a lot of non-English
names and words which contain letters not in the English alphabet, mainly
accented vowels.  I don't like the idea of forcing foreign words into an
English straitjacket by converting these letters into diphthongs (or, even
worse, just ignoring the accents).  There is an international standard
8-bit character set, ISO 8859/1, also known as Latin 1; it's an extension
of 7-bit ASCII to include most of the characters used in European
languages.  I've used the Latin 1 characters in this document.

A lot of news transport and news reading software now supports Latin 1, and
it's becoming more widely supported; unfortunately, there's still a lot of
software around that reduces everything to 7-bit ASCII.  For the benefit of
those using such software, here's a table of the accented letters in Latin
1 (not all of these appear in this document, of course), so you can tell
whether you have 8-bit software, and if not, which characters the accented
letters are being turned into.  If you come across a name that seems to be
spelled oddly, this should help you figure out what it's meant to be.

    Letter           A a E e I i N n O o U u Y y
    Acute accent (') Á á É é Í í - - Ó ó Ú ú Ý ý
    Grave accent (`) À à È è Ì ì - - Ò ò Ù ù - -
    Caret        (^) Â â Ê ê Î î - - Ô ô Û û - -
    Tilde        (~) Ã ã - - - - Ñ ñ Õ õ - - - -
    Umlaut       (") Ä ä Ë ë Ï ï - - Ö ö Ü ü - ÿ
    Ring         (o) Å å - - - - - - - - - - - -
    Slash        (/) - - - - - - - - Ø ø - - - -