Re: diaeresis/umlaut

From: Torsten Mohrin (mohrin@sharmahd.com)
Date: Sat Jun 12 1999 - 10:20:33 EDT


On Fri, 11 Jun 1999 23:24:50 -0700 (PDT), Jeroen Hellingman wrote:

>The reason is quite simple, they look the same, they have almost always been
>treated the same (except for one German character set, that was never widely
>used), and most people will not be aware of their differences, or don't

Which German character set do you mean?

The umlaut is not only used in German. It's also used in Turkish on
'o' and 'u' and is pronounced the same way as in German (as far as I
know Turkish). It's definitely not used as an indicator for seperation
of vocals in Turkish. I think the Turkish usage was influenced by
German when Kemal Atatürk introduced the Latin script to write Turkish
(please correct me if I'm wrong).

I think there are other non-spacing characters (diacritics) that have
the same Unicode character code value but different meanings in
different scripts. And like Mr. Figge I begin to wonder why these two
meanings are not treated differently, like Latin A, Greek Alpha and
Cyrillic A have different code values. Maybe someone can clarify this.

Torsten

--
Torsten Mohrin
Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany
Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450
http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com



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