From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2003 - 11:27:29 EST
I wonder, when looking at the Sütterlin font, if it is not a script variant
of its own, where in German the "umlaut" (diaeresis) and the "combining
Latin small letter e" would be in fact the same diacritic. What's your
opinion about this?
Are there other languages really using "combining Latin small letter e" as
distinctful and not meaning "umlaut" or diaeresis? For example French uses
the "tréma" (diaeresis) in e+diaeresis, i+dieresis, y+diaeresis as a way to
detach the vowel from the preceding vowels (avoiding them to create digraphs
with a single phoneme like in "aï" "oë", "aÿ".
I know some exceptions in proper names like "Saül" (which "could" be written
"Sauel" in German, but not in French where it would be read as "sau-el" i.e.
"so-el" or "soël"). But if this was written with a combining e above in
"Sau(e)l" there would not exist such false reading because any diacritic
added above a vowel in French disables the formation of single-phoneme
digraphs containing that accented vowel.
Is the canonical decomposition of a+umlaut, o+umlaut, u+umlaut better
represented in German as meaning really a+combiningSmallLetterE,
o+combiningSmallLetterE, u+combiningSmallLetterE, and matching the German
collation of a-diaeresis, o-diaresis and u-diaresis with a+e, o+e, u+e?
For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a
compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>? What other
languages don't assume the <long-s> meaning for the first character of the
decomposition?
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