Diaeresis vs. umlaut (was: Re: Standaridized variation sequences for the Desert alphabet?)

[Hans Åberg]

> On 24 Mar 2017, at 19:33, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
> 
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
> 
>> But Unicode just prefered to keep the roundtrip compatiblity with
>> earlier 8-bit encodings (including existing ISO 8859 and DIN
>> standards) so that "ü" in German and French also have the same
>> canonical decomposition even if the diacritic is a diaeresis in French
>> and an umlaut in German, with different semantics and origins.
> 
> Was this only about compatibility, or perhaps also that the two signs
> look identical and that disunifying them would have caused endless
> confusion and misuse among users?

The Swedish letters ÅÄÖ are simplified ligatures, and not diacritic marks. For ÄÖ, in handwritten script style, a tilde, the same as Spanish Ñ, which is also a simplified ligature.