Diacritic marks in parentheses

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

We do have this already, in combining marks extended:
 
@@ 1AB0 Combining Diacritical Marks Extended 1AFF
@ Used for German dialectology
[…]
1ABB COMBINING PARENTHESES ABOVE
* intended to surround a diacritic above
1ABC COMBINING DOUBLE PARENTHESES ABOVE
1ABD COMBINING PARENTHESES BELOW
* intended to surround a diacritic below
1ABE COMBINING PARENTHESES OVERLAY
* intended to surround a base letter
* exact placement is font dependent

 
Best regards,
Marcel
 
On 26/07/18 12:49 Christoph Päper via Unicode wrote:
> 
> German umlauts often occur when a noun is plural or an agens noun is female, e.g. _Arzt_ '(male) physician', _Ärzte_ 'physicians' and _Ärztin_ 
'female physician'. There are several cases where a short notation for both singular and plural or, more frequently, male and female singular are 
desired. A number of notations are commonly encountered, e.g. (not showing number pairs) _Doktor(in)_, _Doktor/-in_, _Doktor/in_, _DoktorIn_, 
_Doktor_in_, _Doktor*in_. 
> 
> These only[^1] work well if there is no umlaut difference, i.e. neither _Ärzt/-in_ nor _Arzt/-in_ would be appropriate. A way to show the umlaut 
dots are conditional would be required but is not available in plain text systems and complicated to achieve in most rich text systems. Unicode has '⸚' 
HYPHEN WITH DIAERESIS (U+2E1A) to offer, i.e. _Arzt⸚in_ or _Arzt/⸚in_. This is also very uncommon, but may be used in some linguistic texts. 
> 
> I believe the most intuitive solution would be tiny parentheses before and after the two dots. This has no established usage as far as I am aware of, 
so would probably not qualify for encoding in the Unicode Standard. However, if it would qualify nevertheless, should this be a new atomic diacritic 
mark, e.g. COMBINING PARENTHESIZED DIAERESIS ABOVE, or two characters, e.g. COMBINING OPEN PARENTHESES ABOVE and COMBINING 
CLOSE PARENTHESES ABOVE to be used with COMBINING DIAERESIS (U+0308)?
> 
> [^1] Yes, there are other cases where the stem changes in different ways, but that is irrelevant here.
> 
>