Re: E-inside-o / o-enclosing-e variant of German ö

[Sławomir Osipiuk]

This character doesn't currently exist, nor is there any apparent way
to compose it, except in an ugly form using an enclosing circle.

There is a combining letter e, but it gets placed above the previous
character: oͤ

"Unicode has done something similar before" seems to be a less-than
ironclad argument; precedent is not a strong factor from what I've
seen. That said, I cannot imagine how U+A66E MULTIOCULAR O (which had
only one example) can be justified for inclusion while this e-inside-o
isn't.

The proposal which brought us ꙮ: http://unicode.org/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf

Sławomir Osipiuk

On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 11:05 AM Sai via Unicode
<unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> Hello all.
>
> Does Unicode have an existing way to encode the e-inside-o /
> o-enclosing-e* variant o-e ligature for German ö?
>
> See e.g.:
> * the ö in Vögeln on the cover of 1st edition of Konrad Lorenz's _Er
> redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen_
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ErRedeteMitDemViehDenV%C3%B6gelnUndDenFischen.jpg
> - n.b. other editions have normal ö; I do not know if it's used inside
> the book in normal or heading texts, or just on the cover
> * the ö in Köln (English: Cologne) in the inscription of its
> cathedral's crypt
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:O_containing_E_ligature.jpg
>
> I do not know whether it is used in any language other than German,
> nor how widely used it is for German.
>
> There's a CC by-sa SVG of the capital version here:
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latin_capital_letter_O_containing_E.svg
> — but I don't know of a lower-case version.
>
> There exist Unicode:
> * Ⓔ U+24BA and ⓔ U+24D4 — circled latin capital/small letter e, in the
> Enclosed Alphanumerics block
> * Œ U+0152 and œ  U+0153 — Latin capital/small ligature oe, in the
> Latin Extended-A block
> * ɶ U+0276 — Latin letter small capital oe, in the IPA Extensions block
>
> However, Ⓔ/ⓔ use a circle (not letter o), and don't decompose to ö or
> œ; and I have not found something that does decompose to œ which would
> use the enclosed ligature.
>
> I don't know combining characters well enough to tell if there is a
> combining version of either o or e which would allow this.
>
> So… is this already a thing? Has it been proposed before? Ought it be
> added to Unicode?
>
> Sincerely,
> Sai
> President, Fiat Fiendum, Inc., a 501(c)(3)
>
> * phrasing it both ways just so this discussion is easier to find by search
>