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

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Martin J. Dürst via Unicode (unicode at corp.unicode.org) wrote:

I'd personally say this is just a font variant of ö. It's the book
> designer's/inscribers choice. It may look way different for outsiders,
> but people used to German will immediately understand what it is.


With my limited (two years at school) understanding of German, I fully
agree.

The letter ö originates from an o with an e above it, and in German it is
customary to replace ö by oe (a two-character combination, not the ligature
œ) when needed, e.g. when the character repertoire is limited to that of
Ascii. Since KOELN would be understood as KÖLN, so would KOLN with an E
inside the O – a surprise perhaps if you never saw it before, but not a new
character.

Things might be different if there were texts where both a normal ö and an
o with an e inside both appear within the same font. Even then, I would say
it is a font variant of ö. A font may well contain variant glyphs for a
character. In order to justify encoding an o with an e inside, I think you
would need present evidence of texts showing 1) usage where it causes a
difference in meaning with respect to ö, or 2) usage that is independent of
the use of the letter ö in different human languages, such as use in some
special phonetic or technical meaning.

Yucca, https://jkorpela.fi
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