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

[Alexander Lange]

Hi,

another German here. I also think it is just a glyph variant of ö - or 
rather Ö. I have only ever seen this in all-uppercase inscriptions where 
the line height is hardly bigger than the capital height. In both images 
Sai has linked to you can see that all lines would need to be higher 
just for the one umlaut in one of the lines if the standard glyph were 
used.

There are several strategies to achieve this:

  * Use a smaller variant of the base letter. This is commonly done on
    keyboards, see e.g. here:
https://angelikasgerman.co.uk/what-does-a-german-keyboard-look-like/
    and on license plates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift#/media/File:FE-Schrift.svg
  * Put dots or e inside O or U (doesn't work well with A)
  * Put one dot at each side of A or O (doesn't work well with U)
  * Use AE, OE or UE.

In normal text and especially on small letters, none of this is needed 
as you have enough space on top of the letters anyway.

Kind regards,
Alexander

On 27.02.2022 02:45, Martin J. Dürst via Unicode 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.
>
> Regards,   Martin.
>
>
> On 2022-02-26 22:32, Sai via Unicode 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
>>
>