Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:

> Let me give you one concrete example: the letter "ö". In English, it
> is (very occasionally) used to indicate diaeresis, where a pair of
> letters is not a double letter - for example, "coöperate". (You can
> also hyphenate, "co-operate".) In German, it is the letter "o" with a
> pronunciation mark (umlaut), and is considered the same letter as "o".
> In Swedish, it is a distinct letter, alphabetized last (following z,
> å, and ä, in that order). But in all these languages, it's represented
> the exact same way.

The German Wikipedia entry on "ä" calls "ä" a letter ("Buchstabe"):

   Der Buchstabe Ä (kleingeschrieben ä) ist ein Buchstabe des
   lateinischen Schriftsystems.

Furthermore, it makes a distinction between "ä" the letter and "ä" the
"a with a diaeresis:"

   In guten Druckschriften unterscheiden sich die Umlautpunkte von den
   zwei Punkten des Tremas: Die Umlautpunkte sind kleiner, stehen näher
   zusammen und liegen etwas tiefer.

   In good fonts umlaut dots are different from the two dots of a
   diaeresis: the umlaut dots are smaller and closer to each other and
   lie a little lower. [translation mine]


(My native Finnish has the "ä" as well; the German tradition of placing
the dots next to the body of the "a" looks a bit unpleasant. On the
other hand, so does the English tradition of hanging the dots high up in
the air.)


Marko