Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

Tue Jul 18 17:29:55 EDT 2017

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