On 2007-10-29 10:40, James Kanze wrote:
To move a bit further off-topic: Yes, I am Swedish. I think there is a
slight difference between the Swedish ö and the German in that the
Swedish alphabet is considered to have 29 letters (the Latin alphabet
plus å/Å, ä/Ä, and ö/Ö added at the end).
That's another difference. If you're typesetting, of course, ö
and o are different letters---back in the days of lead, they
were in separate cases, and today, they're encoded differently,
at least in Unicode and ISO 8859-x. On the other hand, yes: the
collating rules for Swedish treats them as separate letters,
whereas the collating rules for German either treat o and ö as
identical letters, or treat ö as if it were written oe. In
French, the collating rules treat o and ö as identical *unless*
the word is otherwise identical---in that case, it puts accented
characters after unaccented, evaluating from right to left!.
But collating rules can be funny---I've also seen collating in
German where sch was treated as a separate letter, after s.
My point concerning Umlaut was somewhat different. Umlaut is a
very specific pronounciation change, occuring (historically)
when there was an i or an e in the following sylable. In
German, it often has a grammatical role: singular Apfel gives
plurial Äpfel, etc. (because historically, there was a final i
that has been lost in the plurial); it also plays a role in verb
conjugations and derivation (diminutive of Frau is Fräulein; the
long i in middle German lin---which becomes ei in modern
German---causes an Umlaut on the main vowel). The word "Umlaut"
itself refers to the pronounciation change, and only secondarily
to the typographical rendition of the character. (In most
middle German texts, I think that it is rendered by a small e
written over the vowel, rather than a diaersis.)
To my knowledge the German alphabet is normally considered to
be identical the the Latin one and the umlauts (ä, ö, and ü
plus uppercase versions) and ß are not normally considered
part of the alphabet.
In Kindergarten, they do teach the same alphabet as in French or
American Kindergarten, and ignore the accents (and the ß). But
the question is a lot more complicated than that, and in the
end, depends on how you define "letter" (which in turn may
depend on what you're trying to do: sort by alphabetical order,
typeset, etc.).
Though I am not a linguist (or whatever field it is that study
these things) so I might be wrong.
I'm not a linguist either. My knowledge above is based
partially on my interest in literature and in medieval history,
and partially on my interest in Unicode and computer
typesetting. (None of which pay enough to live on, so I'm stuck
doing large scale server software in C++
. Not completely
uninteresting either, though.)
