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In article <617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de> mbut0135@w203zrz.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Matthias Butt) writes:

   2. Let me just add that the lack of umlaut characters in
   international alphabets and in the ASCII code need noty disturb our
   [German] national pride either.
   [...]
    Thus it seems appropriate to use the term *umlaut* or *umlaut character*
    for the German characters /"a, /"o and /"u because they reflect the 
    an umlaut process in writing. In this case it is the whole 
    character including the diacritics (which in turn may be called 
    umlaut marks) which is referred to. The term doesnt seem to be
    appropriate to refer to characters with a trema denoting dieresis
    or some other property unrelated to umlaut as a phonological process.

You should probably also have mentioned that the German umlaut
derives from two-vowel combinations. So, '\"a' used to be
spelled 'ae'. The "two dots" started out being a little 'e'
in Gothic script (which looks like two small parallel lines or
like a small 'n'), then was moved above the preceding vowel
(similar to the 'fi' ligature in English print), and finally
degenerated into two little dots. The German sharp-s, a character
that looks sort of like a beta, similarly, is simply a ligature
between an 's' and a 'z'.

Historically, it may have been nice to provide these ligatures to
improve the appearance of printed text.  However, German can be
written perfectly well with only the standard 26 letter "English"
alphabet, and in this day and age of standardization, it would
probably be a good idea to make use of the umlaut and the 'sz'
ligature optional and eventually eliminate them altogether.

To add to the confusion, the official substitute for writing 'sz' when
the special character is not available is 'ss'. As far as I can tell,
this was a really bad decision, since 'ss' carries with it the idea
that the preceding vowel is short, whereas 'sz' indicates that the
preceding vowel is normal or long; there is no good reason not to
write the 'sz' letter as 'sz' when the letter is not available.

					Thomas.