Peter Kirk schrieb:
May be, but it doesn't matter - no german reader would ever take
any combination of diacritics for an umlaut + something else,
because in german such combinations simply doesn't exist.
Only the tr�ma alone could be confused.
The German readers' instincts would probably be wrong when they came to
Livonian, [...]
While Livonian is definitely *not* the language of choice as a reference
for encoding standards, combinations of diaeresis with other accents are
quite frequent in older German-language phonetic literature.
However, to return to the original problem, I don't remember ever having
seen a data where it would be necessary to distinguish between trema and
diaeresis in the data itself. What Gaultney describes is largely a
typographic problem that can be solved using markup and smart fonts.
Have the German bibliographers shown any evidence as to whether this
difference is being maintained at all in practice, and knowing our
librarians, how consistent are they about it? This looks like it's much
more trouble than it's worth.
Philipp
