On 22 February 2016 at 00:31, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>
> > After all, the only languages that use ø are languages that use it as a
> character of its own).
>
> Not sure what this means: how is the usage of ø in this regard
> different from, say, ä?
>

Well, if you are interested, here's how it works in the Scandinavian
languages:

Swedish has three extra characters: å, ä and ö. These are individual
characters as has been discussed many times in this thread. Norwegian and
Danish has the same extra characters, except that they write them as å, æ
and ø (they also sort them in different order, but that's beside the point).

Now, other languages may use the character (in the Unicode sense) ö as a
variation of o. In other words, o with ¨ on top of it. For users of such
languages ö is just a variation of o as we also have discussed before. On
the other hand, ø is not used as a variation of o in any language that I am
aware of.

In Sweden, when discussing Norwegian or Danish words (usually names) we
tend to keep their style of characters. So for example, if I might refer to
my Swedish friend Östen and my Norwegian friend Øystein. I would not spell
his name Öystein, even though it's technically the same letter.

However, when searching for "ö" I would certainly expect to match the first
letter of Øystein.

> In the thread on the Unicode mailing list, the recommendation seems to be
> to use the CLDR (http://cldr.unicode.org/). Of course, this assumes there
> is a locale, but the choice of locale can easily be customisable (with the
> default being the user's locale).
>
> Not locale, language.
>

Right. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself. As you know, I'm advocating
choosing a default language based on the locale of the user.

Regards,
Elias