Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 22 February 2016 at 00:31, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> 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