I wonder, when looking at the Sütterlin font, if it is not a script variant of its own, where in German the "umlaut" (diaeresis) and the "combining Latin small letter e" would be in fact the same diacritic. What's your opinion about this?
Are there other languages really using "combining Latin small letter e" as distinctful and not meaning "umlaut" or diaeresis? For example French uses the "tréma" (diaeresis) in e+diaeresis, i+dieresis, y+diaeresis as a way to detach the vowel from the preceding vowels (avoiding them to create digraphs with a single phoneme like in "aï" "oë", "aÿ". I know some exceptions in proper names like "Saül" (which "could" be written "Sauel" in German, but not in French where it would be read as "sau-el" i.e. "so-el" or "soël"). But if this was written with a combining e above in "Sau(e)l" there would not exist such false reading because any diacritic added above a vowel in French disables the formation of single-phoneme digraphs containing that accented vowel. Is the canonical decomposition of a+umlaut, o+umlaut, u+umlaut better represented in German as meaning really a+combiningSmallLetterE, o+combiningSmallLetterE, u+combiningSmallLetterE, and matching the German collation of a-diaeresis, o-diaresis and u-diaresis with a+e, o+e, u+e? For the same reason, why is the German "ess-tsett" (sharp S) given a compatibility decomposition as <s><s> instead of <long-s><s>? What other languages don't assume the <long-s> meaning for the first character of the decomposition?
