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I (no expert, hopefully one will be along in a minute) have heard that in Swedish the letters äöå all evolved from corresponding diphthongs - so ae oe and ao respectively. Because the pronounciation changed from what one would assume from the literal spelling it made sense to create new letters to keep things consistent. They are considered to be entirely different letters by the way - much as you wouldn't consider O and Q to be the same letter with an accent.

In Swedish dictionaries those letters are added to the end of the alphabet - it's surprisingly hard to internalise that and remember to look up Å words at the end of the dictionary and not the front...

Edit: tokai below says Å was AA originally not AO so I (unsurprisingly) stand corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317851



The umlaut comes from an e written above the letter, and is thus historically distinct from the diaeresis aka tréma (as in Noël, naïve). I first realized after that looking at Fraktur street signs in Vienna, where it is more like two vertical lines, but the most immediate understanding will probably come after looking at the lowercase e in a table of Kurrentschrift[1].

Which, incidentally, is missing in TFA. Funny how thoroughly the Nazis managed to erase that piece of German legacy (and the only modern Latin-script cursive distinct not coming from the familliar Irish>Italian lineage).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent


Note the three Swedish characters åäö are not umlauts. This comment explains it well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42837273#42882295




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