[DCRM-L] Early printed superscript diacritic "o" isn't the same thing as a ring diacritic in MARC-8? Does it matter?

[Erin Blake]

DCRM's instructions on early letterforms and symbols say that a word like
this:
[image: image.png] (German, see in context
<https://collation.folger.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/09/muss_in_context-1300.jpg>
)
is transcribed as "můss" but I made the mistake of going down the rabbit
hole of Middle High German typography (my own fault: I made a mistake in the
Folger's brevigraphs blog post <https://collation.folger.edu/brevigraphs>,
and wrote "müss" at first. Happily, John Lancaster quickly caught my error.)

Here's the problem: catalogers transcribing Middle High German have been
using the "Circle Above, Angstrom/Combining Ring Above” in MARC records.
This combining character was added to the Unicode character set in 1993, so
it is part of the MARC-8 and the UTF-8 character sets.

But evidence collected from experts in Middle High German shows that the
small "o" (and other small letters above vowels) is its own thing, *not *a
ring diacritic:

"The superscript letter diacritic o is in the two hundred years of
typesetting in this field distinctly regarded as an o typographically, not
as a ring above. Thus only zuͦ , not zů, would be an acceptable rendering
of the /uo/-diphthong." [source: Marc Wilhelm Kuster and Isabel Wojtovicz,
“Diacritics for medieval studies,” N2266 2000.09.14
<http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2266.pdf>, a paper submitted to the
ISO Standards Development Working Group on Universal Coded Character Sets].


Accordingly, the Unicode character set was extended to include “Combining
Latin Small Letters" in 2002. But they are not (yet?) included in any of
the MARC-8 character set extensions
<https://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/specchartables.html>.

This isn't a problem for early modern u-with-an-e-on-top, because everyone
agrees that it's equivalent to the modern German u-with-an-umlaut. It seems
there isn't a modern equivalent of u-with-an-o-on-top, other than the plain
"u" that developed from it.

Is this just a case where we continue to transcribe it as "what it looks
like" instead of "what it is" because that's the way we've always done it?

Erin.

______________________
Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |
201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu  |
www.folger.edu
<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/-t5RCjRgpBtArRXC7R7_2?domain=urldefense.com>
  |  Pronouns: she/her/hers
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