[vurpo]

> Letters in in two languages that are otherwise the same, but one has an accent. Is the accent part of the letter? Separate? Are they really the same letter?

It gets worse than this. Example: the letters Ä and Ö exist in both Swedish and German (as an example).

In German they are actually counted as the letters A and O with diaereses above them, and they alphabetize together with other instances of the letters A and O, because that's what they are.

In Swedish those are their own letters, which are completely separate from the letters A and O. They get their own place in the alphabet (second-to last and last, respectively), and replacing them with AE and OE is technically not acceptable in Swedish like it is in German (though it's often done anyway, e.g. on airline tickets).

And in Unicode they are represented by the same code-point even though in one language it is a letter, and in the other language it's only a variation on another letter. What a mess.