> dictionaries ignore the umlauts almost, but not quite, since you can have words that only differ by umlaut; in that case, the one with the umlaut should sort

> dictionaries ignore the umlauts almost, but not quite, since you can have words that only differ by umlaut; in that case, the one with the umlaut should sort after the one without one, so basically your alphabet now is a, ä, b, c, ... l, m, n, o, ö, p, ..., z. This btw is how modern Japanese dictionaries are sorted, too, where two entries with the only difference of a dakuten (as in しゅ, じゅ) are sorted as shown here.