Composed and Decomposed characters and the use of diacritics in a non-standard way

Question

Having not looked at the Wordlist for a long time, I was surprised to see a big red box mentioning inconsistent encoding.

So the question is whether or not to turn normalisation on. After reading the following advice :

We do NOT recommend selecting "Off (no normalization)" unless the orthography of the project language uses diacritics in a non-standard way and the order in which the diacritics occur is important.

I wonder what is considered using diacritics in a non-standard way?  For example, it is possible to encounter : ŋ́ or Ŋ́ or ŋ̀, ɛ̀, Ɛ̀ɛ̀, ɛ́ɛ́ and ɛ̀ɛ̀ ɔ̀, ɔ́. Is this considered standard use or non-standard use?

Advice or tips on how to handle this are more than welcome.

Bart.

Answer 1

I am no expert on this, but I would assume that the non-standard way of handling diacritics is that you want multiple diacritics to stack on a base character in a way that does not follow the way that Unicode has them in precomposed characters. If you only have one diacritic on a base character, then you are not doing things in a non-standard way, and it should be OK to turn normalisation on and normalise the forms.

John