Timothy Partridge wrote:
> In England in the 11th and 12th centuries i was written without a dot. It
> was common to write the i at the end of a word in a long form which looks
> like a dotless j. (But it was still an i and did not represent a different
> sound.)
Pretty good evidence that all these are presentation forms, not
distinct characters, I'd say. Dotless i is a *character* only
in Turkish; dotless j (or long i) is not a character anywhere.
> (As an aside roman numbers later became i, ii, iii etc in England. One of my
> typography books mentions that the j form was used in French, but doesn't
> mention it at all for English. This suggests that France kept the j's for
> longer. Does anyone have information on this?)
The viij form was certainly used in England around 1600.
> If you are feeling really keen you can add a compatibility decomposition for
> U+0079 of <ligature> dotless i, dotless long i and a comment not equal
> U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ. Can anyone think of an English word with the
> sequence ij in the same syllable? I think they have (almost?) all become y's
> especially the ii sound at the ends of words.
That sounds like Dutch, not English. Do you have evidence that any
real English word was ever written with either ii or ij, excluding
the Roman numerals?
> If this character does go into the standard I think that dotless long i is a
> better name than dotless j, since it wasn't used in the same way as a modern
> j.
Historically, "j" *is* nothing but a long "i", iust as "w" is historically
nothing but "uu" as uuell. The *glyphs* "j" and "w" were around long
before they became separate *characters*.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge / Politzer
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