Re: Irish dotless I

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 15:42:48 EST

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    On Tuesday, March 16, 2004 5:48 PM
    Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> va escriure:

    > On 16/03/2004 07:35, Carl W. Brown wrote:
    >
    >> I suspect that just changing the font to eliminate the dot will be
    >> easier. Software won't have to be changed, existing code pages will
    >> not have to be changed, searches will work, etc.
    >>
    > It has the disadvantage of making these fonts useless for Turkish and
    > Azeri,

    How useful to Turks are the fonts used in France, where the style is small
    case or upper case only, and all the accents are removed (and please do not
    tell me that accents should be drawn on capitals: I know it, and I am not
    speaking about writing a book for Imprimerie nationale, but rather of fonts
    used for advertising, which was Marion's purpose).

    > And of course the fonts would not be acceptable
    > to most users of English and other Latin script languages.

    Again (apart from being suspicious: I certainly can decrypt Latin written in
    Uncial), what is the point?
    Are French Canadians *required* to understand French specificities (and
    vice-versa)?

    On a similar vein, are everybody required to understand the "hacker" script?
    (try <URL:http://www.google.es/search?q=hacker&hl=xx-hacker get my
    point)

    > On the other hand, the change to Unicode required for Irish to use
    > dotless i would be rather trivial, simply adding Irish to the existing
    > list currently consisting of Turkish and Azeri, to which Tatar,
    > Bashkir, Gagauz, Karakalpak and various minority languages of
    > Azerbaijan should also be added.

    Remember that in Marion original post, Irish written in "Roman script"
    should be written with dot (for example, because there are Turks living
    there, and they surely want their names written correctly when using "their"
    script; I know the name ought to be tagged for different language, but
    everybody know this is unpractical)

    So what you are proposing is to add another line to CasingRule, with the
    added discriminant of the script.

    Not as easy as one might expect.

    Furthermore, it has the very useful (from the point of view of some; very
    disastrous for others; and very expensive for many people, like me as
    European paytaxer ;-) see below for the reasonning) property that since
    Irish is a pretty common language with quite a bit of already encoded
    material, all this material will suddendly become obsolete and will need a
    careful examination to decide if any U+0069 should be recoded or not, based
    on the fact it is Irish or it is not (I am thinking here about EU material,
    where every non-Irish proper name inserted inside Irish text should NOT be
    converted).

    Also, Michael, tell us if your name when written inside some Irish text,
    should it be considered English, or Irish? Then, should the i be dotted? And
    if it is English, and not dotted, then we would add some more line to
    CasingRules, wouldn't we?

    ;-)

    Cheers to all,

    Antoine



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