Re: Irish dotless I (was: Languages with letters that always take diacriticals

From: brian@gael-image.com
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 17:37:59 EST

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    Quoting Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>:
      
    > >he also acknowledges that current spell checkers
    > >only work with the modern (Roman) orthography
    > >and that there are no spell checkers that work
    > >with the "older" orthography.
    >
    > Because no one needs one, and no one has made a
    > corpus of texts in that orthography available. If
    > someone makes one available, it *MUST* encode "i"
    > as 0069. If it does not, then it will violate the
    > standard set down in ISO/IEC 8859-14, which does
    > not contain 0131.

    People do not create machine-readible texts in the old orthography because of
    the technical challenges of reproducing them. I've met many native speakers of
    Irish here in Chicago who want little to do with the written language because,
    as they say, it's not "their" language. If there were text processing resources
    available for the Gaelic script, this could change.

    > The letter "í" is the long form of "i". It is encoded
    > 0069 0301 (or its equivalent 00E9). It would also
    > be a spelling error to encode "í" with 0131.
    >
    > Those are the facts. It is not a matter for dispute.

    I'm sorry. I do not acknowledge the ISO's authority to dictate "spelling" norms.
    Like all linguistic behavior, correct spelling is a matter of usage.



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