From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 18:00:28 EST
At 16:37 -0600 2004-03-18, Brian wrote:
>People do not create machine-readible texts in the old orthography because of
>the technical challenges of reproducing them.
I have no difficulty reproducing machine-readable
texts in the old orthography. I typeset a version
of the Irish Constitution last year for Mícheál Ó
Cearúil's book _Bunreacht na hÉireann: An téacs
Gaeilge arna chaighdeánú_.
>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.
I also know people who do not like the spelling
reform. This is a different thing from suggesting
that the letter "i" in Gaelic type is a different
letter from the letter "i" in Roman type. To
suggest this is to ignore the character/glyph
model, and it is to suggest the introduction of a
practice which would *harm* the Irish language.
And that is something that I, for my part, shall
certainly not suppport.
> > 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.
I did not say that these were ISO's facts. They
are simply facts. Perhaps you have never typeset
Irish, and changed the font.
>Like all linguistic behavior, correct spelling is a matter of usage.
If you, or anyone else, thinks that the letter
"i", drawn without a dot in a Gaelic typeface is
really the Turkish "ž", then you are simply
wrong. The Gaelic and Roman letterforms are glyph
variants of the Latin script. Changing the font
will lose the dot, if the Gaelic font has been
drawn correctly and tastefully. This has been the
case for the entire history of the use of the
Irish langauge on computers. Those, Brian, are
the facts.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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