Re: OT: Sociolinguistics and orthography

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Mar 19 2004 - 12:34:40 EST

  • Next message: Mike Ayers: "RE: help needed with adding new character"

    On 19/03/2004 08:16, brian@gael-image.com wrote:

    >I have a confession to make. I don't really care, personally, about the whole
    >dotted-i vs. undotted-i thing. When I write Irish, I use Roman typefaces and
    >the standardized orthography. The real reason that I have tried to sustain this
    >argument is my interest in the relationship between orthography and identity.
    >
    >Marion Gunn raised a question which I'd paraphrase as, How can continuance of
    >dotless-i be guaranteed in Irish texts? By "guarantee," I take this to mean in
    >all representations regardless of font selection--i.e., the underlying form vs.
    >the surface form. In the ensuing discussion, this question was not answered.
    >Instead, the question itself was dismissed as irrelevant and declared
    >ignorant.
    >
    >
    >
    The problem is that this is NOT what she meant. If she and other Irish
    speakers had requested that i was always left undotted in Irish language
    texts, regardless of the font selection, then the obvious answer is the
    one I suggested earlier, to use the dotless i character defined for
    Turkish. But it seems that the requirement is for dots in some fonts and
    no dots in other fonts. The only way to do that (and it is of course not
    a guarantee) is to use different glyphs in different fonts.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 19 2004 - 13:06:14 EST