From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 16:28:41 EST
At 14:32 -0600 2004-03-18, Brian wrote:
> > Well, unless your spelling-checker author is bright enough (as is very
> > likely) to handle both dot-convention and h-convention spellings.
> > These are not intrinsically tied to Uncial vs. Antiqua font styles,
> > though; one can write perfectly good Irish in Antiqua style and still
> > use dotted consonants.
>
>That's my point. The differences between Roman and "Gaelic" orthographies as a
>whole are not intrinsically tied to font styles. Although Michael insists that
>it is,
No, I don't. You can write "dóig*" in old
orthography or "dóigh" 'likelihood' in modern
orthography. The orthographies are different,
just as "colour" and "color" are different. You
can display "dóig*" and "dóigh" in a Roman or a
Gaelic font style. The "d" is 0064, the "ó" is
006F 00301 (or the equivalent 00F3), the "i" is
0069, the "g*" is 0067 0307 (or the equivalent
The "i" is not equivalent to 0131. It is a
spelling error to use 0131 in Irish, and it will
always be.
>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.
>Use of the dot-convention of marking lenition
>already necessitates that different characters
>must be used to represent the same phonological
>segments that would otherwise be represented by
><cons>+"h", which would itself confound existing
>spell checkers.
That is one of the things which makes them different orthographies.
>In this context, and if it's true that a spell checker could, in theory, be
>programmed to handle parallel encoding conventions, then why shouldn't Irish
>language "traditionalists" encode the i with a LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I
>such as <0131>?
Because that would be a spelling error. 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.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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