From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Mar 19 2004 - 16:22:12 EST
Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org> wrote:
> I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless Marıon ın
> Irısh even when usıng a non-Gaelıc font. The consensus on the list seems
> to be that Irish should be written with a normal i character and the dot
> removed in particular fonts.
I also approve, simply because Irish has no distinction between a dotted or
undotted glyph representation of the vowel i...
So which ever character is encoded does not matter as they will be perceived as
equivalent by Irish readers. If one creates a Irish document using the dotless
i, it won't break the Irish orthograph, and there's a way to use a custom
folding rule for Irish to use any of these two characters.
Because of that, an application may as well use a Gaelic font where the
soft-dotted 'i' is shown without the dot, or mutate every soft-dotted 'i' into
dotless 'i' before rendering with any other font.
In both cases, there's apparently no need to add a new character or diacritic to
preserve a linguistic distinction, or to render Irish with either the modern or
traditional Gaelic styles...
So all existing Irish texts do not need to be reencoded. I see only one thing
that may be useful: a folding for Irish where soft-dotted and dotless i could be
unified. This could be part of the language definition in applications (for
example in ICU when performing language sensitive collation...)
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