From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Mar 19 2004 - 19:48:46 EST
On 19/03/2004 13:41, Marion Gunn wrote:
>Yes!
>
>That is why Irish traditional spelling rendered in Gentium looks so silly!
>
>I'm sure I, or almost anyone else on this august list, could easily adapt
>Gentium to the small extent of removing that extraneous dot, but it would
>probably be illegal to so alter it. Any point asking SIL for that favour?
>
>That is, asking SIL for a special 'Irish' edition of Gentium with only our
>native dots, for when our native fonts are denied us, for whatever reason.
>mg
>
>Scr甐bh <brian@gael-image.com>:
>
>
>>Quoting Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org>:
>>
>>
>>
>>>I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless Mar覺on 覺n
>>>Ir覺sh even when us覺ng a non-Gael覺c 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.
>>>
>>>
>>That's exactly the point. When the dot-convention for lenition is being used,
>>the "i" should never be dotted, even when using a non-Gaelic font, because
>>there's no such thing as a lenited "i" in Irish.
>>
>>It's not a character-glyph issue.
>>
>>
>
>
>
I'm not sure why Gentium is mentioned here. No SIL members have
contributed to this discussion, although Peter C and I are both former
members. You are welcome to ask the developer of Gentium to provide you
with a special edition with a dotless i in the character code position
for regular i. I have no idea what the response might be, but you have
more chance that way than by asking SIL corporately.
It would indeed be illegal to alter the font without permission. From
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium
> Gentium is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It
> is not public domain, and cannot be altered, but can be given to
> anyone who might need it.
If you and Brian wish to argue that in old Irish orthography i is
dotless whatever font is being used (by contrast with the modern Irish
orthography in which, as I understand it, i is dotted or dotless
depending on the font), I would suggest that you put together a set of
spelling rules by which i is represented by U+0131 instead of U+0069,
along with the other changes to use dots above with various consonants.
It will then become a matter for discussion among users of Irish with
the old orthography whether this is correct and desirable or not. But
this is not a matter for Unicode to standardise, because Unicode does
not specify spelling rules for individual languages.
I took the evening away from this debate to watch again The Fellowship
of the Ring. I was interested to note that there are no dots on i's in
the uncial font used in the titles in this film. So at least someone has
such a font.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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