Michael Everson recently said:
> Lads and lassies,
>
> I promise to try to find a true dotless j somewhere. Aside from all the,
> ahem, legacy IPA fonts.
Can I interest you in the possibility of LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS LONG I?
It looks just like a dotless j. (LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG I would be unified
with LATIN SMALL LETTER J.)
In England in the 11th and 12th centuries i was written without a dot. It
was common to write the i at the end of a word in a long form which looks
like a dotless j. (But it was still an i and did not represent a different
sound.) By the end of the 13th century dots were commonly added to remove
ambiguity. (Otherwise the word minimum is just a series of vertical lines
joined by diagonals in the writing style of the time and looks like
|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|, putting some dots in gives a clue
|/|/|/i/|/|/i/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| !)
Roman numerals were written in a similar style e.g. j, ij, iij, iv, v, vj.
It was conventional to write numbers without the dots even after dots came
to be used in words. (So there are texts with a mixture of both long i and
dotless long i and a global font setting is not sufficient for such texts.)
(As an aside roman numbers later became i, ii, iii etc in England. One of my
typography books mentions that the j form was used in French, but doesn't
mention it at all for English. This suggests that France kept the j's for
longer. Does anyone have information on this?)
If you are feeling really keen you can add a compatibility decomposition for
U+0079 of <ligature> dotless i, dotless long i and a comment not equal
U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ. Can anyone think of an English word with the
sequence ij in the same syllable? I think they have (almost?) all become y's
especially the ii sound at the ends of words.
A good reference is "English Court Hand AD 1066 to 1500" by Charles Johnson
and Hilary Jenkinson, 1915. (Volume 1 has the text and diagrams, volume 2
which I haven't been able to locate contains plates of various manuscripts.)
If this character does go into the standard I think that dotless long i is a
better name than dotless j, since it wasn't used in the same way as a modern
j. It would also make people looking for a dotless j think twice before
using it. Before you get too excited about putting it into the standard as
soon as possible Michael, it has some friends like round r that probably
should be considered at the same time.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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