Re: Irish dotless I

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 20:47:14 EST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Irish dotless I"

    Peter Kirk wrote:

    > On 16/03/2004 07:35, Carl W. Brown wrote:
    >
    >> ...
    >>
    >> I suspect that just changing the font to eliminate the dot will be
    >> easier.
    >> Software won't have to be changed, existing code pages will not have
    >> to be
    >> changed, searches will work, etc.
    >>
    >>
    >>
    > It has the disadvantage of making these fonts useless for Turkish and
    > Azeri, and more fundamentally so than fonts which have <f,i> ligatures
    > with no visible dot. And of course the fonts would not be acceptable
    > to most users of English and other Latin script languages. So any such
    > font will be restricted to a small niche market.

    You say that like it's a bad thing...

    Of course Celtic uncial fonts will have appeal only to a limited
    market. But you shouldn't have to respell your words when the font
    changes (as you would if Irish went to dotless-i, since when printed in
    conventional fonts, it does have a dot on its i). We're after a
    particular look here, and so a particular font. That font has limited
    appeal? So does the look we're after. Someone who wants to write
    Turkish in Irish-looking uncials will have to come up with his own
    clever font that manages to have dotted and dotless i's and still look okay.

    > On the other hand, the change to Unicode required for Irish to use
    > dotless i would be rather trivial, simply adding Irish to the existing
    > list currently consisting of Turkish and Azeri, to which Tatar,
    > Bashkir, Gagauz, Karakalpak and various minority languages of
    > Azerbaijan should also be added.

    Yeah, but then your spelling would be wrong every time you decided to
    print in Times Roman instead of Celtic Pride Bold.

    ~mark



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