Irish in Roman script is written i with dot above, Irish in traditional script is written i without dot above.
Irish lower-case "i" is written with the Latin-script character U+0069, which has as its capital U+0049.
A dotted glyph for the lower-case "i" is generally used in Roman fonts, while an undotted glyph is always preferred in Gaelic fonts. Further information about Gaelic typefaces can be found at http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/fonthist.html
The current flooding of our local advertising and publishing markets by various non-native uncial fonts to write our language goes against tradition in imposing on us that unwanted dot.
A number of type designers provide quite excellent Gaelic fonts with the correct glyphs.
One might observe that if local Irish markets are "flooded" with inauthentic Gaelic fonts it is nevertheless Irish advertising and publishing agencies which are doing the "imposing" of the unwanted dot. It is a pity that they do not choose authentic fonts, but it is certainly no conspiracy to impose dots upon the Irish people.
Authenticity in fonts is a valuable criterion for judging their usefulness; "nativeness" is irrelevant except to the chauvinist.
Is there any way at all that using Unicode can help support our tradition?
Unicode is a character set for data interchange. "Using it" cannot of itself do anything about the choices made by ill-educated sign makers and advertisers.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
