> Well, unless your spelling-checker author is bright enough (as is very > likely) to handle both dot-convention and h-convention spellings. > These are not intrinsically tied to Uncial vs. Antiqua font styles, > though; one can write perfectly good Irish in Antiqua style and still > use dotted consonants.
That's my point. The differences between Roman and "Gaelic" orthographies as a whole are not intrinsically tied to font styles. Although Michael insists that it is,
No, I don't. You can write "d�ig*" in old orthography or "d�igh" 'likelihood' in modern orthography. The orthographies are different, just as "colour" and "color" are different. You can display "d�ig*" and "d�igh" in a Roman or a Gaelic font style. The "d" is 0064, the "�" is 006F 00301 (or the equivalent 00F3), the "i" is 0069, the "g*" is 0067 0307 (or the equivalent
The "i" is not equivalent to 0131. It is a spelling error to use 0131 in Irish, and it will always be.
he also acknowledges that current spell checkers only work with the modern (Roman) orthography and that there are no spell checkers that work with
the "older" orthography.
Because no one needs one, and no one has made a corpus of texts in that orthography available. If someone makes one available, it *MUST* encode "i" as 0069. If it does not, then it will violate the standard set down in ISO/IEC 8859-14, which does not contain 0131.
Use of the dot-convention of marking lenition already necessitates that different characters must be used to represent the same phonological segments that would otherwise be represented by <cons>+"h", which would itself confound existing spell checkers.
That is one of the things which makes them different orthographies.
In this context, and if it's true that a spell checker could, in theory, be programmed to handle parallel encoding conventions, then why shouldn't Irish language "traditionalists" encode the i with a LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I such as <0131>?
Because that would be a spelling error. The letter "�" is the long form of "i". It is encoded 0069 0301 (or its equivalent 00E9). It would also be a spelling error to encode "�" with 0131.
Those are the facts. It is not a matter for dispute. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
