I have a confession to make. I don't really care, personally, about the whole dotted-i vs. undotted-i thing. When I write Irish, I use Roman typefaces and the standardized orthography. The real reason that I have tried to sustain this argument is my interest in the relationship between orthography and identity.
Marion Gunn raised a question which I'd paraphrase as, How can continuance of dotless-i be guaranteed in Irish texts? By "guarantee," I take this to mean in all representations regardless of font selection--i.e., the underlying form vs. the surface form. In the ensuing discussion, this question was not answered. Instead, the question itself was dismissed as irrelevant and declared ignorant. Who decides what characters (not glyphs) are part of a language and/or an orthography? In the Irish context, as everybody knows, this has been a contentious issue. When the Gaelic League and other traditionalists objected to the spelling reforms formally proposed in 1931, experts like Aodh De Bl�cam characterized those positions as ignorant. De Bl�cam wrote, "Purists who wish to load every Irish word with a burden of fossil letters find small support among REAL authorities" (Emphasis mine).(1) In the 1970s, work was done to standardize S�mi orthographies. In the Skolt case, all of the normalized data was pulled from one dialect, which prompted objections from speakers of the smaller dialects. As Zita McRobbie-Utasi points out that "this resistance was intended to emphasize identity�and (slow) down the standardization process aimed at codification and elaboration of the dialect chosen.�(2) McRobbie-Utasi�s greater concern, however, was the contention that �Skolt S�mi speakers themselves should decide what orthographic symbols they should use and which linguistic forms are truly representative of the language,� which, it seemed, she viewed as an obstacle to language planning activities. Finally, Steven Bird has also written about orthography and identity in Cameroon.(3) He concluded that enduring orthographic innovations are those that take account of "sociolinguistic and political realities, and the various layer of identity referenced by orthography." My point in presenting all of this is to try to demonstrate that Marion's concerns are perfectly normal. They are not extreme, irrational, or ignorant. Furthermore, contrary to what John Cowan said about selection of a hypothetical Gaelic "g" not making sense, I suggest that not only does it make sense but you can bet your bottom dollar that people will use alternative characters that have the preferred underlying form. It's not necessary that they won't be aware of or understand the character-glyph distinction. It's that their own concerns will be of greater priority. People aren't computers. They don't execute programs. They engage in behavior that's meaningful to them--standards by damned. I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a good thing. I am suggesting that developers of the Unicode standard need to consider these issues and devise creative solutions. The only affirmative answer I saw to Marion's questions was that OpenType may soon support alternative characters for diffrerent languages. Furthermore, when a guest on this discussion list asks a question of a sociolinguistic nature, that question should not be dismissed with authoritarian, positivist, expert answers. Questions such as these ARE a matter for dispute, because this is a public list and we're not all experts. (1) Aodh De Bl�cam, Gaelic Literature Surveyed, Originally published in 1929. New York: Barnes and Noble (1974): 4-5. (2) Zita McRobbie-Utasi, "Language Planning, Literacy and Cultural Identity: The Skolt Sami Case," Linguistics. Series A, Studia et Dissertationes 17. Zur Frage der uralischen Schriftsprachen. 31-39. 1995. (3) Steven Bird, �Orthography and Identity in Cameroon,� Written Language and Literacy 4:2 (1991):131-162. <http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/home/papers/00001446/00001446.html> (March 6, 2004).
