On 19/03/2004 08:16, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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.
The problem is that this is NOT what she meant. If she and other Irish
speakers had requested that i was always left undotted in Irish language
texts, regardless of the font selection, then the obvious answer is the
one I suggested earlier, to use the dotless i character defined for
Turkish. But it seems that the requirement is for dots in some fonts and
no dots in other fonts. The only way to do that (and it is of course not
a guarantee) is to use different glyphs in different fonts.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
