Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless MarÄon Än > IrÄsh even when usÄng a non-GaelÄc font. The consensus on the list seems > to be that Irish should be written with a normal i character and the dot > removed in particular fonts.
I also approve, simply because Irish has no distinction between a dotted or undotted glyph representation of the vowel i... So which ever character is encoded does not matter as they will be perceived as equivalent by Irish readers. If one creates a Irish document using the dotless i, it won't break the Irish orthograph, and there's a way to use a custom folding rule for Irish to use any of these two characters. Because of that, an application may as well use a Gaelic font where the soft-dotted 'i' is shown without the dot, or mutate every soft-dotted 'i' into dotless 'i' before rendering with any other font. In both cases, there's apparently no need to add a new character or diacritic to preserve a linguistic distinction, or to render Irish with either the modern or traditional Gaelic styles... So all existing Irish texts do not need to be reencoded. I see only one thing that may be useful: a folding for Irish where soft-dotted and dotless i could be unified. This could be part of the language definition in applications (for example in ICU when performing language sensitive collation...)
