Yes!I'm not sure why Gentium is mentioned here. No SIL members have contributed to this discussion, although Peter C and I are both former members. You are welcome to ask the developer of Gentium to provide you with a special edition with a dotless i in the character code position for regular i. I have no idea what the response might be, but you have more chance that way than by asking SIL corporately.
That is why Irish traditional spelling rendered in Gentium looks so silly!
I'm sure I, or almost anyone else on this august list, could easily adapt Gentium to the small extent of removing that extraneous dot, but it would probably be illegal to so alter it. Any point asking SIL for that favour?
That is, asking SIL for a special 'Irish' edition of Gentium with only our native dots, for when our native fonts are denied us, for whatever reason. mg
Scr�obh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Quoting Peter Kirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I don't think it affects Irish, unless you want to be dotless Marıon ın
Irısh even when usıng a non-Gaelıc 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.
That's exactly the point. When the dot-convention for lenition is being used, the "i" should never be dotted, even when using a non-Gaelic font, because there's no such thing as a lenited "i" in Irish.
It's not a character-glyph issue.
It would indeed be illegal to alter the font without permission. From http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium:
Gentium is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It is not public domain, and cannot be altered, but can be given to anyone who might need it.
If you and Brian wish to argue that in old Irish orthography i is dotless whatever font is being used (by contrast with the modern Irish orthography in which, as I understand it, i is dotted or dotless depending on the font), I would suggest that you put together a set of spelling rules by which i is represented by U+0131 instead of U+0069, along with the other changes to use dots above with various consonants. It will then become a matter for discussion among users of Irish with the old orthography whether this is correct and desirable or not. But this is not a matter for Unicode to standardise, because Unicode does not specify spelling rules for individual languages.
I took the evening away from this debate to watch again The Fellowship of the Ring. I was interested to note that there are no dots on i's in the uncial font used in the titles in this film. So at least someone has such a font.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
