Hi folks,

I'm looking for some advice with the creation of a typeface that can cover the setting of modern Irish among its characters sets.

I know I need to include a handful of accented characters (Áá Éé Íí Óó Úú), but I was wondering if modern Irish also required the dot above characters (Ḃḃ Ċċ Ḋḋ Ḟḟ Ġġ Ṁṁ Ṗṗ Ṡṡ Ṫṫ) that I seem to see being discussed in relation to Irish.

If I don't need to include the dotted characters for modern Irish, can you tell me which script they are used with and if I'd need to include any additional characters, in addition to the dotted ones, to satisfy the needs of that script. What I mean is, including the dotted characters is easy, but if I was missing other characters from the set, including them would be pointless.

I hope asking for advice here isn't completely off-topic, if so please quietly disregard this message.

Many thanks,
brook

There is a unicode standard which covers Irish.

But I think you have pretty much everything there, except an optional long r and long s.

More information and examples (in Irish) here

http://www.connect.ie/users/morley/cloanna/cloanna2.htm

and in english here

http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/celtcode.html

Thanks for those links.

Just to clarify, I'm designing a normal Latin based typeface with some extended Latin character sets for modern use, rather than a Celtic-style typeface.

In addition to your links, I found some thoughts about font choice and design advice for Latin dotted consonants. Does the advice presented there sound sensible to the expert users on this site, or are they just one users opinion?

Opps - looks like the links didn't come through very distinctively. I was talking about this page: http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/fonts.htm and this page: http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/latindots.htm

The dot is not usually used in modern Irish, although it can be. In the past it had been by use of what is known as a seancló font, but the combination of the dot and a roman typeface is almost unheard of.

That having been said, I think the dot system is far better than the 'h' system which is the current standard, and hope that as computers allow for easier use of the combination between the two we will see it more often.

Even if it's little-used, I'd still include it.

This raises an interesting question.

Why was the dot abandoned in favor of an appended "h", but the fada preserved and not replaced with an alternate spelling that didn't require and accent mark?

As slovenly and antiquated as English's orthography is, it does at least have the advantage of not requiring any special characters.

i think that's a disadvantage. if we had a full range of diacritical marks one could tell how a word was prononunced by looking at it.

but I digress, the reason for adoption of the 'h' was that printing presses and typewriters available in Ireland were geared toward english - although the acute accent (the fada) is extremely common in european languages and was available even though it wasn't used in english. while there are some languages that use a dot (lithuanian comes to mind) none use the combinations that Irish does. So, if printing was to be done, they had to do it on english's terms: no dot.

So throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries if one was to print in the old style font, it required a special typeset - or even a special font on computers up until very recently.

Now that it can be easily done with the unicode setup, the argument against abandoning the 'h' is that a) too many people already know how to read with the 'h' b) already printed materials would become obsolete c) another accent mark would scare off english speakers and d) many people have no idea unicode exists.

My feeling is that a) it wouldn't take much to switch back b) no moreso than seancló materials are today, and perhaps much less since the letterforms would be teh same c) perhaps, but it would make the phonetics easier for those that do learn (no false relationships between english ch, sh, th or impossible combinations like mh, bh, etc) and d) get the word out...

quote:

while there are some languages that use a dot (lithuanian comes to mind)

There is a single letter with dot, and it is vowel "e" in Lithuanian. So it is not very comparable.

Many thanks for your thoughtful replies, everyone.

As well as Lithuanian, there are several languages that use a dot accent, Polish (ż), Maltese (ċ, ġ and ż), Catalan (a floating dot between two l characters) and Irish, as I've learned from this discussion :)

I think what Antaine says about a restricted character-set leading to use of 'h' sounds likely. As has happened in many other languages based on the latin script, compromises have been made to have access to printing. As time goes by, these 'hacks' becomes convention and the dot disappears (except in Celtic-style fonts).

In fact, would it be correct to say use of the 'h' is still a compromise? Would a dot accent be considered the more 'correct' practice? I'm trying to get a feel for whether use of the dot accent has been completely lost in modern Irish, or whether it's still there when the typesetting allows it.

Brook,

Traditionally, Irish used to use the dotted consonants c, d, g, t, m, b, f, p and s. It also incorporated the so-called "tall r" and a "tall s". The tall s can also have a dot above it.

All of these characters do have code points assigned in the Unicode standard. The combining character "dot above" also has a code point in Unicode. However, most fonts that people typically have on their computers only have glyphs for some of these, or even none of these.

If you want to design a Roman font with dotted characters, you will probably run into difficulties with the lower-case d and t: there simply doesn't seem to be any suitable place to put the dot! In the classical Celtic design, these two letters have a different shape, they're not as tall and they're kind of rounded, so there is a natural place on top of them for the dot.

All of this merely of historical interest, though. Modern Irish almost never uses these characters, except for effect. It wouldn't even be accurate to say that the dot accent is "more correct", as you suggest. People do get slightly sentimental about the old typeface sometimes but hardly anybody is able to read it fluently. It would be distinctly odd to set, say, a book or a magazine in it.

quote:

As slovenly and antiquated as English's orthography is, it does at least have the advantage of not requiring any special characters.

The h was originally written. It became written above the letter to save parchment, and eventually became a dot, in a similar way to the umlaut (ä, ü ö) in German, which was orignally written as an e, and is sometimes in the 7 bit domain!

> As slovenly and antiquated as English's
> orthography is, it does at least have the
> advantage of not requiring any special
> characters.

Which characters one considers "special" and which not is a question of perspective. It's a historical coincidence that computers and word-processing first came about in English-speaking countries. Had the first computers been created by the Gaels in the Middle Ages, ASCII today would have included á, é, í, and so on, but would not have included w, x or y, as these have no use in Irish. They would only be added later, as "special" characters.

"The h was originally written. It became written above the letter to save parchment, and eventually became a dot"

In Old Irish h was used to show the lenition of c, p & t (the three consonants after which a h is written in Latin) while the dot (also from Latin) was used over s & f so both have an equally old history in Irish orthography.
Generally the dot has been used with the Gaelic type and the h with the Latin. I think that's a sensible convention.

"i think that's a disadvantage. if we had a full range of diacritical marks one could tell how a word was prononunced by looking at it. "

Well you cant be too phonetic lest you leave out varience in the spoken tongue, plus slight changes generation by generation.

For anyone who finds a dot or a h problematic, I have two words, and one phrase:

1) digraph

2) practice

3) Irish is not English

true, true.

My only contention is that in order to survive and survive well, Irish needs to win converts from the english speakers living in Ireland. Because of that, certain compromises will have to be made to accomodate english speaking learners.

I've tried teaching phrases to rank beginners using the modern 'h' method, the seancló method, and the unicode dot+roman method. They grasped the pronunciation of the dot+roman method most easily, the seansló took a little getting used to, but it was far, far from the 'insurmountable task' it is often made out to be and once they "got it" could easily read both the new and old systems. The ones who had the most difficulty and, unless I'm forgetting someone, never did "get it" were the ones using only the modern system. The english pronunciation of those letter combination was so ingrained that it caused endless frustration, and left the student baffled how they could "get that sound from those letters". My fear with the modern convention is that it is a recipe for making english speakers give up on irish at the earliest stages.

Perhaps if we trained people on seancló or unicode and then "migrated" them over to the modern system when they were at a more advanced level and could more easily wrap their brains around what was going on...

"My only contention is that in order to survive and survive well, Irish needs to win converts from the english speakers living in Ireland. Because of that, certain compromises will have to be made to accomodate english speaking learners."

I suspected that, that is why I did not direct it at you, as I took it you know how to use both varieties

"Perhaps if we trained people on seancló or unicode and then "migrated" them over to the modern system when they were at a more advanced level and could more easily wrap their brains around what was going on..."

Could be. On a wider sense, I would like if people kept a diary of the process of learning so that we would have a qualitative record which would give us some idea of the varience in learning. For myself, there seems a whole lot of people learning in different ways, but wholly valid. I'd like a detailed analysis of how they do them

"Which characters one considers "special" and which not is a question of perspective."

True enough. I take "special characters" to mean basically any character that does not have its own key on a modern, standard keyboard. Plainly there is an English-language bias here.

Interestingly, I've seen the dot script used in a number of places and I have to say I'm glad it's no longer used! For whatever reason, I find the written-out "h" appended to a consonant to be much more understandable.

quote:

modern, standard keyboard

I had a Keyboard in Germany which had ä, ö, etc on it.

French, Czech etc keyboards exist.

There is a keyboard driver for the gaelic and other celtic fonts; follow the links above.

The english language bias is plainly, in this case in the eye of the beholder, who is reduced to 7 bit ASCII....

This has been very useful.

If I had to sum up use of dot accents in a sentence for an audience of typeface designers (in the context of modern Irish set in a roman font), would it be fair to say:

"Dot accents are occasionally used in modern Irish to denote lenition of a consonant."

I'm intensionally trying to get a precise summation of the topic. It's difficult for a non-specialist user of a script to get a handle on the difference between convention, whim and duress due to lack of options. Especially coming from an English background where the conventions are simple and generally accepted.

Yes.