Hi,
Most websites use the Arial font, which facilitates a whole range of
Alphabets and Languages. But this has got me thinking, why can't Irish
be written in Arial with respect to its old orthography -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography
Take the letter A, which is somewhat like a triangle. Why can't there
be an arial representation of this character?
The issue of course is that the Irish letter A, no matter what its
orthography is, is mapped to Latin A in the unicode table. This is
despite the fact that Cyrillic A has its own unicode position.
Irish in its old orthography has a different alphabet than when
written in Latin. For example, the use of the dotless i (has a
different unicode position), the use of dotted consonants, and the use
of characters that simply look different to Latin letters - no matter
what the font or handwriting is.
If you try to write Irish in Arial, using the dotless i and dotted
consonants, you end with with an ugly mess with the dots not appearing
along the same horizontal line. In other words, its pointless trying
to write Irish in the manner. But it wouldn't have to be that way if
Gaelic letters for the old typography had there own unicode
positions.
At the moment, the old typography can only be written using specific
Gaelic fonts like those covered here -
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/fonts.htm
but these can't be used in a practical fa****on on a website since font
embedding is still non existent. But even if embedding was possible,
what would happen to the website title when it appears at the top of
the Browser window - it would need to be written in its Latin form.
Keep in mind also that many Irish words have different unicode
representations depending on whether latin or the old typography is
chosen.
Anyway, I personally believe the there should be a Gaelic (old
typography) section in the Unicode table. What are your opinions on
this?
Thanks,
Barry.
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