Re: totem 0.99.1

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 16:31, Paul Duffy wrote:
> 
> what's your definiton of the "original orthography" for irish. 
The one in use for >1000 years :-) as opposed to the one that 
I am guessing came in with the spelling reform of the 70's.

Are you saying that you really can't read the old road signs? ;-)

for those who haven't a clue what I'm on about, sometime in recent
memory the aspirated consonants, which were represented by a letter with
a "spot" above it, were replaced by the same consonant followed by the
latin character "h" (which was mostly unused in Irish).  Thus

ċ -> ch
ṁ -> mh
ḋ -> dh

etc.  thus making the language much less compact (and less beautiful,
typographically).  Presumably this happenned for compatibility with
English-language typewriters - though the job was half-finished since
the "fada" (ˊ) remained to trouble the typist.  The above transformation
is 1:1 and thus reading the old orthography does not require learning
any complex rules or unfamiliar symbols.

I am well aware that Irish is a compulsory subject for some 11-12
years.  Perhaps if the language reform took place today in the age of
Unicode instead of 30-odd years ago, the typographic issue would have
been moot and the old orthography would have been retained.

- Bill

> Any
> spelling or whatnot i'm using in Irish translation is based on what i
> learnt in school. Irish is a compulsory subject. Matter of fact most
> universities in Ireland will only permit matriculation if the candiadate
> has received a pass in their Leaving Cert Irish exam.
> Basically alphabet used in irish is much the same as english apart from
> their vowels with fada's on them.
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
>  "There is no greater sorrow then to remember times of
> happiness when miserable" -- Dante "The Inferno"
> 
> On 25 Jun 2003, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 01:13, Alan Cox wrote:
> > ...
> > > > > by the way who do i complain to about getting keyboard shortcuts to get
> > > > > fada's (accents on letters) for Irish translation. In windows i can just go ctrl-alt-letter and voila.
> > > > > while with gnome it's copy and paste out of character Map. which is a bit
> > > > > of a pain in the arse to be honest.
> > > > ...
> > Alan said
> > > Or type shift-altgr for compose, then its the logical stuff - eg
> > > type ^ a for â  ' a for à c , for ç, n ~ for ñ etc...
> >
> > Yes, this even works for "old orthography", i.e. shift-AltGr-.-m gives
> > you the aspirated m (but not in evolution 1.1 which I'm using).  If
> > you're going to go to the trouble to translate to Irish which isn't a
> > living person's sole language anymore AFAIK, why not use the original
> > orthography too?
> >
> > Just wondering...
> >
> > - Bill (a non-Irish-speaker)
> >
> >
> > >
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> 
>