[Spellyans] Front unrounded vowels, was: The quantity system

[A. J. Trim]

Yes, I would prefer to use an acute accent, rather than using a dieresis, 
providing the acute accent is not going to be used for something else.
I use a Windows PC, and all I have to do is to press the AltGr button whilst 
typing my vowel.
This works for <é> easily. I have made it work for <ý> (by re-mapping my 
keyboard using the freely available Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator) but 
some people would have difficulty with this. Some fonts don't work but most 
do. Unfortunately, I don't currently have access to a Mac or Linux machine, 
so I cannot try on those.


Regards,

Andrew J. Trim



--------------------------------------------------
From: "Owen Cook" <owen.e.cook at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 7:32 PM
To: "Standard Cornish discussion list" <spellyans at kernowek.net>
Subject: Re: [Spellyans] Front unrounded vowels, was: The quantity system

> 2008/6/24 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> rug scrifa:
>> Actually, I think I've caught you here. ;-)
>> Consider German and its dialects. <ö> is (in
>> practice if not in theory) an umbrella graph for
>> /ø/~/e/ (schön [Sø:n]~[Se:n]) and <ü> is an
>> umbrella graph for /y/~/i/ (grün
>> /gry:n]~[gri:n]). So what we propose here is that
>> <ÿ> and <ë> are both umbrella graphs for
>> [i:]~[e:].
>
> It's a clever trick, but I'm not taken in! ;-) The real reason for the
> diaeresis is simply that we don't want to discrimate against Mac
> users. While a noble goal in itself, this is not worth the vexation of
> using the wrong diacritic when a better alternative exists. The words
> we're talking about all have <ë> or <ÿ> in a stressed syllable anyway
> -- no problem there, were we to use the acute. Furthermore, anybody
> with exposure to Irish will know the acute as a length marker already.
> <é> is familiar to most of us from French as a higher variety of <e>
> (potentially convenient for those who want to continue the fiction of
> 'aspirational' /I:/), and was used this way in Breton (in the
> Orthographie universitaire). Long, stressed, alternating with a higher
> variant -- our dédh and prés words are all of these things. On hiatus,
> umlaut, centralized -- dëdh and prës are none of these. And if a
> diaeresis is arguably unobtrusive, an acute is certainly more so by
> virtue of being more simply formed.
>
> Cheers,
> ~~Owen
>
>> In my judgement the acute accent would be
>> interpreted as a stress mark by most readers. And
>> I think the two little dots are really not very
>> obtrusive. But the choice here is one of
>> character set and many many many fonts: While
>> Windows has both y-acute and y-diaeresis, the
>> classic Mac OS has only y-diaeresis.
>> --
>> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>>
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