[Spellyans] <y Y> + diacritical

[Michael Everson]

At 11:18 +0200 2008-06-25, Daniel Prohaska wrote:

>Rest assured, I'm no fan of the diaeresis either.

Why not? Nance used it on ü and very occasionally 
on ö. It's not unfamiliar to the Cornish eye.

>This may be irrational and childish, but I also 
>dislike the fact that Michael is pushing for 
>diaeresis because it's easy for HIM to write on 
>HIS computer,

No, Dan. I can typeset real Unicode perfectly 
well in Quark XPress. My e-mail client is not 
Unicode enabled, however. I'm looking out for 
people less technically adept than myself. I'm 
not willing to condemn the Cornish language or 
any of its users to the kinds of problems Welsh 
users have.

>[...] while not considering the people that are 
>using other systems and may find y-accute, 
>y-grave or y-circumflex easier, or equally 
>difficult to spell as y-diaeresis. Sorry, 
>Michael, but it just doesn't add up.

Dan, huge numbers of fonts simply lack y-acute, 
y-grave, and y-circumflex ENTIRELY. Y-diaresis is 
available to everybody, however.

It does not matter if your system can TYPE a 
letter if the fonts you are using don't have it. 
You'll get an empty box instead of the letter you 
want. Keyboard software to assist input is a 
one-off fix, easy to manage, easy to distribute.

There is no way we can fix ten thousand fonts 
missing a letter we want to use in our 
orthography.

The suggestion to use y-acute will disadvantage 
many users. I can't support that.

This isn't new, either. It has always been a part of KS. See §1.3.7.

>I can live with the SWF alternation dydh ~ 
>dedhyow and it's alternative dedh ~ dedhyow. I 
>don't need any diacritic in this particular case.

Then you can't distinguish words which do have 
the alternation bys/bes from those which do not.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com