Elizabeth Pyatt: Irish Lenition & Orthographic Depth

[Elizabeth J. Pyatt]

Brian:

Stepping outside my moderator mode for a moment, I would like to say
I would be interested in seeing the results of your experiment. Both
conventions seem understandable to me, although I actually find the
buailte appealing because of its compactness.

Unfortunately, as someone who has consulted others on how to post
non-English material online, I have to acknowledge that from a
computing and typographical view, using "h" is much easier to handle
than a buailte would  be. In fact, I've seen online Old Irish texts
using the "h" spelling because using the buailte is such as
challenge.  I wonder if similar issues of ease of creating materials
on a printing press were facing the Irish community when they chose
the "h" convention in the first place.

With "h" you can type on a standard keyboard and even send it over
e-mail. With buailte you would need special fonts and a special
keyboard utility. Of course fadas (acute accents), aren't standard
ASCII, but most operating systems these days can process acute
acvents because they support other more widely spoken languages like
Spanish and French which use acute accents.

As much as I like the buailte, it's very unique qualities would mean
that you would have to do a lot of convincing to computer programmers
that you must use it. In addition, I would not want to be the person
in charge of converting Irish electronic data and interfaces to the
buailte system unless I knew the benefits would be very great.

Also, Ditto Andrew Carnie's comments. This is another area that has
been improved with reforms over the years, but I agree with Marion
that it's still hard to teach.

>I personally had more problem, when I
>was learning, to know which vowels were pronounced, which vowels were there to
>indicate broad/slender, and which vowels were both.


Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
ejp10 at psu.edu
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10
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