[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Just ran across this one a few weeks ago: "dotted b" and "dotted d". Only used in Irish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography

Initially found out about it in a bug in Source Code Pro:

https://github.com/adobe-fonts/sourc...pro/issues/205

And "dotless i" and "dotted capital I" in Turkish... oh boy, does that one open up a huge can of worms. It's the source of many bugs in programs (capitalization, comparing strings, sorting, etc.):

https://haacked.com/archive/2012/07/...uld-care.aspx/

And how do you spell an Irish person's name or pronounce it? Whatever way they say.
Some old road signs have the dotted h, instead of th, like Bother for road.
Actually b c d g m p s and t all took a dot.
bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, th
The s without a dot was so rare that actually most Irish words, especially starting with an S are pronouced sh.
Síle = Sheelagh or Sheila.
Actually Hebrew has almost the same constants in hard and soft versions, but for kids books and the Bible they use the dot in the opposite sense.
I was puzzled how the name Madb might be pronounced. It went out of fashion unlike Donal which is just as old. My Irish speaking connections didn't know and were unsure about Neamhain as it's also now unused for the same reason. Turns out the dots are missing on Madb, so it's Madhbh. Which is a little easier. The dh is now often silent, or a soft y sound. The bh is a soft b which can be like an English or German w. See Lenition. Meábh is thus the most similar modern Irish name, though eá is longer vowel sound than adh (~ay).

I proof a LOT of contemporaneously set books with Irish names in them. Today in the real world people in Ireland might use ancient Irish spelling, pre-1948 spelling, modern Irish spelling, English transliteration. Pronuciation varies dramatically with region. Alice and Eilis can be pronouced the same.

I'd like to be able sometimes to use traditional Irish Orthography, but it seems to have zero support on mobi, and tricky on Linux (which is better than Windows) and hard on azw/KF8 or epub. Choosing a suitable font isn't simple. Many are poor. I tried the Turkish undotted i for the proper Irish i and it was a bad idea. The problem too is mixing fonts in the same line as they rarely have the same size for the same em/pt size. I've had difficulty with a Sans to match the size of Georgia, so it's not just language orthography.

The oldest Proto-Celtic known was associated with the European Celtic Helveti (one tribe of Swiss founders, clue in name), which uses a mix of Greek and Etruscan letters, about 700 BC. At one stage the Greeks had no H letter so put a ' at the beginning of words starting with H. Also Irish doesn't use the apostrophe, a word often takes an h after the first letter in the genitive case.