Re: Random Spellings (was: Decorative diacritics)

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "suzmccarth" <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

> What a bizarse comment. First, the Cree had *never* established the
> use of obligatory diacritics for themselves. Indigenous Cree
> dotting is usually compared to Hebrew partially marked text. If you
> can't produce fully marked Hebrew text does that mean you can't
> spell? I guess I don't know the answer to that. I would be
> interested to hear what the expectations are for Hebrew. But it was
> never a standard for Cree. Partially marked was used but at the
> writer's discretion.

I now have a better understanding of what you are saying, but it
would be helpful to have some examples. I would suggest citing the
spelling by Unicode hexadecimal codes, as I suspect few of us have
Cree fonts to hand.

Arabic provides the comparison you are looking for, as it allows
partial dotting.

> There is no WRONG and RIGHT about choosing to dot or not in Cree.
> Dottings are added to the full syllabics at the writer's
> discretion.

Isn't the choice messier? Isn't it the case that some syllables may
not be dotted, while others may have a certain dotting? In this case
there is no way of indicating in an utterance that a syllable can't
be dotted.

Logically, the problem is no worse than that faced by Arabic text
processing. In practice, there may be the practical issue that the
diacritics won't be represented by 'non-spacing' marks, but that
instead look-up tables are required to convert dotted syllables to
undotted syllables.

Richard.