Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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.

Now, what do _you_ mean by "dotting"? Surely you can't omit some of the
dots that distinguish e.g. b from n from t? Do you mean vowel pointing?

> > 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.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...