Irish insular features for mga (Middle Irish) and ghc (Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic)

[silmeth]

When using Junicode Two Beta with ss02 for a HTML element with lang="ga" (Irish) or lang="gd" (Scottish Gaelic) or lang="sga" (Old Irish), the text uses the “Irish” features (eg. the Irish form of Insular ꝺ).

But it isn’t so if the language of the text is set to mga (Middle Irish, the form of Goidelic dialects used between ~900–1200) or ghc (“Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic”, a weird name assigned to Classical Gaelic, literary/poetic standard of the Gaelic language of ~1200–1750, by Ethnologue¹).

Check the codes mga and ghc in BCP47 Language Subtag Lookup.

I’d expect mga and ghc to be displayed the same way as Old Irish and Irish.

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¹ Ethnologue 15, p. 565:

Gaelic, Hiberno-Scottish (Gaoidhealg, Hiberno-Scottish Classical Common Gaelic) [ghc] Extinct. Ireland and Scotland. Class: Indo-European, Celtic, Insular, Goidelic. Lg Dev: Roman script. Bible: 1690. Other: Archaic literary language based on 12th century Irish, formerly used by professional classes in Ireland until the 17th century and Scotland until the 18th century. vso.

[psb1558]

Unfortunately, these language tags are not part of the OpenType font specification, which provides only a subset of the language tags in the relevant standards. Junicode Two has all the available tags for Irish and Gaelic: IRI, IRT, SGA, GAE.

There's a link to a form for suggesting additional language tags on the page linked above.

[silmeth]

Ah, I was afraid that might be some OpenType limitation. Thanks for the response!

[silmeth]

Just a self-note that the CSS attribute font-language-override with the appropriate language system tag ("IRT" for Irish traditional, "SGA" for Old Irish) is a valid work-around for this:

<span lang="ghc" style="font-language-override:&quot;IRT&quot;">A Ṡionann Ḃríain Ḃóroiṁe,<br/>
iongnaḋ is méd do ġáire,<br/>
mar sguire dod ġlóraiġe<br/>
ag dol síar isin sáile.</span>

EDIT: that works at least in Firefox… not necessarily elsewhere.

[psb1558]

Very elegant (FireFox is often the first to implemen new CSS features). BTW, should the dot be lowered on the insular cap B?

[silmeth]

Yes, I think in most old Gaelic types the capital B is basically scaled-up lowercase b (and thus the dot placement is similar to the lowercase variant). This for example is either capitals or small caps (as it uses the capital “Roman” R rather than the insular r seen below in Forbaḋ):

or here:

You can see examples of older metal Irish types on Gaelchló website (in Irish) – each section ends in a link to a PDF with example of a page printed with that type. But in Early Modern Irish you wouldn’t have a sentence beginning with a ⟨ḃ⟩ (in Modern Irish Ḃí ‘was’ is common at the start, but in Classical Gaelic/EMI it’s rather Do ḃí or Do ḃáoi, or similar), so I don’t think there is any example there.

[psb1558]

Okay, thanks: I've moved the dot.

[psb1558]

I'll leave this open and add those languages when/if they make it into the OpenType standard.