Re: OT: "Unicode" keymap

Garth Wallace wrote stuff, linking to
<http://www.livejournal.com/users/gwalla/43931.html>

On that page, he wrote:
: G: yogh (Old Irish "gh")

Which as far as I know is wrong. Celtic scribes had a letter <g> in
their celtic script. They started writing Old English, using their
letter <g> in their celtic script.

Norman invaders invaded England, and so eventually people started
writing Middle English with the french script the norman invaders
brought over. But by now the evil Middle Englishers had broken up the
lovely phoneme /G/ into many millions of them: /j/, /w/, /g/, /h/ [x]
(noting that /w/ and /h/ certainly existed before as independent
phonemes, and I think /j/ did but it was spelt with <g>). This screwed
up the orthography, for which they only had themselves to blame.¹

Now, the Norman invaders weren't entirely inconsiderate and provided
perfectly reasonable ways to write /g/, but the English still had a
tradition to maintain and obviously felt that the new french <g> and the
old celtic <g> weren't the same letter, and should be applied different:
<g> for /g/ and /dZ/ (as it was a French letter, it got the French
values) and <yogh> for /j/, /w/ and /h/ [x]. Eventually, of course,
always/mostly using <y> and <w> for /j/ and /w/ won out, and <gh> for
/h/ [x] and the letter yogh went the way of the dodo.

In other words, yogh is used in Middle English and Middle English alone
(oh, well, and later versions of Scots I suppose). If you want to make
Old English or Irish look like Old English or Irish scribes writing Old
English or Irish, then you use a font that looks so, just as if you want
writing to look like it's handwritten, you use a font that looks so, not
the script l character, which lives as an alternative for L or l for
litre. (Some people use 'yogh' to mean 'ezh'. Yoghs and ezhes often look
alike, to the point where some yoghs are now spelt with zeds, but I
wasn't talking about them.)


1: Today, of course, Englishers have plenty of things to blame their
    orthographical woes on:
     - World domination.
     - Historical writings that are still kinda readable, if you
       don't mind tripping up on the myriad false friends.
     - Standardised orthography.
     - Political correctness.
     - Americans.²
     - Invasions by the French.
     - Previous world domination by Latin.
     - Previous writings in Old English.
    And so forth. So as you can see, today, it's everyone's fault but
    ours. I can assure you we'd fix it up if we could!

2: If Americans spoke like Australians, then we'd be much more able to
    revise our orthography! Of course, the Conspiracy of English Teachers
    who Read Shakespeare and Religioustypes who Insist Upon the King
    James Version of the Bible³ are behind these differences. If it
    weren't for the so-far successful attempts of these people to spread
    discord, the speech of everyone else would quickly drift back to the
    natural way!

3: Most conspiracies that I learn about lack marketing departments and
    thus use descriptive but not memoriable names. This particular
    conspiracy is in fact the merger of three conspiracies, who realised
    they would be better able to screw with my mind if they joined: The
    Conspiracy of English Teachers who Read Shakespeare, The Conspiracy
    of Religioustypes who Insist Upon the King James Version of the Bible
    and The Conspiracy of Confusion. The Conspiracy of Confusion's name
    doesn't appear in the merged conspiracy's name mostly because they
    realised that by including it, everything would become evident, so
    more confusion would be spread by *not* including it.

--
| Tristan.               |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
| kesuari@yahoo!.com.au  |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
|                        |                 to make you everybody else---
|                        |          means to fight the hardest battle
|                        |            which any human being can fight;
|                        |                    and never stop fighting.
|                        |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"
|                        |
|                        |     In the fight between you and the world,
|                        |                             back the world.
|                        |      --- Franz Kafka,
|                        |         "RS's 1974 Expectation of Days"

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