Monday 17 August 2020

point suscrit

Noticing an all-caps headline with BฤฐDEN rendered as such with the dotted i (called the tittle in English though there’s no case for the letter j in Turkic scripts, see also) as opposed to the dotless that appears later in the word for asylum, I was intrigued about the distinction and wondered how Turkish orthography treated these letters. As with ฤฐstanbul, the dotted version usually represents the long vowel sound, close front unrounded, whereas ฤฑ most times denotes an oo sound, close back unrounded. Not all computing platforms are able to encode this difference properly—sometimes the numeral 1 is substituted for the dotless ฤฑ—resulting in consequential miscommunications.