Lithuanian localization

Tofu Type Foundry · October 2

Whilst admiring John’s Brill fonts the other day, I noticed it has Lithuanian localization. The Lithuanian alphabet doesn’t include Ì ì (igrave) so is this feature used to support “accentuation”?

John Savard · October 2

I followed your link, and I saw that when Lithuanian localization is turned on, "igrave" becomes a lowercase "i" with the grave accent appearing over the dot.

Although originally I didn't understand your question, this caused me to suspect that the answer is "yes".

EDIT: After reading the Wikipedia article on Lithuanian accentuation, which notes that the grave accent, along with the acute accent and some others, is used to mark tone and stress, I am more confident that this is indeed the purpose.

Tofu Type Foundry · October 2

Sorry, I forgot to include this screenshot showcasing the feature!

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5019405/uploads/editor/87/iwgtwci9t1sv.png

John Savard · October 2

On further reflection, since you knew what accentuation in Lithuanian was, in order to suspect that this is what the feature was for, it is clear my response was not helpful to you. I presume you're looking for an employee of Brill, or at least a native speaker of Lithuanian, to give you a hard, definitive answer to what this localization feature is for.

For the benefit of naïve readers of this thread, though, I will make some comments.

Lithuanian just has an ordinary I which has a dot when lowercase; it isn't like Turkish in this respect. And pinyin uses popular accent marks to indicate tone, but when they're used in this way, they replace the dot over the lowercase i just as they do when those marks are used as accents in other languages.

So why would users of Lithuanian feel the need to keep the dot above the lowercase i when adding a grave accent to indicate tone and/or stress?

For two reasons. Although Lithuanian doesn't use the grave accent as an accent, it does use other accented letters. And one mark it uses as an accent - but under the letter, rather than above - is a dot.

So it is at least reasonable to think that keeping the dot above the lowercase i when accentuation takes place is considered useful for avoiding confusion in printed Lithuanian texts.

Thomas Phinney · October 2

@John Savard in this case I think we can assume that “John” was intended to be a request to @John Hudson, the designer of the Brill types.

John Savard · October 2

I saw the reference to "John's Brill fonts", and I did not assume that it had anything to do with me.

However, I am able to provide a hard "yes" answer to the original poster's question. In "An Introduction to Modern Lithuanian", published in 1993, I found the phenomenon in question actually occurring in the wild:

So, yes, Lithuanians do feel the need to keep the dot on the i under accentuation.

Tofu Type Foundry · October 2

Correct, Thomas! I was hoping @John Hudson would confirm his intentions, as the main designer behind Brill, but also wanted the question to have a public forum. I always appreciate the insight and comments from others—such as @John Savard’s notes! Plus, designers with the same question can now reference this thread.

John Hudson · October 3

So this is a little complicated.

There is indeed a convention in Lithuanian typography that when accents are applied to the lowercase i, e.g. to mark stress in a dictionary, the dot is retained, unlike in most other languages. So this is indeed a behaviour that can be implemented at the glyph level using the Lithuanian langsys tag in an OpenType font and simply not including the contextual lookup used in the dflt and other langsys entries to remove the dot when followed by an above combining mark character. After discussing this with the editing and typesetting advisor at Brill, we decided to implement it in this way.

HOWEVER...

Someone (@Denis Moyogo Jacquerye? or maybe Roozbeh Pournader?) pointed out to me a while ago that Unicode advises a different approach, in which the retained dot should be hard encoded as U+0307 COMBINING DOT ABOVE. So, the example Lithuanian i with grave would actually be encoded as i (soft-dotted, with the dot supressed as in other languages) followed by a combining dot followed by a combining grave.

Frankly, that seems to me a terrible idea, not least because it means the Lithuanian diacritic cannot be searched for simply as a i+grave, which is what it is, semantically speaking.

Implementing this as in the Brill fonts seems to me a better idea, and well within the scope of the sort of language-specific glyph behaviour variation that the OpenType Layout langsys architecture was designed to enable. If someone were working in an environment without support for language-specific shaping, then hacking the encoding to achieve the desired appearance would be possible, but it doesn’t make sense to me that it should be the ‘correct’ approach.

Lithuanian localization

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