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Wikipedia / Gaelic type

Gaelic type (sometimes called Irish character, Irish type, or Gaelic script) is a family of Insular script typefaces devised for printing Early Modern Irish. It was widely used from the 16th century until the mid-18th century in Scotland and the mid-20th century in Ireland, but is now rarely used. Sometimes, all Gaelic typefaces are called Celtic or uncial although most Gaelic types are not uncials. The "Anglo-Saxon" types of the 17th century are included in this category because both the Anglo-Saxon types and the Gaelic/Irish types derive from the insular manuscript hand.

The terms Gaelic type, Gaelic script and Irish character translate the Modern Irish phrase (). In Ireland, the term is used in contrast to the term , Roman type.

The Scots Gaelic term is (). (–1770) was one of the last Scottish writers with the ability to write in this script, but his main work, , was published in the Roman script.

Characteristics

Besides the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, Gaelic typefaces must include all vowels with acute accents as well as a set of consonants with dot above , and the Tironian sign et ⁊, used for 'and' in Irish.

Gaelic typefaces also often include insular forms: of the letters and , and some of the typefaces contain a number of ligaturess used in earlier Gaelic typography and deriving from the manuscript tradition. Lower-case is drawn without a dot (though it is not the Turkish dotless ı), and the letters have insular shapes .

Many modern Gaelic typefaces include Gaelic letterforms for the letters , and typically provide support for at least the vowels of the other Celtic languages. They also distinguish between and (as did traditional typography), though some modern fonts replace the ampersand with the Tironian note ostensibly because both mean 'and'.

History

The Irish uncial alphabet originated in medieval manuscripts as an "insular" variant of the Latin alphabet. The first Gaelic typeface was designed in 1571 for , a catechism commissioned by Elizabeth I to help attempt to convert the Irish Catholic population to Anglicanism.

In 1611, Franciscans from Leuven/Louvain (Belgium) created their own typeface, known as Louvain Irish Type.

Use

Typesetting in Gaelic script remained common in Ireland until the mid-20th century. Gaelic script is today used merely for decorative typesetting; for example, a number of traditional Irish newspapers still print their name in Gaelic script on the first page, and it is also popular for pub signs, greeting cards, and display advertising. Edward Lhuyd's grammar of the Cornish language used Gaelic-script consonants to indicate sounds like and . In 1996 created a new corporate logo. The logo consists of a modern take on the Gaelic type face. The R's counter is large with a short tail, the T is roman script while the E is curved but does not have a counter like a lower case E, and the letters also have slight serifs to them. TG4's original logo, under the brand , also used a modernization of the font, the use of the curved T and a sans-serif A in the word . Other Irish companies that have used Gaelic script in their logos including the GAA, and . The uses Gaelic Script on its official seal.

In Unicode

Unicode treats the Gaelic script as a font variant of the Latin alphabet with precomposed characters for the letters with diacritics (the glyphs shown here are representative glyphs from a Roman typeface and will not have the correct appearance unless a Gaelic typeface is used):

Similar linguistics graphemes

The glyphs in Gaelic types typically resemble their related phonetics characters. For example, the letterforms used for and resemble the linguistics insular g, but (in normal text) it is correct to use and with a Gaelic type (font) specified (and incorrect to use and unless writing about linguistics).

According to Michael Everson, in the 2006 Unicode proposal for these characters:

Unicode 5.1 (2008) added a capital G (Ᵹ) and both capital and lowercase letters D, F, R, S, T, besides "turned insular G", on the basis that Edward Lhuyd used these letters in his 1707 work as a scientific orthography for Cornish.

Unicode 14.0 (2021) added characters, including Insular letters, for the Ormulum:

  • Ꟑ ꟑ Closed Insular G (U+A7D0, U+A7D1)

  • ◌ᫌ Combining Insular G (U+1ACC)

  • ◌ᫍ Combining Insular R (U+1ACD)

  • ◌ᫎ Combining Insular T (U+1ACE)

Samples

Gallery

See also

  • (who devised an Antiqua orthography for Irish in 1639)

References

Sources

  • Lynam, E. W. 1969. The Irish character in print: 1571–1923. New York: Barnes & Noble. First printed as Oxford University Press offprint 1924 in Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 4th Series, Vol. IV, No. 4, March 1924.)

  • McGuinne, Dermot. Irish type design: A history of printing types in the Irish character. Blackrock: Irish Academic Press.