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Lenition

Lenition explained on this page: In addition to the difference in letter shapes between Latin and Gaelic styles, there are two different methods of representing the letter modification known as "lenition", which is applicable to the nine consonants b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s, t. In Gaelic fonts, lenition is usually indicated by a diacritic (dot-above), while in Latin fonts it is common to use a digraph (e.g., lenited b is written "bh"). This situation is analogous to that of representing German umlaut by diacritic or digraphic means. It is important to realise that the questions of letter-style (Latin vs Gaelic) and of lenition representation (diacritic vs digraph) are independent, and all four combinations are possible in principle. The choice of letter-style has no encoding implications, since all the basic (unaccented) Gaelic letters are also found in the Latin alphabet---in this, Gaelic is like German Fraktur but unlike Greek or Cyrillic---whereas the choice of lenition representation has such implications. (Font encoding is another name for the range of characters in the font, and their correspondence with keystrokes.) When lenition is represented digraphically, the normal Windows Latin font encoding may be used (ISO Latin-1), irrespective of whether the letter style is Latin or Gaelic. When lenition is represented diacritically, the standard 8-bit encoding for Windows is ISO Latin-8 (aka ISO 8859-14), again irrespective of whether the letter style is Latin or Gaelic. Latin-1 and Latin-8 are in agreement on the placement of those characters common to both. A font may be described as "Gaelic" if it employs Gaelic letter-shapes, or if it supports dotted consonants, or both.

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