Quote:
Caoimhín, if you are there, is this Scottish Gaelic correct?
Yes, it is.
I've never seen anything written in Scottish Gaelic using any of the old fonts, but I assume they were used in Scotland centuries ago. I'm not really up on the history of it all that much, but I've read that until around the 16th century Scottish Gaelic speakers who could write (which would have been a small percentage of the population) wrote almost exclusively in Irish when they wrote in the vernacular, rather than Latin, even while (presumably) saying things their own way in daily life, so prior to the 16th century I assume that they used the same fonts as were in use in Ireland.
It was only around the time of the Reformation that people really started coming up with written forms of Scottish Gaelic (i.e., writing things as they actually said them), and there was nothing really systematic about it for a long time, which is why there are so many variant spellings today, and older (more Irish) forms of words which some people still use (or did use, until recently when things started getting standardized).
I assume that, when they started writing in Scottish Gaelic, it was done with more modern fonts from the very beginning, since that all happened around the same time that book printing became common and they were busy creating type with which to print Bibles and other books. I suspect that they just used the same fonts which they were using to print everything else. I know that the early Scottish Gaelic Bibles in the 18th century, which were prepared in part to allow the "evangelizing" of the Highlands and the remaining Gaelic-speaking areas in the Lowlands used modern fonts (though the language used was often still close to Irish in many cases).
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