using the dotless i currently uses one
diacritic, the acute accent, though traditionally a second was used, the overdot. If diacritics are unavailable, e.g. on a computer using
ASCII, the overdot is replaced by a following , e.g. → "He/It was" and there is no standard for replacing an acute accent, though sometimes it is indicated by a following
slash, e.g. → "truth". The
acute accent (; or "long (extension)") is used to indicate a long vowel, as in "boat". However, there are other conventions to indicate a long vowel, such as: • A following , e.g. "high", "destruction", "fist", and, in Connacht, a word-final , e.g. "time". • The digraphs , e.g. "gay", "bare", "music". • The tri/tetragraphs , e.g. "neighbour", "Munster". • and before or , e.g. "wild", "twine". The
overdot (; "dot of lenition") was traditionally used to indicate
lenition, though exclusively uses a following for this purpose. In
Old Irish, the overdot was only used for , while the following was used for and the lenition of other letters was not indicated, lenition being generally understood due to word position (somewhat like in
Danish). Later the two methods were used in parallel to represent lenition of any consonant (except ) until the standard practice became to use the overdot in Gaelic type and the following in Roman type. Thus the dotted letters ( "struck letters") are equivalent to letters followed by a , i.e. .
Lowercase has no
tittle in Gaelic type. However, as printed and electronic material like books, newspapers and web pages use Roman type almost invariably, the tittle is generally shown. Irish does not
graphemically distinguish
dotted i and
dotless ı, i.e. they are not different letters as they are in, e.g.
Turkish and
Azeri. ==Punctuation==