on 4/20/01 6:39 AM, James Kass at jameskass@worldnet.att.net wrote:
> If nobody has complained about the proposed architecture...
> maybe it's because there's nothing to complain about.
I am not an Egyptologist, but as one involved in Ancient Near Eastern
studies (electronic projects include Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding and
Ugaritic for Unicode) I do hear rumblings from the Egyptological community
now and then. And until someone with better information steps in I feel
obligated to relay what little I know about the Egyptian Hieroglyphic
Unicode proposal, as heard from several internationally recognized
Egyptoplogists.
I believe that somebody HAS indeed "complained about the proposed
architecture" for Hieroglyphic in Unicode. I have been told that there was
an organized protest from within the Egyptological community against the
proposal a few years ago as being entirely too premature and inadequate.
Also at the University of Chicago conference on Electronic Publication of
Near Eastern Texts in 1999 the consensus among the Egyptologists seemed to
be that the current state of the art in Egyptian paleography and orthography
did not bode well for a Unicode proposal in the near future.
My experience with other ancient script systems has been that the Unicode
Consortium should only entertain proposals to the standard after ACTIVELY
seeking the input from the relevant (scholarly) communities - something
which the ICE and UFU projects are doing for two cuneiform script systems.
And, if it isn't the case now, I would also propose that relevant input on
proposals should somehow be formally tied to and registered with the various
proposals themselves. (It would be hard for me to imagine that the rejection
of the Hieroglyphic proposal by the Egyptological community has not been
formally associated with the proposal itself.)
On a positive note, I must say that our contact with Unicode experts and
officials during the process of trying to come up with a formal proposal for
Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform and Ugaritic cuneiform has been a wonderful and
productive experience. I'm hoping for a similar process amongst the
Egyptological community. Any takers?
Respectfully,
Dean A. Snyder
Senior Information Technology Specialist, Humanities
Research and Instructional Technologies, 167 Krieger Hall
School of Arts and Sciences, 426A Gilman Hall
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA 21218
410-516-6021 office
410-961-8943 mobile
410-516-5508 fax
dean.snyder@jhu.edu email
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