On Thursday, July 4, 2002, at 09:07 AM, Otto Stolz wrote:
> Michael Everson wrote:
>> That, and the fact that it hasn't been deciphered.
>
>
> Which implies that you really cannot tell what constitutes a character,
> in that script, nor its writing-direction.
>
>
Actually, you can't even tell *that* it's a script, not for sure. But if
it *is* writing, then the nature of the characters seems fairly
unambiguous as the various signs are self-contained and don't break down
into smaller pieces. It would appear to be a syllabary. Also IIRC the
writing direction has been deduced by determining the order in which the
characters were stamped into the clay (as indicated by overlaps).
I should mention that the proposals for the encoding of the Phaistos disc
are the only proposals made to the UTC and WG2 which contain the entire
known corpus of writing with that script as a part of the proposal. :-)
==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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