From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Aug 21 2003 - 12:33:27 EDT
On 21/08/2003 07:38, Paul James Cowie wrote:
> Thanks, Michael and Peter....
>
> For your feedback regarding Egyptian transliteration characters - I
> did get the feeling after trawling the code charts that they just
> weren't all there..... now you've confirmed the fact (well, at least
> we do have the dotted k.... though I conventionally use "q" for that
> myself anyway!)
>
> To answer your question, Peter, I am using U+02BE for aleph when
> encoding Semitic transliterations, likewise U+02BF for ayin (which is
> also used in Egyptian transliteration). It would be great, though, to
> have access to purpose-encoded characters for the conventional
> Egyptian aleph (3) and yod (i with a half-ring) that don't rely on
> combinations or workarounds. These characters are certainly the
> accepted convention in most if not all Egyptological publications - a
> burgeoning field!
>
> So let's get that proposal for these two characters happening!!
> Exactly how does one go about that? How long will it take for their
> acceptance do you think? I'd love to be able to drop use of a
> transliteration font in order to encode my transliterations
> correctly.... I'm sure other Egyptologists would also appreciate it!
>
>
Well, perhaps Michael can tell us what happened to the following
(extract from http://www.dfki.de/~nederhof/AEL/transliteration.html):
> There is a proposal N2241
> <http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2241-egypt.pdf> (from
> 2000-08-27 by Michael Everson) to add the Egyptological aleph and ayin
> to Unicode (both the small and capital letters), and this is currently
> under discussion (p.c. with Michael Everson, May 17th 2001).
The hyperlink to
http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2241-egypt.pdf is dead, but
the same proposal, presumably, is now at
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2241-egypt.pdf. Such a
proposal is the way to go. But I wonder if the "egyptologial ayin"
proposed there is really different enough from U+02BD given that the
sample glyphs are all from italic fonts.
As for the requirement for distinct upper and lower case variants of
ayin, I understood that there was a similar requirement in some minor
Cyrillic languages, at least for apostrophe and double apostrophe.
Earlier this year Peter Constable was gathering information for a
possible proposal. But I never heard if it was proceeded with.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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