From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Aug 29 2003 - 18:55:20 EDT
At 14:33 -0700 2003-08-29, Peter Kirk wrote:
>>Well, *I* gave it its name. And as to the glyph, having an original
>>model in something does not mean that an entity has not budded off
>>into its own letterness. ;-)
>
>My point is that you didn't call it ayin. Neither did the ancient
>Egyptians as this is a Semitic word, meaning "eye". Modern scholars
>gave it that name because its sound is the same as the Semitic ayin
Gardiner, Loprieno, and others call it ayin. I never said anything
about ancient Egyptians. They didn't use the Latin script. These are
Egyptological characters used by Egyptologists. I formalized the name
to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN and LATIN SMALL LETTER
EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN
>And they gave it basically the same shape. It may have gone its own
>way since, but I'm not entirely convinced.
It isn't basically the same shape. Ayin is usually written with a
6-shaped apostrophe. If this were based on one of the apostrophes, it
would be a reversed 9-shaped apostrophe.
>OK. But I'll use the same argument for Hebrew. BHS is essential in
>study of biblical Hebrew, and so plain-text representation of BHS is
>essential. Even including the raised letters, perhaps?
I never said anything against raised Hebrew letters. I just helped to
encoded a rake of superscript Latin letters for Uralicists.
>>It is not identical to either. I do not want to add a combining
>>Egyptological ring-thingy to Unicode. It is not a productive mark.
>>A capital and small letter i with a deformed dot is what's needed,
>>that's all.
>
>I thought it was policy never to add new precomposed characters,
>however unproductive the combining marks are. Well, that was
>certainly the argument for encoding in Hebrew right holam rather
>than precomposed holam male. Though we more or less agreed not to do
>either.
The policy is not to add a new character for which its base and its
combining mark are already there; that is, not to add a letter which
already exists because it can be made from things which are existing.
I propose a letter i with a special diacritic, but I do not propose
to encode the special diacritic separately, since it is not
productive. So I do not propose any decomposition for the character.
And I do not believe that the EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD can be encoded with
combining characters already in the standard.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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