From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Nov 30 2007 - 15:48:54 CST
At 18:26 +0000 2007-11-30, Saqqara wrote:
>A reminder. Unicode 5.1 is bringing Egyptian Transliteration
>characters LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF, LATIN SMALL
>LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AIN
>and LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AIN. The EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD is
>still an unresolved point but nevertheless the new characters allow
>for a useable system.
The mark on the Egyptological Yod is ultimately a Greek spiritus lenis.
Here is my recommendation:
1. Spiritus lenis in Greek is U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE. In Greek,
what this character does is sit atop a lowercase letter, and is
preposed before uppercase letters. See U+1F00 and U+1F08.
2. U+0313 cannot be used for the Egyptological Yod because its case
behaviour in Greek does not apply to Latin or Cyrillic. In Latin and
Cyrillic, U+0313 sits atop both uppercase and lowercase letters. This
happens in natural orthographies for minority languages.
3. Spiritus lenis in Cyrillic is U+0486 COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI
PNEUMATA. In Cyrillic, this sits atop both uppercase and lowercase
letters. But in Latin, it could sit atop a lowercase letter, and be
preposed before uppercase letters. It could be used with I for
Egyptian and A and U for Ugaritic transcription.
4. If the Cyrillic diacritic can't be used, we will need to encode a
Latin Spiritus Lenis. Or explicit LATIN LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD,
LATIN LETTER SEMITIC ALEF, and LATIN LETTER SEMITIC WAW.
5. If this is accepted, I would add an annotation to U+0486.
* used with Latin a, i, u in Semitic studies and Egyptology
I hope this is acceptable to everyone.
-- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
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