L2/02-288 From: Michael Everson Date: 2002-08-13 14:18:59 -0700 Subject: Status report on proposal encode Egyptian Hieroglyphs I prepared preliminary proposals (for discussion) at http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1636/n1636.htm (N1636: Encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs in ISO/IEC 10646-2) published 1997-08-25 and http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1637/n1637.htm (N1637: Proposal to encode Basic Egyptian Hieroglyphics in Plane 1), published 1997-09-18. I continued to prepare the proposal at http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1944.pdf (N1944: Encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs in Plane 1 of the UCS) published 1990-01-09, by making a comparison between the glyphs in the CCER's fonts with the printed manual, finding a half-dozen (not very many!) or so duplicate characters or misprints. Some members of the scholarly community reacted quickly to say that such a large set would be inappropriate for encoding due do current ongoing research on the very much larger set which was likely to result from that research. In particular Wolfgang Schenkel wrote against the proposal at http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2096.pdf (Comments on the question of encoding Egyptian hieroglyphs in the UCS). I responded to this with http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2132.htm (Response to comments on the question of encoding Egyptian hieroglyphs in the UCS (N2096)) on 1999-10-04. Subsequent discussion with a number of Egyptologists took place on the egyptian@unicode.org list. Ken Whistler had met with Drs MŸller and Schenkel in TŸbingen to discuss the encoding of Egyptian (the minutes were written up by Carl-Martin Bunz, see http://www.saphor.net/news/report.html). An agreement coming out of that meeting was to encode the basic Gardiner Sign List at present (some 800 signs) and to leave the thousands of other signs for further study. On 2001-06-07 I wrote to Drs Allen, M‡lek, MŸller, Schenkel, and Nigel Strudwick asking them about this proposal. Discussion ensued, with Wolfgang Schenkel, J. M‡lek, and Jim Allen stating that they would prefer to encode the 1957 list from the Grammar along with the 1928 and 1953 Supplements. Nigel Strudwick was somewhat doubtful as to whether very many people would want them, though in 1996 he had written to me on this subject "Ideally the encoding of the thing should be in the Gardiner sign list. Plus whatever other characters in supplementary lists there are." It appeared that we had consensus to encode the Gardiner list plus the Supplements. Having said that, there is still plenty of work to be done to prepare the set so that it is mature for encoding. The source documents must be compared; there are subset and superset relations among them as well as unique characters in each. Some of the characters in the supplements do not have font representations as yet. And when the proposal is drawn up it has to be checked by the experts who have written to give their support in principle. Given the size of this set and the resources available at present I can't say that anything will be ready by November (priority being given to three living scripts: N'Ko, Saurashtra, and Ol Chiki). Nevertheless we have made progress since 1996. There is also the outstanding question of whether all of the transliteration letters used by Egyptologists have been adequately encoded. See http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2241.pdf (N2241: Proposal to add 6 Egyptological characters to the UCS).