L2/04-068

From: Mansour, Kamal
Date: 2004-02-02 01:49:21 -0800
Subject: Coptic Comments

Hi Debbie,

Following are my comments on Prof. Emmel's document. Please feel free to  
use during the UTC meeting. Thanks for contacting me.

Kamal

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Since Prof. Emmel and his colleagues rank among the top coptologists of  
the world, I take their contribution very seriously. I will restrict my  
remarks to the points on which I am sufficiently qualified to comment. In  
general, I agree with most of the proposed additions & deletions of  
characters; in the case of combining characters, however, we need to  
clarify some potential ambiguities and deficiencies.

I.4. The Sahidic style described by Emmel derives from Greek uncial, which  
is essentially caseless. The past 200 years of typography has imposed a  
dual-case (i.e. upper & lower) paradigm on the Latin alphabet, and by on  
extension on Cyrillic, Greek, as well as Coptic. As a result, adding a few  
caseless alphabetic characters to the dual-case Coptic repertoire might  
prove problematic. Since most Coptic dialectes --especially Bohairic and  
Sahidic-- share the majority of the same alphabetic characters, even a  
Sahidic-style font must be able to cope with case variations even if it  
displays the same glyph for both cases of a case pair. If it is decided to  
encode the newly proposed "caseless" characters, it might be wise to  
reserve additional code points for the potential upper case characters in  
the future.

II.1a. There is good reason to unify Nubian with Coptic since Nubian was  
dependent on Coptic tradition and did not evolve its own use of Coptic  
script into a distinct system.

II. 1b. The appearance of the so-called circumflex cited in the examples  
is quite distinct from the Latin circumflex while it resembles one of the  
possible shapes of the Greek perispomeni. It would be advisable to encode a  
distinct combining circumflex for Coptic, not to mention an additional  
circumflex that spans two characters.

II. 2a. I agree with the removal of U+2C9A (Capital Ro stroke) because it  
is strictly symbolic, not alphabetic. However, I am not so convinced we  
should delete U+2C99 (Capital Akhmimic Khei) because that would break the  
dual-case paradigm. Also, Akhmimic Khei is not part of the Old Coptic  
repertoire which definitely predates any use of upper case.

II. 2b. Other reference book confirm the error in the name for U+2CBD; it  
should indeed be "Stavros". The initial and final "c" in the symbols stand  
for the /s/ at the start and end of "stavros".

II. 2f. All the listed additions seems reasonable. We should investigate  
whether "O UA" should be encoded in both upper and lower cases. Certainly,  
if it appears as alphabetic in Bohairic, it needs to be in two cases.

II. 2g. (ii). We can reassure the contributors that variations in the  
width of the supralinear stroke can be handled nowadays through intelligent  
font technology such as OpenType.

II. 2g. (iii). Variations in alignment of dot-above ("jinkim") should be  
accomplished through three distinct characters since in (iv) Emmel states  
that Coptologists suspect that these are more than glyphic variants.

Regarding the supralinear combining stroke, I fear there might be some  
confusion here. I believe there are two types of supralinear stroke which  
can be typographically distinct: one is a syllabic marker (as over a  
syllabic, nasal consonant), while the other is an abbreviation mark as in  
one of the proposed symbols, Coptic Symbol COIS.  We need to clarify which  
of these two uses is visible in the example resembling "MNT".

II. 2h. I do not think it is necessary to encode the trema (dieresis)  
combinations with Iauda and Ua since these can be dynamically composed.

Are the "combining grave accent above right" and "combining comma above  
right" merely graphic variants of the same character, or do they need to be  
distinguished in plain text?