Thanks, Michael and Peter....Well, perhaps Michael can tell us what happened to the following (extract from http://www.dfki.de/~nederhof/AEL/transliteration.html):
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!
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
