Philipp Reichmuth wrote at 9:44 PM on Thursday, October 21, 2004: >I'm not saying that half ring is the *only* way Ayin is transcribed. >... >However, I would say that left half ring is preferred, at least in works >dealing with more than just Hebrew (supposing the character was >available at all to the respective author)
I would not say that there is a "preferred" practice for transliterated ayin (implying some sort of international consensus); instead I would just say there are many competing practices - left half ring, left- single-quotation-mark, inverted-left-single-quotation-mark, slanted-left- single-quotation-mark, slanted-inverted-enlarged-left-single-quotation- mark (as in Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar), super-scripted-c, IPA pharyngeal voiced fricative, plus various other idiosyncratic permutations on the basic idea. >> 02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING > >Which is what I use (dating back from Unicode 3.0, where it was >specifically annotated). (I know authors who use superscript c as well.) I personally agree with your choice - if I had to pick one Unicode character to designate as transliterated ayin I would choose left half ring. And in that case, I would recommend encoding: * MODIFIER CAPITAL LETTER LEFT HALF RING And, while we're at it, do the analogous thing for transliterated aleph and encode: * MODIFIER CAPITAL LETTER RIGHT HALF RING (Although I realize that this is not the desired Egyptian transliterated aleph and would therefore have limited usage in Semitic contexts.) Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
