On Thursday, July 4, 2002, at 09:07 AM, Otto Stolz wrote:
> Michael Everson wrote: >> That, and the fact that it hasn't been deciphered. > > > Which implies that you really cannot tell what constitutes a character, > in that script, nor its writing-direction. > > Actually, you can't even tell *that* it's a script, not for sure. But if it *is* writing, then the nature of the characters seems fairly unambiguous as the various signs are self-contained and don't break down into smaller pieces. It would appear to be a syllabary. Also IIRC the writing direction has been deduced by determining the order in which the characters were stamped into the clay (as indicated by overlaps). I should mention that the proposals for the encoding of the Phaistos disc are the only proposals made to the UTC and WG2 which contain the entire known corpus of writing with that script as a part of the proposal. :-) ========== John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
