At 17:40 +0200 2002-07-08, Marco Cimarosti wrote: >Michael Everson wrote: >> >1. Your lacks an important sign, which I would call "PHAISTOS >> >COMBINING LINE BELOW". [...] >> >> Um, can't something from General Punctuation be used, in the absence >> of knowing more about this "character"? > >It seems very imprudent, considering that nothing is known abut the nature >of that a sign.
How much more imprudent is it to encode it as a unique character when nothing is known about it? :-) >E.g. would you dare to unify it with U+0316 (COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT BELOW) >without knowing whether it is a stress mark, a tone mark, a cantillation >mark, a vowel muter, a full stop, a comma, a determinative for >logographs...? I ask again: > > Do you have an analysis of all the signs which take it in the document? > >Yes, in Louis Godart, "Il disco di Festo: l'enigma di una scrittura", >Einaudi (Italy) 1994, ISBN 8806128922. An English translation should now be >available. OK, I have the English translation of it. But you want the character. You do the work. Please look and tell me by cell number and character (A-I-22, A-IV-1, B-VI-45) where they are actually applied. Be comprehensive. Thanks. >BTW, the only thing I disliked in this excellent book was the fact that, >IMHO, Godart was to quick to accept the assumption that this sign could be >punctuation, and he even uses it to segment the text in "sentences" or >"veses". What page or section does he state that specifically? >Perhaps, it would be useful to have a (non PUA) Unicode symbol to mark >unidentified characters in any kind of paleographic or critic texts. This >could be the object of a proposal, or it could be unified with one of the >existing shaded rectangles. Markup. In my file I just wrote [.] as Godart did. But for Egypian and Cuneiform it's been suggested that markup is the appropriate means for showing this element of palaeography. > > I agree that those names aren't good. The dotted one occurs at the >> beginning of the text on both sides. PHAISTOS BEGINNING OF TEXT and >> PHAISTOS SEPARATOR then? > >Still assumptions, but much more reasonable. The one does begin the text on both sides, and the other does separate. > > I don't like VERTICAL LINE and DOTTED >> VERTICAL LINE very much. That kind of description we usually reserve >> for abstract technical symbols rather than punctuation. > >Punctuation? Did you discover it is punctuation? :-) Separators are punctuation. What else? Perhaps it is a 17th-century BCE spreadsheet. >OTOH, you know the Phaistos Disk "translators": for many of them, the >character names on your CSUR page make enough evidence that PHAISTOS SIGN OX >BACK was pronounced /bu/. (or even /kau as/ :-) There are silly people everywhere. > > I have followed Egyptological -- and ancient Egyptian -- practice >> here. If the script is represented right-to-left the faces point to >> the right so that you read into their faces. If the script direction >> is reversed so that it is left-to-right, it is conventional -- among >> Egyptologists and ancient Egyptians -- to reverse the signs as well. > >I see. But Hieroglyphs were handwritten, not "typed". And carved in stone and wood. Impressed in soft clay probably. Your point? >Moreover, the mirroring of glyphs is actually attested for Egyptian. Yeah because you have thousands of documents. Mirroring is also attested in Greek and Etruscan. I don't think I've erred in thinking that it would apply to Phaistos in left-to-right directionality. > > Godart does not reverse the glyphs even though he reverses the >> directionality, but I think it is *his* practice which is >> ahistorical, and I think it makes the text harder to read. And I >> suspect is has to do with the font technology he had in 1994 when he >> wrote his book. > >It's seems that July 2002 is our disagreement month... I think that Godart >was perfectly right avoiding assumptions that he could not support: there is >no reason to think that the Phaistos "script" should work as Egyptian >hieroglyphs work. No way! *ALL* of the scripts of that part of the world show mirroring of characters when the script direction is reversed. There's no reason to assume that Phaistos would be otherwise. >I don't think font technology had anything to do with this choice: from my >printed edition of "Il disco di Festo" I can see clearly that the text was >reproduced using little images, not a font (sometimes the borders of the >film and the adhesive tape are still visible). Right, so then he had a sheet of drawings photocopied dozens of times and pasted them down. He didn't think of directionality in the way we do I guess. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
