At 02:10 -0700 2003-08-26, Peter Kirk wrote:
EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN? I don't think it is either U+02BD or U+02BF. The former is a reversed comma, the latter a half-ring. And neither has a capital, as the Egyptological character has.
Michael, it is very clear to me that the Egyptological ayin is modelled in its glyph as well as its name on the ayin used in transliteration of Hebrew, Arabic etc.
Well, *I* gave it its name. And as to the glyph, having an original model in something does not mean that an entity has not budded off into its own letterness. ;-)
My point is that you didn't call it ayin. Neither did the ancient Egyptians as this is a Semitic word, meaning "eye". Modern scholars gave it that name because its sound is the same as the Semitic ayin. And they gave it basically the same shape. It may have gone its own way since, but I'm nopt entirely convinced.
...
As for the casing distinction, I wonder if this is in fact unique to Gardiner. If so, perhaps a PUA character is appropriate.
For Egyptian? Certainly not. Gardiner is essential in Egyptology, and I would consider plain-text representation of his texts to be essential. Whether it is unique to him or not, his work is seminal.
OK. But I'll use the same argument for Hebrew. BHS is essential in study of biblical Hebrew, and so plain-text representation of BHS is essential. Even including the raised letters, perhaps?
...
Or else we can note that the Egyptolological mark is identical in shape to either U+0357 or U+0313 and so use the existing mark.
It is not identical to either. I do not want to add a combining Egyptological ring-thingy to Unicode. It is not a productive mark. A capital and small letter i with a deformed dot is what's needed, that's all.
I thought it was policy never to add new precomposed characters, however unproductive the combining marks are. Well, that was certainly the argument for encoding in Hebrew right holam rather than precomposed holam male. Though we more or less agreed not to do either.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
