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
Gardiner, Loprieno, and others call it ayin. I never said anything about ancient Egyptians. They didn't use the Latin script. These are Egyptological characters used by Egyptologists. I formalized the name to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN and LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN
And they gave it basically the same shape. It may have gone its own way since, but I'm not entirely convinced.
It isn't basically the same shape. Ayin is usually written with a 6-shaped apostrophe. If this were based on one of the apostrophes, it would be a reversed 9-shaped apostrophe.
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?
I never said anything against raised Hebrew letters. I just helped to encoded a rake of superscript Latin letters for Uralicists.
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.
The policy is not to add a new character for which its base and its combining mark are already there; that is, not to add a letter which already exists because it can be made from things which are existing. I propose a letter i with a special diacritic, but I do not propose to encode the special diacritic separately, since it is not productive. So I do not propose any decomposition for the character. And I do not believe that the EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD can be encoded with combining characters already in the standard.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
