On 5/9/2014 6:49 PM, catherine butler wrote:
"> Since the top scholars still haven't resolved the exact shapes, but all
agree on the identities being indicated (man, woman, etc), could the Unicode leave the
exact shapes up to future debate, but set aside some two-dozen slots using Joyce's own
verbal designations? (HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy, etc)
That's usually not how it's done."
The Phaistos Disc's Unicode block names the characters after best-guesses of what they
depict. If it's ever solved, we might realize some guesses were wrong, and re-draw them,
but the Unicode numbering can stay the same. This could work similarly. The old
Finnegans Wake Circular used ascii designations: $E, $A, $I.1, etc. that everyone agrees
on. But trying to resolve subtle questions like "Is the middle horizontal of the 'E'
shorter?" by collating all handwritten exemplars will be a labor of decades...
And not likely relevant to the encoding decision.
A./
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