<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">From: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Serge Rosmorduc <<a href="mailto:rosmord@gmail.com" class="">rosmord@gmail.com</a>><br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class=""><b class="">Re: [Egyptian] Some general considerations</b><br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">Date: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">1 August 2016 at 13:14:23 GMT-4<br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(127, 127, 127, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">To: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS <<a href="mailto:egyptian@evertype.com" class="">egyptian@evertype.com</a>><br class=""></span></div><br class=""><br class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div class=""><div class="">Le 23 juil. 2016 à 19:12, Marwan Kilani <<a href="mailto:odusseus@gmail.com" class="">odusseus@gmail.com</a>> a écrit :</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">Hello everyone<br class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><br class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word" class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><b class=""><span lang="EN-GB" class="">Third</span></b></p></div></blockquote><div class="">And your solution is a good one — I have absolutely no doubt — as long as you do not want to *search* for the relative position of signs with respect to one another. This is however a piece of information that is, like it or not, part of the ‘orthographic’ system of ancient Egyptian and to which we want to have access (see further Simon’s mail earlier this week).</div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">In general, the spatial distribution of signs (i.e. the "grouping") has *no meaning at all* in Egyptian. No semantic, phonological, or morphological information is coded in the relative position of the signs. </div><div class="">This is demonstrated by the texts themselves: if the relative position of the signs were linguistically important, you would have some form of regularity, with some combinations being possible and others being forbidden. This is not the case.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">There are a few issues here:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">a) right or wrong, the egyptological community *wants* a « close enough » representation of the original text. An automated layout is simply going to alienate them. </div><div class="">I’m not speaking of corpus linguists here, but of almost all the people I have interacted with concerning JSesh, and they are probably a good sample. Usually, I have a hard time explaining them they are not doing a facsimile. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">b) there *is* information in sign positioning. In particular, quadrants limits are more likely to indicate word separation. In some cases, sign positioning can hint at possible alternative readings </div><div class="">(I have a specific example in P. Turing 1880, where Gardiner’s reading D37:A1 could be replaced by D37:t with a better meaning. A « flat » rendering, like « D37-A1 » would have made the alternative rendering </div><div class="">much more difficult to make.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">c) and of course, in monumental texts, sign positioning can be really significant - our colleagues working on Ptolemaic temples will probably be quite vehement about it. For instance, in the spelling pt:HH:tA for Ptḥ.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Your approach is fine for some uses (and probably allows much faster typing, save when you have 50 orthographies for one word like we do),</div><div class=""> but you start from the standpoint that it’s reasonable to remove philological information from the document, and encode the pure linguistic string. </div><div class="">it won’t work for most scholars, because most of our texts are damaged, have unsecure readings, etc. It’s not only about scholarly traditions.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Perhaps this question has been already asked, but honestly so far I haven't heard or read any convincing answer, and I haven't seen any common example (i can exclude there could be some uncommon case, i obviously have not seen all the egyptian texts existing in the world) where the position of a sign in respect with the other signs around it carries and linguistic information.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">nw:mw for m-ẖnw for instance, on the one hand, and pt:HH:tA on the other hand.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><br class=""><div class="">Best regards,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Serge</div></div><br class=""><br class=""></body></html>