[Egyptian] comments

[M.J. Nederhof]

Hi all,

I've gone through the proposal, and I'm glad that this
is about to become reality. My appreciation for the creators.

I have some comments, a few of which are somewhat off-topic,
but perhaps still worth discussing.

My first comment is about the "character names" and "complex descriptions" (p. 
2).
I think in the proposal no more needs to be said about this, but I cannot help
making the link to some work I started a few months ago, which has as ultimate
goal to create an annotated sign list with meanings and typical use, etc., as
ultimately characters are more than their typical appearance. As part of this,
I first tried to come up with a consistent way of naming glyphs.  I found many
difficulties, and Gardiner himself is far from consistent. Some questions I 
only
partly found an answer to:

1) Should the names be as short as possible to distinguish signs from other
signs, or should they be full descriptions. E.g. should we have "noble
squatting" or "noble squatting with flagellum"? Note there is no sign "noble
squatting without flagellum", at least not in GEG.

2) Should animals be described by scientific names, or by names
that can be easily remembered, so "flamingo" or "Phoenico-pterus ..."?

3) What to do about e.g. V33 and V34, both "bag of linen"?

I would gladly send anyone the list of names I have now, and discuss this
further. (For the 'complex descriptions', I've only covered GEG by now, and
for meaning and use I've only covered the A category.)

Back to the proposal, I am not yet convinced that NL and NU should be
placed between N and O. What did Gardiner do in his publications?

P. 3, line 3, the 'E' in 'E034' looks wrong. Perhaps choose different font?

P. 3, "Second, the use of zeros [...] Hieroglyphica".  I seem to remember that
the Hieroglyphica has 3-digit numbers for some categories with over 99 signs,
and there are no leading zeros in that case, and thereby I find your second
argument unconvincing.  I assume that the present proposal is set up to also
ultimately allow more than 99 signs per category (barring letter suffixes), so 
that
the names will overlap with Hieroglyphica. (Is not serious, but invalidates
the second argument.) Furthermore, I assume future MdC dialects will also
refrain from using leading zeros for compatibility reasons (same holds for me
in the case of RES). Thereby I think the second argument is even less
relevant.

By the way, one could also question the first argument, that of sorting,
because Aa should be at the end, and so primitive sorting doesn't work anyway.
You may argue that Aa may be replaced in ZA in the implementation, as you do
in the database, but then by the same token, A1 could be replaced by A001 _in
the implementation_.

Let me say clearly I do not oppose leading zeros, and perhaps they simplify
human look-up in tables, but I think the arguments given in the text are not
very convincing.

Middle of p. 3 a few typos: "have been may have been identified as 
bellonging".

Typo (I think) in 7.2 "in _the_ Gardiner". Typo in 7.3 "fortifed".

While you are in the process of adding such things as parts of cartouche-like
signs, how about adding a "verse point"? I suspect that is very useful,
and in fact essential for some texts. I guess Gardiner must have used them
in some publication (?)

I have a question (for my own benefit). The text mentions a square fortified
wall and a round fortified wall. I included the square wall in RES about five
years ago under the name 'inb', but I was not aware of the existence of the
round wall until now. Can anyone tell me whether one or the other is more
common? I may have to change the naming of my types of 'box'.

For 7.5, I have my doubts about distinguishing 'unity' and 'one', and
'duality' and 'two', etc. Is this a modern invention or is this
actually visible in hieroglyphic?

I'm unconvinced by your plans concerning ordering (Section 9),
but so be it. I have a question about Figure 3, middle column,
last row: why "1" in "gf1"?

P. 17, "Marc-Jan" s.b. "Mark-Jan", "Rosmarduc" s.b. "Rosmorduc".

Is it intentional that V011 is significantly smaller than V011B ?

On p. 31 of the database print-out, the letters W and X have
been omitted.

Regards,
 Mark-Jan