[Egyptian] Towards a deterministic sort for Egyptian Unicode characters

[Michael Everson]

At 10:12 +0100 2007-08-17, Angela McDonald wrote:

>Response to Egyptian sorting doc
>General comment: have you looked at the 
>Lautwerte section (pp. 1455-63) at the end of 
>the new edition of Hannig's Grosses 
>Handworterbuch Agyptisch-Deutch which lists 
>signs by their phonetic values? Might be a 
>useful check and guide.

No, and I don't have this. I have his Ägyptisches 
Wörterbuch 1. Could you scan the Lautwerte 
section and make it available as a PDF? At 
present I am using Gardiner and Allen.

>1. Have errors been made?
>Below are a few errors I spotted:
>p. 2 The walking reed leaf sign (Gardiner M18) should read iy not i.
>p. 2 The tree sign (M1) can be transliterated as iAm in addition to imA.
>p. 3 The pustule sign (Aa2) can also be used to write Hsb.
>p. 3 The hoof-sign (F25) should be 
>transliterated wHm (second h) not wxm (third h).
>p. 3 The fattened duck (G42) should read wSA not wSr.

All corrected.

>p. 3 I'd be tempted to treat the two flying duck 
>signs as separate (so < not <<) since they only 
>alternate in error. They are not variants of the 
>same sign. G41 only reads pA when written in 
>error for G40.

Corrected.

>p. 3 The crested bird's head (H2) can also read 
>mAa. Again I would treat the spoonbill head (H3) 
>as a separate sign (<) rather than an alternate 
>version (<<).

Here's an example, then, of where H003 has one 
reading (pAq) but H002 has three (in alphabetical 
order wSm, pAq, mAa). If we were choosing the 
default reading for H002 alphabetically, it would 
be wSm. Is that what we want? It may be the case 
that we should judge these on a case-by-case 
basis.

>p. 4 The leg sign (D56) can also read rd. Hannig 
>lists a number of alternatives, but pd and rd 
>are the two more common.
>p. 4 The vulture sign (G14) can also read nr.
>p. 5 The ship part (Aa5) should read Hp not Hip.

Allen gave H(i)p. But OK.

>p. 5 The flowers (M2) can also read is as well as Hn.

OK, but here if we were choosing alphabetically, 
is precedes Hn. Yet Allen and Gardiner give Hn 
first.

Must dash to the post office. Will respond to the 
rest when I get back in a bit.

-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com