From everson at evertype.com Fri Nov 30 21:48:54 2007 From: everson at evertype.com (Michael Everson) Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:48:54 +0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Unicode 5.1, Egyptian Transliteration, and Fonts In-Reply-To: <001e01c8337e$8cd27dc0$0200a8c0@imhotemp> References: <001e01c8337e$8cd27dc0$0200a8c0@imhotemp> Message-ID: At 18:26 +0000 2007-11-30, Saqqara wrote: >A reminder. Unicode 5.1 is bringing Egyptian Transliteration >characters LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF, LATIN SMALL >LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AIN >and LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL AIN. The EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD is >still an unresolved point but nevertheless the new characters allow >for a useable system. The mark on the Egyptological Yod is ultimately a Greek spiritus lenis. Here is my recommendation: 1. Spiritus lenis in Greek is U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE. In Greek, what this character does is sit atop a lowercase letter, and is preposed before uppercase letters. See U+1F00 and U+1F08. 2. U+0313 cannot be used for the Egyptological Yod because its case behaviour in Greek does not apply to Latin or Cyrillic. In Latin and Cyrillic, U+0313 sits atop both uppercase and lowercase letters. This happens in natural orthographies for minority languages. 3. Spiritus lenis in Cyrillic is U+0486 COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA. In Cyrillic, this sits atop both uppercase and lowercase letters. But in Latin, it could sit atop a lowercase letter, and be preposed before uppercase letters. It could be used with I for Egyptian and A and U for Ugaritic transcription. 4. If the Cyrillic diacritic can't be used, we will need to encode a Latin Spiritus Lenis. Or explicit LATIN LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD, LATIN LETTER SEMITIC ALEF, and LATIN LETTER SEMITIC WAW. 5. If this is accepted, I would add an annotation to U+0486. * used with Latin a, i, u in Semitic studies and Egyptology I hope this is acceptable to everyone. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com