[Egyptian] Unicode 5.1, Egyptian Transliteration, and Fonts

[Michael Everson]

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