From everson at evertype.com Mon Feb 4 17:30:13 2008 From: everson at evertype.com (Michael Everson) Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 17:30:13 +0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod Message-ID: Dear colleagues, The request for the UTC to make property changes to the Cyrillic characters to facilitate Egyptological yod which is at http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3382.pdf has had some feedback from Debbie Anderson and Donald Mastronarde. It seems that Debbie believes that there is not consensus amongst Egyptologists as to which character should be used. Debbie and Donald's document is at http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/08087-yod.pdf They haven't rejected the proposal, but evidently the matter needs further discussion? Does anyone have Donald's e-mail address? Debbie, if you can give me the addresses of your contacts, we can all discuss this here on this list. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com From rosmord at iut.univ-paris8.fr Mon Feb 4 18:13:39 2008 From: rosmord at iut.univ-paris8.fr (Serge Rosmorduc) Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:13:39 +0100 Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <47A755D3.4010709@iut.univ-paris8.fr> Michael Everson a ?crit : > Dear colleagues, > > The request for the UTC to make property changes to the Cyrillic > characters to facilitate Egyptological yod which is at > http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3382.pdf has had some feedback > from Debbie Anderson and Donald Mastronarde. It seems that Debbie > believes that there is not consensus amongst Egyptologists as to > which character should be used. Debbie and Donald's document is at > http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/08087-yod.pdf > > They haven't rejected the proposal, but evidently the matter needs > further discussion? > > Does anyone have Donald's e-mail address? Debbie, if you can give me > the addresses of your contacts, we can all discuss this here on this > list. > If I understand well, as nobody chosed the cyrilic character (which was not one of the two solutions proposed), it should be rejected ? I fail to see the actual point, except if the idea is that we need a specific diacritic sign to be created for building Egyptological yod (which would solve the problems of people having different preferences for the diacritic shape), which would be the right thing to do (the actual really right thing to do would be to provide us with two egyptological yod character, but it seems against the rules, too bad - would some kind of petition be able to change the commitee's mind ?). The solutions which where actually presented back then do not work properly with uppercase letters, and I'm not sure the scholars who answered knew this (I for one did look at this particular problem back then; I only wondered which glyph gave a rendering closer to Gardiner's). The fonts currently used for egyptological translitteration are mostly non-unicode. Of course, historically, the egyptological yod in publication has had many shapes in publications, being in many cases home-made fonts, for instance with mirrored "c" characters used as diacritic over the i. Best regards, S. Rosmorduc From everson at evertype.com Mon Feb 4 18:21:11 2008 From: everson at evertype.com (Michael Everson) Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 18:21:11 +0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod In-Reply-To: <47A755D3.4010709@iut.univ-paris8.fr> References: <47A755D3.4010709@iut.univ-paris8.fr> Message-ID: At 19:13 +0100 2008-02-04, Serge Rosmorduc wrote: >If I understand well, as nobody chosed the cyrilic character (which was >not one of the two solutions proposed), it should be rejected ? No, I think it means that this option was not sent out to the EEF list in March 2006. >I fail to see the actual point, except if the idea is that we need a specific >diacritic sign to be created for building Egyptological yod (which would >solve the problems of people having different preferences for the >diacritic shape), which would be the right thing to do (the actual >really right thing to do would be to provide us with two egyptological >yod character, but it seems against the rules, too bad - would some kind >of petition be able to change the commitee's mind ?). All Debbie is saying is that she knows some Egyptologists who did not endorse the Cyrillic character solution. That does not mean that they won't endorse it. It means that we should talk to them. >The solutions which where actually presented back then do not work >properly with uppercase letters, and I'm not sure the scholars who >answered knew this >(I for one did look at this particular problem back then; I only >wondered which glyph gave a rendering closer to Gardiner's). The fonts >currently used for egyptological translitteration are mostly non-unicode. The proposal Bob and I wrote will, if accepted, give the correct advice to people who use the Unicode Standard to support these characters. >Of course, historically, the egyptological yod in publication has had >many shapes in publications, being in many cases home-made fonts, for >instance with mirrored "c" characters used as diacritic over the i. I hope we will soon have a permanent solution. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com From rosmord at iut.univ-paris8.fr Mon Feb 4 18:52:15 2008 From: rosmord at iut.univ-paris8.fr (Serge Rosmorduc) Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:52:15 +0100 Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod In-Reply-To: References: <47A755D3.4010709@iut.univ-paris8.fr> Message-ID: <47A75EDF.8010503@iut.univ-paris8.fr> Michael Everson a ?crit : > > > All Debbie is saying is that she knows some Egyptologists who did not > endorse the Cyrillic character solution. That does not mean that they > won't endorse it. It means that we should talk to them. > > It's clearer now, I agree with you. I may try to get a few more support for the proposal, if it helps. Best regards, Serge From saqqara at saqqara.org Tue Feb 5 11:37:04 2008 From: saqqara at saqqara.org (Saqqara) Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 11:37:04 -0000 Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000901c867eb$6f139930$0300a8c0@imhotemp> Observations. 1. I am not aware of any particular concerns among Egyptologists about what combining code is used. Much more important is to choose one as standard so data can be encoded in Unicode. 2. Users will rarely need to know the actual code. Normally software will be used, or data copied. 3. The diacritic as used for over a century has never resembled a semi-circle (as in COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE) and a comma shape is rarely used (COMBINING COMMA ABOVE) so use of these codes is not especially helpful in Character Map type applications. 4. The combining behaviour needed for EGYPTOLOGICAL CAPITAL LETTER YOD requires the diacritic be placed to the Top Left of the I, not above it. Now both COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE and COMBINING COMMA ABOVE already have script="inherited" so if we were to specify either of these to require top left behaviour with CAPITAL LETTER I we would need to ensure this does not break any existing use of Unicode. With COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA there is no current defined behaviour for Latin text so we can make the specification without risk of affecting extant Unicode-compatible data. 5. Nevertheless choosing COMBINING COMMA ABOVE would avoid the need to change script properties. This has some benefits in terms of practical operation with some existing software. However the non-comma shape and its top left placing behaviour would still need to be defined. If Debbie and Donald want to take this route, they will need to prove this does not break any other applications of COMBINING COMMA ABOVE. Note this is a broad technical issue, not a matter for Egyptologists. 6. The downside of COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA is the fact that it will not currently combine with Latin text in some (but not all) common applications such as web browsers (which apparently interpret the script="Cyrillic" as meaning inhibit combination, irrespective of font directives). I favour COMBINING CYRILLIC PSILI PNEUMATA primarily because it does not raise the issues with COMBINING COMMA ABOVE and therefore can be actioned safely with minimum delay. Bob -----Original Message----- From: egyptian-bounces at evertype.com [mailto:egyptian-bounces at evertype.com] On Behalf Of Michael Everson Sent: 04 February 2008 17:30 To: Egyptian Discussion Subject: [Egyptian] Egyptological yod Dear colleagues, The request for the UTC to make property changes to the Cyrillic characters to facilitate Egyptological yod which is at http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3382.pdf has had some feedback from Debbie Anderson and Donald Mastronarde. It seems that Debbie believes that there is not consensus amongst Egyptologists as to which character should be used. Debbie and Donald's document is at http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/08087-yod.pdf They haven't rejected the proposal, but evidently the matter needs further discussion? Does anyone have Donald's e-mail address? Debbie, if you can give me the addresses of your contacts, we can all discuss this here on this list. -- Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com _______________________________________________ Egyptian mailing list Egyptian at evertype.com http://evertype.com/mailman/listinfo/egyptian_evertype.com