[Egyptian] Auto-discard notification

[egyptian-bounces at evertype.com]

From: Serge Rosmorduc <rosmord at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Egyptian] Some general considerations
Date: 1 August 2016 at 13:14:23 GMT-4
To: Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS <egyptian at evertype.com>



Le 23 juil. 2016 à 19:12, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com <mailto:odusseus at gmail.com>> a écrit :

> Hello everyone
> 
> 
>> Third
>> 
> And your solution is a good one — I have absolutely no doubt — as long as you do not want to *search* for the relative position of signs with respect to one another. This is however a piece of information that is, like it or not, part of the ‘orthographic’ system of ancient Egyptian and to which we want to have access (see further Simon’s mail earlier this week).
> 
> In general, the spatial distribution of signs (i.e. the "grouping") has *no meaning at all* in Egyptian. No semantic, phonological, or morphological information is coded in the relative position of the signs. 
> This is demonstrated by the texts themselves: if the relative position of the signs were linguistically important, you would have some form of regularity, with some combinations being possible and others being forbidden. This is not the case.
> 

There are a few issues here:

a) right or wrong, the egyptological community *wants* a « close enough » representation of the original text. An automated layout is simply going to alienate them. 
I’m not speaking of corpus linguists here, but of almost all the people I have interacted with concerning JSesh, and they are probably a good sample. Usually, I have a hard time explaining them they are not doing a facsimile. 

b) there *is* information in sign positioning. In particular, quadrants limits are more likely to indicate word separation. In some cases, sign positioning can hint at possible alternative readings 
(I have a specific example in P. Turing 1880, where Gardiner’s reading D37:A1 could be replaced by D37:t with a better meaning. A « flat » rendering, like « D37-A1 » would have made the alternative rendering 
much more difficult to make.

c) and of course, in monumental texts, sign positioning can be really significant - our colleagues working on Ptolemaic temples will probably be quite vehement about it. For instance, in the spelling pt:HH:tA for Ptḥ.

Your approach is fine for some uses (and probably allows much faster typing, save when you have 50 orthographies for one word like we do),
 but you start from the standpoint that it’s reasonable to remove philological information from the document, and encode the pure linguistic string. 
it won’t work for most scholars, because most of our texts are damaged, have unsecure readings, etc. It’s not only about scholarly traditions.

> 
> Perhaps this question has been already asked, but honestly so far I haven't heard or read any convincing answer, and I haven't seen any common example (i can exclude there could be some uncommon case, i obviously have not seen all the egyptian texts existing in the world) where the position of a sign in respect with the other signs around it carries and linguistic information.
> 

nw:mw for m-ẖnw for instance, on the one hand, and pt:HH:tA on the other hand.


Best regards,

Serge


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