[Egyptian] Ligature joiners - evidence needed please

[Mark-Jan Nederhof]

The evidence for the insertions is of the same kind as the evidence for horizontal and
vertical grouping.

Look at an inscription. What do you see? Signs and groups are below and above other signs and
groups, or next to one another. Therefore primitives for horizontal and vertical grouping are natural.

But not everything is horizontal or vertical. Sometimes you see one sign in the corner
of another. This warrants the insertions as primitives. This was recognized already
by PLOTTEXT in the late 1980s. I reinvented the wheel around 2000-2002 with RES,
coming to almost the same conclusions. JSesh has insertions as well. I have also 
shown that OCR tools are able to automatically recognize insertions. 

So the empirical evidence is that any known way of encoding hieroglyphic text that explicitly
describes the graphical form has insertions.

Horizontal/vertical grouping plus 4 or 5 insertions plus JOIN do not cover everything, but
it will be sufficient for many applications, and it is the most we can hope for within the 
limitations of Unicode, what precision and coverage is concerned (ignoring cartouches 
and such for now).

Mark-Jan

On Wednesday 20 Jul 2016 10:58:26 Bob Richmond wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I’ve not yet seen any data, evidence or rationale about the suggested 5 positional ligature system discussed at Cambridge. I don’t have unlimited time to research all this myself and I’m not an Egyptologist. Technically such a system can be added to current controls but it needs to be well-defined, detailed and justified if it is to be submitted. [This is what I’m doing with the group-joiners].
> 
> One part I’m reasonably happy that I understand is ligatures involving the cobra-pattern (also seen with tongue). This ligature has a special role in orthography, especially in column vertical writing and ‘tall groups’. I’ve seen plenty of instances.
> 
> Conversely there is the bird pattern a+b, b+c or a+b+c where b is a bird. Pretty much all I’ve seen is a and c as individual hieroglyphs. What other bird patterns attested? Groups?
> 
> There are characters in Hieroglyphica e.g. HG-D0160 to HG-D0188 and many more HG arrangements that could be implemented using controls (as with monograms). If this is what some of these proposed controls are about I think next step repertoire might be a better context in which to discuss the topic to begin with.
> 
> Mark-Jan – you’ve been using your ‘insert’ operator in RES typography for many years. It would be great to see a list of at least some of the clusters you’ve encountered.
> 
> Anyway, great if anyone has any examples/evidence to share.
> 
> Bob
>