[Egyptian] Ligature joiners - evidence needed please

Thu Jul 21 10:56:34 BST 2016

Hi all,

Please find attached data from Ramses regarding :
1) free-groups.gly, i.e. groups which involve an absolute positioning of signs in MdC (**, etc.); a lot of these groups are directly relevant for (1) making a case about the need for the four corner INSERT operators, (2) exemplifying the need for a ’stack’ operator, etc., etc.
2) ligatures.gly, i.e. groups that use the ‘&’ operator; directly relevant for illustrating all the cases of the 4 corners operators.
3) subgroups.gly, i.e.groups with the parentheses in MdC, which are directly relevant for illustrating the several levels embedding of hieroglyphs.

Note that:
* the number before indicates in how many spellings the group/ligature occurs in our corpus.
* the encoding of theses spellings was made by PhD or MA students; there are inconsistencies in the encoding because they first and foremost tried to stick to the visual arrangement of the signs in the edition of the text.
* 98% of the data are coming from horizontal text (I admit that the *vertical argument* made by Bob several times escapes me a bit, but I might not understand fully what you mean, Bob).

We are happy to share this material under 2 conditions:
1 - A reference to Ramses should be made for any use, minimally referring to the website <ramses.ulg.ac.be>.
2 - These groups are there for helping the development of an appropriate encoding scheme for Unicode as regards the control characters, but they should by no mean be integrated as glyphs or characters into Unicode. I’m sorry to insist again on this and to stress that it would be against all the principles advocated for during the meeting by the Egyptologists (as well as against the conditions for using the material from Ramses): (1) such combinations of signs are productive in ancient Egyptian and we want to be able to encode them without adding new groups in Unicode, this would make no sense; (2) we have to be able to search easily for the signs in these groups as well as the position of theses signs in the groups.

The only way out in my view is:
a) A well defined set of **insert** operators with a precise semantics.
b) A way to make sub-groups (parentheses, precedence operators, begin-end marker, whatever you like).

More comments soon regarding the other topics!

Have a nice day,

Stéphane (also on behalf of Serge, of course)

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Chercheur qualifié F.R.S.-FNRS

Université de Liège
Service d'Égyptologie
Département des sciences de l’Antiquité
Place du 20-Août,
B-4000 Liège

http://www.egypto.ulg.ac.be
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> Le 21 juil. 2016 à 09:39, Simon Schweitzer <schweitzer at bbaw.de> a écrit :
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> concerning the one ligature joiner vs. the four corner ligature joiner:
> 
>> 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].
> 
> Why should one use four instead of one ligature joiner?
> Because the encoding with four control characters offers more information. It is readable for the egyptologist and for the font developer. Cf. my example from the last week: In the temple of Kom Ombo, there are two ligatures with the knife T31 and the bread X1. We can encode this in RES with insert[bs](T31,X1) and insert[te](T31,X1). The position of the X1 is obvious. But if we have T31&X1, one cannot decide the position of X1. And a font developer could create such ligature with the "corner control character" even if he do not see the original reference, but he cannot do anything if he only has T31&X1. But what about T31&N29 or T31&O49, ligatures, that occurs in the Kom Ombo temple? We (the egyptologists, the font developers, the fonts) cannot interpret the ligature only with this encoding.
> 
> Okay, the Kom Ombo temple belongs to the ptolemaic and not to the "classical" writing system. But the encoding of this temple is important for the TLA project, because the Kom Ombo project wants to encode their data in our system, so that we will have such encodings in our material. But there are such problems in more classical data, too:
> 
> For example the ligatures with E6. Bob, you offers three ligatures in your EGPZ 1.0 BETA Specification (August 2007): U+eb13 E6&Z2d, U+eb14 E6&X1, and U+eb15 E6&Z1. These ligatures could be encoded as insert[te](E6,Z2), insert[te](E6,X1), insert[b](E6,Z1) in RES. But there are examples where the plral strokes are in another corner. These examples (DZA 24.607.440 <http://aaew.bbaw.de/dza/24/24605000/24607440.gif> or DZA 28.723.300 <http://aaew.bbaw.de/dza/28/28720000/28723300.gif>) could be encoded as insert[bs](E6,Z2) in RES. As in T31&X1, the encoding of E6&Z2 is ambiguous. The three ligatures which E6 use different corners. Therefore, it is not clear how to interpret E6&D2 or E6&X1&Z2. But if we have the four corner control characters, we could encode something like the RES code insert[te](E6,D2) instead of E6&D2 in DZA 28.722.290 <http://aaew.bbaw.de/dza/28/28720000/28722290.gif>. The E6&X1&Z2 would be the readable insert[bs](E6,X1*Z2) in RES (DZA 28.722.530 <http://aaew.bbaw.de/dza/28/28720000/28722530.gif>). BTW, this example is an argument for the special grouping character "g*" which Michael wrote on the whiteboard last week: X1 g* Z2 insert_bs E6 and the g*-group has to be parsed first. But this is another topic...
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Simon
> 
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