[Egyptian] Some general considerations

[Marwan Kilani]

Have a nice Sunday evening

Marwan

(sorry, that was meant to be in the previous email, obviously :-p )

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just one comment:
>
> And all the parallels from other scripts are pointless (and admittedly
>> funny in the framework of this discussion), since none of these scripts are
>> based on a quadratic structure that is close in any respect to Egyptian.
>>
>
> Funny to read such a comment while at that meeting in Cambridge a Japanese
> linguist and Egyptologist explained, by referring to scientific
> publications, that Japanese (and chinese and korean) are indeed based on
> quadratic structures that are indeed very close in many respect to Egyptian.
>
> There were many things that could be said as a reply to your email, but
> let be honest: with these premises, it won't make any sense.
>
> p.s.:
> No, actually, i am going to add something:
> Look what happens (image 1 below) if you cut your ramesside line in small
> columns (which is just a way of analyzing the text, as it is yours taking
> them as groups, but as we are not egyptians it is not "truth", it is not
> and don't want to be the "true nature of the text"), I was saying: Look
> what happens (image 1 below) if you cut your ramesside line in small
> columns and you put them one under the other..
>
> Such a nice example of Egyptian vertical text, isn't it? :-)
>
> And now, count how many groups you would need to compose such a text with
> a vertical font within a vertical layout.
> You can see the result in the second image: the groups you will need are
> marked in green: 7 groups. That's all.
> Note that you will not need to combine the D snake and the ns tongue as a
> group with the following signs, because with a vertical font you could put
> the baseline of the sign under its "horizontal" bit, and you could consider
> the tail as hanging below the baseline, as it is for the latin letters "q",
> "g" "p" and so on. And consider that the "30" is already a single character
> in unicode (as the t&w, btw.. so i would suggest you to find a more
> relevant example to argue for the importance of the relative position of
> signs..)
>
> So if you use my way of interpreting ramesside texts as short vertical
> strings of texts within an main horizontal layout, you would just need 7
> (sic!!!), in general very basic, groups to display it correctly. All the
> other signs could just be inputted one after the other, without control
> characters, without ligatures, without anything, within short columns one
> next to the other. And you could just use basic layout algorithm to make
> them with the space in a nice way (you know, like when you expand or to
> squeeze the letters within a line to make you text look better? exactly the
> same thing, but vertically).
>
> Instead, with your way of interpreting ramesside writing, which assumes
> that every "tall group" is a real "group" that need to be built and
> displayed within a single purely horizontal layout, and with your system of
> control characters, you would need 15 (sic!!!) groups, many of them very
> rare in not even unique, and you would need tens of control characters
> nested one into the other to correctly build and correctly display each of
> them.
>
> I really wonder which approach would be more efficient, more economic and
> more easily implemented..
>
> Image 1:
>
> [image: Inline image 1]
>
>
>
> Image 2:
> [image: Inline image 2]
>
>
>
>
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