[Egyptian] Some general considerations

Mon Jul 25 11:58:03 BST 2016

P.S. Stéphane, please obviously don't take my tone, which I know could have
sounded a bit harsh, on a personal level. I am not taking any of remarks
personally and feel free to freely criticize my arguments as much as you
wish. Please do the same. It is nothing personal, I am talking about work,
this as nothing to do about me or you as a person, obviously. I hope it is
clear for everyone.

Marwan

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Nigel Strudwick <ncs3 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Can we please stop this sort of pointless arguing and get back to the
> basic issue of getting the encoding members back onto sorting out this
> Unicode control character business?
>
> I’m trying to keep out of it, but I think there are times when everyone
> needs to be called to order and reminded of the main thing we need to
> achieve first after Cambridge.
>
> Nigel
>
>
>
>
> On 25 Jul 2016, at 11:49, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Stéphane polis <s.polis at ulg.ac.be>
> wrote:
> > Yes, Marwarn, I agree that we should indeed stop here.
> >
> > The vertical text that you produce is nothing even close to what could
> have been an ancient Egyptian vertical text, even less a ’nice example’ (or
> was it ironic?).
> >
> > Stéphane, I am sorry to disappoint you, but you are not an ancient
> Egyptian scribe and I am sorry to disappoint you, but your perception of
> egyptian writing is not the "truth".
> >
> > Your aim is not to *produce* an ancient egyptian text.
> >
> > The aim is, or should be, to analyze what ancient Egyptian wrote in a
> way to transcribe what ancient Egyptian wrote in an precise and efficient
> way. Not to determine what according to some abstract concept is the "true
> nature" of a text and trying to encode this "true nature".
> >
> > And the aim of that "vertical rendition" was not to produce a "real"
> ancient egyptian vertical text. it was to explicit and explain one specific
> step (and its advantages) the inputting procedure and approach that i am
> suggesting.
> >
> > And my approach allows to transcribe it as precisely as yours. But more
> efficiently.
> > Perhaps you should try to understand how it works (because clearly you
> don't) before stating what is possible and what is not.
> > And perhaps you should try to understand a bit better how fonts,
> ligatures, layouts, and unicode in general work because you seem to believe
> that is possible/practical to do things that are actually
> impossible/impractical (stacking in hieroglyphs, using tens of control
> characters to display 3 hieroglyphs), and you seem to believe that is
> impossible/impractical to do things that are instead very
> possible/practical (as coding spatial information in ligatures - you can
> give names to ligature, so you can call your p*w-ligature "p*w" and you
> have your spatial information that you can retrieve from your font whenever
> you want)
> >
> > Let alone your comments about non-western non-latin scripts or your
> tw/wt example (which is a non-existing problem that has *already* been
> solved in the *current* current unicode set, where t&w is *already* coded
> as an independent character. So if you want to display tw = /tw/ you just
> input t + w, if you want to display wt = /wt/ you just input w + t, and if
> you want to display t&w = /wt/-/tw/ leaving the ambiguity of the
> pronunciation you just input the unicode character tw (u13172) which was
> probably encoded *exactly* for this purpose - pretty smart idea btw… - you
> should find some other common examples that cannot be solved in this very
> easy and practical way to explain why coding position is important, because
> arguing for a proposal on the basis of a problem that has *already* been
> solved in the current unicode set, well.. and btw, if you knew how
> ligatures work, you would see that in the case of the wt/tw problem it is
> actually possible to code *more* information, about the spatial
> organization *AND* about the reading order of the signs, by using
> ligatures, than by using control characters.. but I assume you are not
> really interested in that right?)
> >
> > So well..
> >
> > All the best with your work with ancient Egyptian as well
> >
> > Marwan
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> Le 24 juil. 2016 à 18:15, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> a écrit :
> >>
> >> 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_1.png>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Image 2:
> >> <image_2.png>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >
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