[Egyptian] On "A system of control characters for Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text" (2016-07-23)

[Michael Everson]

On 28 Jul 2016, at 12:41, Mark-Jan Nederhof <mn31 at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:

> "For complex writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or Japanese, the visual order of characters should be separate from phonetic order. In complex writing systems, combining visual and phonetic order can result in visual ambiguity, where one reading could have two different visual sequences. One could, however, keep a separate field (or use mark-up) with the phonetic reading, which could be carried along with the data.”

OK

> I interpret this to say reading ('phonetic') order is secondary to graphical order what Unicode is concerned. But it also suggests there might be room for taking reading order  into account, and not just in mark-up but also into the Unicode encoding itself. I can't be certain my interpretation of this is correct. We should ask the UTC for clarification next week.

It depends on the script. Devanagari and Thai have similar structures though Thai doesn’t do conjuncts the same way. Devanagari is encoded phonetically, Thai visually. 

In my view it is graphical order which is the only practical way of encoding Egyptian. 

Michael