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

[Marwan Kilani]

"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"

Correct me if I am wrong, I don't know much about Thai:
As far as I know Thai script has both isolated signs (like letters in the
latin alphabet), and signs combined together into groups/ligatures.
In particular, some vowels are written as independent signs, while others
are combined with consonants in graphic units that represent syllables.

now, as far as I know, those signs that are displayed as independent sigs
are encoded visually.
This mean that some vowels, that are displayed as independent glyphs before
the consonants are encoded before the consonants, although they have to be
read after them.

The reason, I guess, is that these letters are perceived as independent
glyphs, and therefore the fact that a vowel has to be inputted/displayed
before the consonant, although it has to be read afterwards, can be
interpreted just as an orthographic/spelling convention. As long as the
signs are treated as independent, non ligated glyphs it makes sense. I
guess perhaps you can find similar examples also in other languages. Just
spelling conventions.

At the same time, in Thais, however, as far as I know, everything combined
into groups/ligatures, is encoded phonetically, not visually. Diacritics
for tones or vowels that have to be displayed above the consonant and have
to be read after it are encoded after the consonant, according to their
phonetic reading (and not before it, as one could argue for a "top-bottom"
visual encoding).

is it correct? Or am I wrong?

In devanagari everything is encoded phonetically because per se everything
is combined into ligatures/groups.

Actually, question for the Unicode guys of the group:

is there in unicode any writing system that uses groups or ligatures (not
isolated glyphs), and encode them visually, rather than phonetically?
Or more in general, what is the proportion of writing systems using
ligatures/groups that encode them visually, and what is the proportion of
those encoding them phonetically?

Just to understand where some of the methods suggested for Egyptian here
would stand

Best

Marwan










On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
wrote:

> 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
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>
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