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

[Bob Richmond]

Hi Mark-Jan

I was grateful to receive data from TLA and Ramses this week and last which
I've been working on to organize. 

On repeated occasions I've asked for data and examples to help put these
questions on a secure footing. Since well before Cambridge.

Now you tell us there's been "six months of concentrated study" from a bunch
of people. 

Am I, and have I been, wasting my time if you've already done this work?

I'd really appreciate if you could share with group what you can such as any
of: images of the difficult cases, data, analysis and other evidence that
you've been collecting and analysing during the last 6 months to inform your
work.

Thank you

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Egyptian [mailto:egyptian-bounces at evertype.com] On Behalf Of Mark-Jan
Nederhof
Sent: 30 July 2016 12:28
To: Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS <egyptian at evertype.com>
Subject: Re: [Egyptian] On "A system of control characters for Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphic text" (2016-07-23)

There are motivations for the particular choice of primitives we have now,
which was the result of half a year of concentrated study by the folks from
TLA, Ramses and St Andrews, with constructive criticism from some
participants in Cambridge, and some further ideas discussed on this email
list. 

Is the current collection of primitives and the way they are to be used set
in stone? No. 

Do we have a single easy one-line answer why we need this set of primitives
and no other. No. 

Could the theoretical and empirical support in favour of our set of
primitives, or any other, ever be exhaustively explored? No.

Does that mean our set of primitives is completely arbitrary and baseless?
If you think that you have not read the text of our proposal and have not
followed the discussions on the list.

For the rest you are contributing no new thoughts. Life is too short to have
to repeat the same discussions over and over and over again. 
I hope you excuse me but this is for me my last response on this thread.

Mark-Jan

On Saturday 30 Jul 2016 12:46:12 Marwan Kilani wrote:
> We are back to square one because you (and I say you as you are 
> suggesting the proposal) have not approached one of the basic questions
yet:
> 
> what is a spatially relevant feature that need to be encoded/displaed, 
> and what is not?
> 
> stéphane gave some scattered example, but there is no definition yet, 
> no general coherent frame about *how egyptian work spatially* and 
> therefore about what is meaningful and what is not has been suggested. 
> Only random examples taken here and there (some even borderline cases, 
> like your Dd=f, where you are essentially discussing and issue that 
> *does not exist* because the difference between the to is not 
> meaningful in any way, as far as i know) have been pointed out. Or at
least this is what I have seen.
> 
> What you describe is a calligraphic variant: it is important to be 
> able to represent calligraphic variants or not?
> 
> This is an *important* question that *has to be tackled with* because 
> it has consequences on all the the suggestive steps.
> 
> just to say: if you want to be able to display calligraphic variants, 
> then you have to include corresponding precomposed glyphs in your font 
> (because control characters dont make up anything on their own), with 
> all the problems this will generate (and beside the fact that unicode 
> is not for calligraphic variants) if instead you don't want to do 
> that, then you have to make explicit that calligraphic variants *are 
> not* meant to be handled with unicode, and this can have consequences 
> on the features you need in your encoding system, and also brings up 
> the next questions: if calligraphic variants are not meant to be 
> encoded then 1) what is a calligraphic variant and 2) what else could 
> be left out?.
> 
> This is an important question, as important as understanding what is a 
> real glyph that should have an independent unicode slot, and what 
> instead is just a graphic variant.
> 
> It is the same principle that make people at the workshop arguing 
> against encoding into the unicode set signs "at random": you need 
> first to know what is a really meaningful variant, and what instead is 
> an allograph to have a manful set of hieroglyphs.
> 
> With spatial distribution should be the same: what is meaningful and 
> what is not.
> 
> What is the general theoretical frame we are working in? If any?
> 
> Essentially, what (in absolute terms, in concepts, not in random 
> examples) are we trying to encode and what are we not trying to encode?
> And possibly why (meaning-wise, quantity-wise etc?)
> 
> And this stands true whether you want to use ligatures, control 
> characters, or whatever else.
> 
> 
> Marwan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 12:18 PM, Mark-Jan Nederhof 
> <mn31 at st-andrews.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Saturday 30 Jul 2016 10:52:00 Marwan Kilani wrote:
> > > "For example take Dd=f, with cobra + hand + viper. Sometimes you 
> > > see hand:viper clearly entirely inside the bounding box of the 
> > > cobra. Sometimes you see the hand in the cobra, while the viper is 
> > > entirely below, with the tail of the viper extending below the tip 
> > > of the tail of the cobra. Sometimes, the head of the viper is 
> > > inside the bounding box of the cobra, while the tail of the viper 
> > > extends below the tail of the cobra."
> > >
> > > Sorry, to go back to the same thing, but.. what is the practical 
> > > need of encoding such a distinction?
> > >
> > > having the inside or outside the cobra has (I guess I should say 
> > > "as far
> > as
> > > I know") no meaning and no importance whatsoever. There is no 
> > > linguistic, no semantic, nothing..
> > >
> > > it is just a graphical variant, a calligraphic choice of the scribe.
> > >
> > > Unicode should be about standardized transcriptions, not about
> > paleographic
> > > details. The important thing here is that the "f" comes after "D+d".
> > That's
> > > all.
> > > Why should we encode such calligraphic variants in the first place?
> > >
> > > What is the utility of that?
> >
> > I must have been spectacularly unclear.
> >
> > If one accepts that an encoding should contain primitives that 
> > describe the approximate spatial arrangement of signs, then it is 
> > inevitable there will be boundary cases where it is unclear how to 
> > encode some text. That holds for a system with 20 control characters 
> > as well as for a system with 3 control characters.
> >
> > Of course, if one does not accept that an encoding should contain 
> > primitives that describe the spatial arrangement of signs, then 
> > we're back to square one. I suggest you reread Stéphane's messages 
> > on the subject, who motivated time and time again why at least one 
> > prominent potential user community most certainly needs to have 
> > access to the graphical realisation of a text. Stéphane explained 
> > this with extraordinary detail and above all patience. I don't see 
> > any need to restart this. There are diminishing returns for 
> > repeating the same discussions ad infinitum.
> >
> > Mark-Jan
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Egyptian mailing list
> > Egyptian at evertype.com
> > http://evertype.com/mailman/listinfo/egyptian_evertype.com
> >


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