[Egyptian] Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) documents about Egyptian Hieroglyphic (May 2017)

[Marwan Kilani]

Also, it would be worth remembering that Egyptologists (and
"Ugaritologists") use these characters to represent and express
*linguistic* concepts, *not* typographical concepts.

If we use in our transliterations the character "i + semicircular diacritic
on top of it" it is to represent a *linguistic* concept, i.e. the fact that
a given sign may linguistically behave both like a "i" and like a *glottal
stop*.

We don't use such character to indicate the typographical anecdote that in
the 19th century people fancied using the spiritus lenis to represent the
glottal stop.

This is irrelevant, from and for an egyptological point of view.

therefore, that "semicircular diacritic on top of it" should be equated
with what it represents, i.e. a glottal stop, and not with what it may
looks like, i.e. a spiritus lenis.

Because egyptologist use it (and will use the new character you want to
encode in Unicode) because of what it linguistically represents, not
because of what 19th century people fancied and not because of what it
looks like in some fonts.



On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:

> The diacritic does represent a superimposed glottal stop, while it does
> not represent (anymore) a spiritus lenis (which in today's technical
> terminology, which has changed since the time of Lepsius, is a diacritic of
> greek orthography, not of Egyptian transliteration orthography)..
>
> That fact that in the fonts commonly used in egyptology it may look like a
> spiritus lenis is due to historical topographical reasons (which are not
> rules set in stone, and should not have the priority over an accurate
> linguistic description of the function of such diacritic), but it does not
> mean that it is a spiritus lenis.
>
> Also because I think that the aim should be to encode the transliteration
> used by Egyptologists today as Egyptologists understand it today, not the
> transliteration used by Lepsius as Lepsius understood it more than a
> century ago.
>
> And it is enough to have a look at recent publications such as Allen's
> "Middle Egyptian Grammar", Allen's "The Ancient Egyptian Language",
> Loprieno's "Ancient Egyptian - a linguistic introduction" or even something
> more popular such as Collier & Manley "How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" to
> realise that today *no one* of them talks about "spiritus lenis", but they
> all refer, in various ways to "glottal stops".
>
> Because this is what that diacritic is meant to represent.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 4:20 PM, Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 1 Jun 2017, at 14:37, Stéphane polis <S.Polis at ulg.ac.be> wrote:
>> >
>> > Not sure that I get what you mean here, Michael.
>> >
>> > Could you be more explicit, What would be the problem with: LATIN
>> CAPITAL LETTER I WITH GLOTTAL STOP?
>>
>> The diacritic is not a glottal stop. Ɂɂʔʖʡʢˀˁˤ
>>
>> It’s a spiritus lenis.
>>
>> Michael
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Egyptian at evertype.com
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>>
>
>
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