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

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Jun 2017, at 15:43, 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)..

I don’t care what its phonetic value is. The shape of the diacritic is not the shape of a glottal stop ʔ. The origin and shape is that of the spiritus lenis. 

> 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.

See Lepsius, who invented it. 

> 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. 

Well, you’re stuck with it. The name of the mark is spiritus lenis, and the reading rule for it in Egyptian and Ugaritic is probably /ʔa ʔi ʔu/.

> 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”.

That’s the reading rule, not the identification of the character. 

> Because this is what that diacritic is meant to represent.

The diacritic known as “acute” may represent stress, or vowel quality, or vowel quantity. 

The diacritic known as “cedilla” does not represent a small z except in shape.

Michael