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

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Jun 2017, at 15:57, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:

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

You use the letter “w”, don’t you? You call it “double u”, don’t you? You use the letters ḥ and ḫ, do you not? They are named H WITH DOT BELOW and H WITH BREVE BELOW, not PHARYNGEAL H and UVULAR H. 

> 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*.

Writing systems are not languages. Writing systems are graphs on paper, wood, stone, metal, etc. In the UCS we often use descriptive names. 

Moreover, what is A WITH GLOTTAL STOP? It it a glottalized a? Is it /ʔa/? Is it /aʔ/?

(Glottalized a is “creaky voice” and is written /a̰/.)

> 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.

Get over it. 

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

Really, you’re going to have to get over it.

> 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.

What does the letter “c” represent? What do the acute, grave, circumflex, breve, inverted breve, and caron represent? 

> 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.

If you want it to look good in fonts, then the origin of the diacritical mark should be known. 

You have not convinced me, and I have been naming UCS characters for two decades, and I know what I am talking about. 

Michael