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

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Jun 2017, at 16:43, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "If you consider such “historical typographical distinction[s]” irrelevant, you can use the existing U+0357 ○͗ COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE (solution  A2 in proposal n3487) or ˀ U+02C0 MODIFIER LETTER GLOTTAL STOP and this whole discussion is irrelevant."
> 
> 1a) no, because it does not represent a "half ring" (which has other linguistic meanings). It represent a glottal stop

What does the letter “c” represent? I know it to represent all of these: /dʒ ð k s ʃ ts tsʰ tʃ θ ʔ ʕ ǀ/

You are confusing writing system (graphs) with speech (sounds). 

> 1b) no, i cannot use ˀ U+02C0 because from a linguistic perspective, " iˀ "represent a *glottalised i*,

No, iˀ represents i followed by a glottal stop. Glottalization is a different process. 

> not a character that seems to behave like a i or like a glottal stop depending on the context (which is what the egyptological character we are discussing means). To represent that, the glottal stop must be *above* the i, to indicate that the same phoneme can behave in both ways.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours. 

> 2) if you think that "historical typographical origins" are relevant, then we should name the character "A" as "Romanized Aliph", rather than "Latin A", because Latin A is nothing but a typographical development of Phoenician aliph, after all.

Sigh. 

> And in general, I still don't get what is the problem in having a "a/i/u with glottal stop above" / "a/i/u with superimposed glottal stop”?

The mark isn’t a glottal stop. Glottal stops look like this: Ɂɂʔˀ. We do not have a combining glottal stop mark in the UCS. 

> Michael, i do appreciate you effort in coding these things for 17 years, but i don't see why such a name, which is more appropriate and more accurate, should be a problem?

Because the name we have chosen is more accurate and more useful, and because the name you prefer (A WITH GLOTTAL STOP) is ambiguous anyway, as I have said (ʔa, aʔ).

> And in general seriously, please, please: traditional Egyptological linguistic terminology is already too often so much backward for so many concepts, please let's not reinforce this by encoding into Unicode such characters with a 19th century term like "spiritus lenis", when we can use a much more appropriate "glottal stop”.

The behaviour of this diacritic is EXACTLY THE SAME as that in Greek, where it sits *atop* a lowercase letter and stands *before* an uppercase letter. 

So the proper identification of this mark as spiritus lenis is not only historically accurate, but essential for correct rendering. 

> Egyptology needs to be integrated into the general modern linguistic trends and terminology, it does not need to be stuck into an exceptionalism of 19th century terminology.

You are mistaken. I appreciate your ideology, but it’s not appropriate here. 

Michael.