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

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Jun 2017, at 18:07, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "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/."
> 
> No it is not.

The name of the mark is the name of the mark. We use it in scholarship because Lepsius took it and put it there. 

> In egyptological transcriptions it indicates

What it indicates is not what it *is*. That’s a reading rule. 

> a sign that can be EITHER a i OR a glottal stop, while in Ugaritic it depends on the context: in some context it indicate a vowel followed by a glottal stop, in other a glottal stop followed by a vowel - and this is what it is represented as a vowel with a glottal stop above it.

The glyph of the diacritical mark comes before capital A I U. Just like the spiritus lenis does in Greek. The glyph is not a glottal stop glyph. A glottal stop sound may be represented with many different glyphs. 

A sound is not a glyph. A glyph is not a sound. 

> Seriously: you clearly do not know what these characters are meant to represent

What is the letter “c” supposed to represent? I gave you already a list. Here it is again: /dʒ ð k s ʃ ts tsʰ tʃ θ ʔ ʕ ǀ/

> (and i wonder how you can assume you know how to encode something you don't understand

I don’t have to understand ANYTHING about Egyptian or Ugaritic phonology in order to analyse the glyphs of a diacritical mark and to identify the placement it has when used with capital and small base letters. 

> why has that specific shape in the first place - we are not talking about since that have randomly evolved for centuries as all the other examples you mention,

Sorry, what? I mentioned c (and its uses) and w (and its name) and ḥ and ḫ (and their names)

> we are talking about specific characters that have been developed by scholars

The use of the spiritus lenis was developed by Lepsius 154 years ago (his Standard Alphabet was published in 1863). Interestingly, one difference that can be observed about scholars of that era and this, is that they all had training in Latin and Greek. 

> and that have that specific shape because of what they want to represent), i was saying, you clearly do not know exactly what these characters are meant to represent,

What they are meant to represent is some sounds. What they *are* is some shapes. The name of the shape of Ɂɂʔˀ is “glottal stop”. The name of the shape of the mark used with six new characters is “spiritus lenis” as described by the person who put that mark into use.

Celebrate the history of your discipline! Rejoice in the 150-year life of this diacritical mark! 

> you ask what we egyptologists think about your suggestion, we (not only me, three egyptologists so far) say that no, we don't think "spiritus lenis" should be in the name,

Daniel, Nigel, and Stéphane were talking about the two characters used in Egyptology only. I pointed out that there are four other characters used in Ugaritic studies which use the same mark. So we could not name those EGYTOLOLOGICAL ALEF (already taken, and not used in Egyptology) and EGYTOLOLOGICAL WAW (not used in Egyptology), so the name EGYPTOLOGICAL YOD cannot be used. 

> we offer an alternative which 
> a) you have not yet validly dismissed (why the name "glottal stop above i/a/u" should not work? leaving aside the fact you want it to be a spiritus lenis) 

We have existing naming conventions (and you cannot argue with them; they are the naming conventions). LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP ABOVE I does not conform to those conventions. LATIN LETTER I WITH GLOTTAL STOP also does not conform to them: it is a descriptive name like LATIN LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS, but the name GLOTTAL STOP in such a name would refer to something which has the shape of Ɂɂʔˀ, which the diacritical mark used in Egyptology and Ugaritic studies does not. In fact, we know the actual origin of the diacritical mark used in Egyptology and Ugaritic studies. It is the spiritus lenis. 

In the UCS, the origin of a character often distinguishes it from another character. 20 years ago I showed that Middle English yogh ȝ and the phonetic character ezh ʒ had different origins despite a superficial resemblance. 

The glyphs for glottal stop aren’t the same as those used in Egyptology and Ugaritic studies. So we wouldn’t use the word GLOTTAL STOP in a character name for this particular diacritic. 

Moreover, as I have said, we know the origin of the diacirtic. It’s Greek. It’s the spiritus lenis. Being used to indicate /ʔ/. And it behaves just like the Greek diacritic does where capital letters are concerned. 

So according to our naming conventions, the right name to use is LATIN LETTER I WITH SPIRITUS LENIS. I suppose we could also call it LATIN LETTER I WITH PSILI, but that would not, I think, be better. 

> and 
> b) which has much more general than your suggestion, and has much more potential to be useful as a unicode character even outside egyptian and ugaritic, because it is hard that a linguist will need a "vowel + spiritus lenis" because the "spiritus lenis" is mainly a 19th century concept (except in greek, obviously), but there could be various contexts, for various languages, in which a linguist could make use of a "letter x with superimposed glottal stop". For intende to transcribe ambiguous forms, in which the glottal stop may occur both before and after the main letter/phoneme.

We do not wish to encode a combining diacritical mark for this because its behaviour (vis à vis capital letters) is complicated (Greek fonts have precomposed versions which help font developers) and therefore we decided to encode all six letters uniquely. 

You have forgotten, it seems, that your linguist who used something like x̓ would have to have it come out as ʼX in upper-case. 

> But still, no.
> Because you want it to be a spiritus lenis.

Because it is, in origin, demonstrably, a spiritus lenis. It is clear from its behaviour and its name that it was borrowed directly from Greek. Its shape informs EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF Ꜣꜣ and EGYPTOLOGICAL AYIN Ꜥꜥ. This is not in doubt. 

> And you have encoded names for to decades. And you know what you are talking about.
> Great arguments.

They’re true. You’re arguing on the basis of a failure to distinguish glyphs from sounds. 

> Good like with you next 17 years of attempts.

Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t accommodate your ideological concerns about character names and Egyptology. I recommend that you revel in the history of your discipline, but if you think it’s better, you can hold out and complain for the rest of your career that these letters are mis-named. 

> "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,"
> 
> I suggested a second version: "A WITH GLOTTAL STOP ABOVE IT" (or something like that) which is not ambiguous, i think?

It does not conform to our naming conventions. As I said, that is a description of the glyphs, and you can’t use GLOTTAL STOP as a name for the glyph used in Egyptology and Ugaritic studies because the glyph is different from Ɂɂʔˀ. 

> "Moreover, what is A WITH GLOTTAL STOP? It it a glottalized a? Is it /ʔa/? Is it /aʔ/?"
> 
> "No, iˀ represents i followed by a glottal stop. Glottalization is a different process."
> 
> If this is what you are talking about, then no: you clearly don't know that you are talking about.
> 
> /iʔ/ represents a i followed by a glottal stop. /iˀ/ represent a glottalised i which in some languages can be realised as "creaky voice" and can be transcribed *also* as /ḭ/ 

I’m sorry to disagree with you, but in Seneca orthography, U+02C0 ˀ is used as a stop (consonant), not as a mark of creakily voiced vowel. 

> I quote:
> 
> "Glottalization varies along three parameters, all of which are continuums. The degree of glottalization varies from none (modal voice, [d]) through stiff voice ([d̬]) and creaky voice ([d̰]) to full glottal closure (glottal reinforcement or glottal replacement, described below). The timing also varies, from a simultaneous single segment [d̰] to an onset or coda such as [ˀd] or [dˀ] to a sequence such as [ʔd] or [dʔ]. "
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottalization#Types
> 
> Perhaps if you were listening to people who actually know what they are talking about, you wouldn't have been spending 17 years trying to encode these things.

Heh. 

In 2008 Bob and I tried to get decisions from the UTC. The UTC was unable to make one, and this had nothing to do with the character names. 

But go ahead. Be angry. 

On 1 Jun 2017, at 19:03, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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."
> 
> And still:
> 
> Unicode U 13A0, Ꭰ , it looks like a D, its shape and origin is that of a D. And still in Unicode it is labelled "CHEROKEE LETTER A"
> because its phonetic value in cherokee (the source of such character) is A, not D, and it does not matter it looks and derive from a D.
> 
> Unicode U13AA, Ꭺ , it looks like a A, its shape and origin is that of a A. And still, in Unicode it is labelled "CHEROKEE LETTER GO"
> 
> Unicode U13DF, Ꮯ , it looks like a C, its shape and origin is that of a C. And still, in Unicode it is labelled "CHEROKEE LETTER TLI"
> 
> And so on, and so on, and so on..

The original Cherokee syllabary did not use Latin letterforms; that was devised as Cherokee went to type. Please see Cherokee A, GO, and TLI at http://www.omniglot.com/images/writing/cherokee_orig.gif

In any case, we distinguish look-alike letters from script to script, and these letters are simply Latin letters with diacritical marks. 

> Or also:
> 
> Unicode U30D2, ヒ , it looks like the Chinese radical ⼔, its shape and origin is that of a ⼔. And still, in Unicode it is labelled "KATAKANA LETTER HI", because this is the *phonetic value* that such sign has in Japanese.
> 
> And same with lots of other katakana, such as タ, カ, イ,...
> 
> And let's not talk about characters in devanagari-derived scripts..

We do not unify between scripts. So you’re arguing on the basis of Not Understanding How the UCS Works. 

> So since in Unicode there are already characters that are indeed labeled on the basis of their phonetic value in the writing system using them, in spite of the fact that their shape and origin is the same of other characters, then why shouldn't be possible to called the egyptological yod "i with glottal stop atop" (or similar) since this is what that character represent, *in spite* of the fact that the diacritic originates form a spiritus lenis?
> Why?

Because (1) the shape of a glyph for GLOTTAL STOP ABOVE would have to be ʔ and (2) it’s only “above” the lower-case letters. 

> If this is possible for Cherokee, Japanese and various indian characters, why shouldn't it be possible for an egyptological character?

I have explained this mistake above. 

Michael