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

[Michael Everson]

On 1 Jun 2017, at 19:44, Marwan Kilani <odusseus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "We do not unify between scripts. So you’re arguing on the basis of Not Understanding How the UCS Works."
> 
> Exactly. This is exactly my point.

Your point is that you are arguing on the basis of NOT understanding how the Universal Character Set works. Well, learn to understand it, then. 

> then why do you want to unify between Greek and Egyptian transliteration?
> The spiritus lenis is a *greek* character, which was adapted for egyptological transcription to transcribe a phoneme glottal stop.

The spiritus lenis *was* a Greek character. So are the letters αβγειυφχω are all Greek letters, too, and behold, in the last two centuries they were borrowed into Latin as ɑꞵɣɛɩʋɸꭓꞷ. That’s called “disunification”. 

> Exactly like the radical ⼔ , which is a chinese character, which was adapted for japanese transcriptions to a phonemic sequence "hi", written with the kana ヒ.
> 
> Exactly the same situation, as you can see from the same sentence.

Nope. It’s called “disunification”. For functional grounds (like sorting) as well as design grounds (in the case of Japanese, as well as Latin IPA characters). 

> Therefore,

Your logic is faulty. 

> since the katakana graph ヒ, which derives from chinese ⼔ but represent "hi" is labelled "KATAKANA LETTER HI", then the egyptological diacritic we are talking about, which derives from greek spiritus lenis but represent "glottal stop" (and can be represented without problems with the grapheme "glottal stop"  should be labelled… 

Either SPIRITUS LENIS or PSILI. 

Disunification happens to work somewhat differently for many combining marks. which have a “common” script property, but since for these six new characters we are explicitly NOT encoding them with combining marks arguing about that is pointless. 

Even though Greek breathings were introduced in the 23rd century BCE by Aristophanes of Byzantium, to indicate the presence or absence of /h/, what happened 150 years ago is that Lepsius *disunified* the marks from Greek to use them in Latin. Their essential shape, however, he did not change. They were, and are, separate things from the later-invented glottal stop ʔ (which in the IPA seems to have had its origin in filing off the dot on a ?). 

Glottal stop as a letter is ʔ. Glottal stop as a sound is /ʔ/. 

Egyptologists and Ugaritic scholars transcribe some Egyptian and Ugaritic letters using the spiritus lenis, which sits atop lowercase letters and precede uppercase letters. The sounds these represent are evidently reconstructed as /ʔa ʔi ʔu/.

Glyphs are not sounds. 

The name for these must be, for historical reasons, and in support of their glyph behaviour, LATIN LETTER WITH SPIRITUS LENIS.

Michael