From: Raymond Mercier (rm459@cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2007 - 07:18:29 CDT
I am new to the Cuneiform block (U+12000), but having some familiarity with the standard neo-Assyrian sign list and ideogram names as given by Labat (and certainly others), I am puzzled by the numerous differences affecting both the glyphs adopted for the Unicode chart and the names there assigned to them. The glyphs seem to be a rather idiosyncratic mixture of standard Neo-Assyrian forms (1223E NA, for example) and those from a much earlier Era. As to the names, why could those used in Labat not have been used, or at least Karel Píska's alternate forms (which avoid diacriticals) ? There is a perfectly clear list of signs and names in Píska's site http://www-hep2.fzu.cz/~piska/cuneiform.html, and in any case the UTC (of all people) should have no objection to names like GÌS, or SÚ.
As to the fonts, unfortunately those created by Píska are not encoded in line with the Unicode block, and indeed start at 1 !
There is another font cc500d1.ttf available from
but this causes a fault in my Word 2007. Besides its glyphs, especially as viewed in Fontlab, are pretty wierd !
Raymond Mercier
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