Michael Everson wrote:
>>(Mayan is on the Roadmap to Plane One, but it doesn't look as
>>though there's been any detailed proposal yet.)
>I believe that structurally it will work as well as Egyptian. But No
>one has weighed in on my proposal for Egyptian so far, except for
>people complaining about the repertoire. Fair enough, but it's the
>architecture that needs to be agreed first.
The proposal is N1944.pdf and can be found on the Roadmap to
Plane One at:
http://www.egt.ie/standards/iso10646/smp-roadmap-table.html
(It's 84 pages, 3562096 bytes.)
If nobody has complained about the proposed architecture...
maybe it's because there's nothing to complain about.
The structure intentionally parallels that of existing computer
implementations which are in use and have been used by
Egyptologists for many years. The set-up preserves plain
text practicality while providing for special features such
as the cartouche, reversed characters, and even the color red
for special phrases (which is represented by a horizontal line
above in plain text).
As for complaints about the repertoire, it follows existing
computer fonts and the proposal allows for further
extensions.
The proposal covers encoding needs well and its structure
could apply to other pictographic scripts like Mayan.
Some of the special shading glyphs which indicate damaged
portions in the source might be placed in a common area,
though, as other transcription systems for ancient writings
have similar needs. (This commonality is mentioned in the
proposal.) On the other hand, perhaps they should stay
where they are in order to keep the conversion from
older encoding simple. Maybe for these positions the names
should be changed from "EGYPTIAN... " to "PICTOGRAPHIC... "
or "SOURCE DAMAGE..." .
Display issues which are beyond the scope of an encoding
standard might be resolved by a 'hieroglyphic mark-up
language', just as there is a math mark-up language for
mathematic display.
Using the standard Egyptian glyph catalog numbers for
the naming table is probably the best way to go, but
it seems a shame to lose the picturesque names like
"standing monkey holding a severed head". Perhaps this
information could be included in the database under a
description field?
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT