Towards a Proposal to encode Egyptian Hieroglyphs in ... - Evertype

instantiate the numbers encoded. Between Möller and the in-text examples of numbers given in Gardiner,
96.6% of the number-forms (the 10s, 100s, 1000s, and 10,000s) are attested in a way which can be
sourced by page number in the source database. There are 87 such numbers, and only three of them have
no page-reference sources in Gardiner or Möller: „ D070-A ‘4 heqat measures’, ‰ D075 ‘9 heqat
measures’, and  V042-A ‘400’ in one of its configurations. And D070-A is referenced in Allen
1999:102. Different configurations are considered unique text-elements and are encoded as characters,
because it is these elements which are used for hieratic transcription and manipulated by (for instance)
the MdC. Thus Ê Z020, ä Z020-A, ã Z020-B, and å Z020-C, are all encoded though thay all mean
‘9’, the last two of these are are used in writing dates; Allen 1999 gives another form ç Z020-D. Higherlevel
protocols could, in principle, be used to generate Egyptian numbers out of their constituent parts,
but there would seem to be little advantage to doing this. In such a case, a number like ÿŸ⁄€‹99,999
would have to be decomposed into 45 constituent parts along with 44 elements of markup, e.g.,
›*›*›:›*›*›:›*›*›-fi*fi*fi:fi*fi*fi:fi*fi*fi-fl*fl*fl:fl*fl*fl:fl*fl*fl-‡*‡*‡:‡*‡*‡:‡*‡*‡-·*·*·:·*·*·:·*·*·. Egyptian numbers
are thus encoded here along the same principles which were used in the encoding of Aegean and
Cuneiform numbers.
9. Enclosures. The two principal names of the king, the nomen and praenomen, were normally written
inside a cartouche: a figure representing a coil of rope, for instance “ ≠¨pp ‘Apophis’. Gardiner
1957:71–76 describes the royal titulary, giving beginning and end shapes œ and — signs in the Catalogue.
The bracket-like convention of writing œ–— is used in the hieratic (cf. Möller 1936:51) and some
modern publications. Plain text and general purpose software should likewise treat these signs as
characters and not render the fully enclosed form. For some additional enclosure characters which could
be added to the repertoire, see “Issues: Enclosures” below.
10. Unicode Character Properties
The Unicode Consortium maintains a set of character properties. The following excerpt from the
proposed additions to the file UnicodeData.txt indicates that hieoglyphs are classified as Letter_Other
(L0), that they are not combining characters, that they are Left-to-Right (L) and that they do not have
decompositions or case mappings. For the purposes of line and word breaking as well as identifiers they
would be treated like alphabetics.
13000;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A001;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
13001;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A002;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
13002;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH A003;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
...
1341F;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH AA030;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
13420;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH AA031;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
13421;EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH AA032;Lo;0;L;;;;;N;;;;;
11. Ordering. Deterministic ordering of actual hieroglyphs is something that is probably unknown to the
Egyptological tradition, since Egyptologists have tended to sort the transliterations. However, an
alphabetic order does exist (¨, ñ, y, Æ, w, b, p, f, m, n, r, h, h. , h, h, s, sˇ, k. , k, g, t, t,
d, d as given above), and
˘ ¯ ¯ ¯
this should be the basis for ordering those characters with a phonetic reading. Determinatives without
phonetic readings should probably be left in code-point order. Some experimentation and investigation of
current practice will have to be undertaken before recommendations can be made, and this will be the
subject of a further proposal as input to ISO/IEC 14651 and the Unicode Collation Algorithm. As an
example, however, we have taken a set of words beginning in g- from Gardiner’s grammar and ordered
the list of words there as it might be ordered according to the principles outlined above.
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