Hello One and All,
Before setting off down the path of submitting a couple of new characters I
would like to run them past you for your consideration. If I have ben blind
as a bat and these characters already exist please correct me in my error.
But first, a little context...
I am an Egyptologist and, as you can imagine, transliteration is big in
Egyptology since it is not only essential in language teaching but a major
convenience in its own right. While complete unanimity is lacking amongst
egyptologists concerning the conventions for transliteration there is way
better than 95% agreement on the basics. Not surprisingly the Unicode
character-set already addresses nearly every character required to
transliterate Ancient Egyptian according to any of the alternative schemes
which may be used.
However, it appears that one character is missing (OK, 2 characters if we
say uncial and diminuative) and another is not available in the form in
which egyptologists are accustomed to encounter it.
The missing characters can be characterised as follows:
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW
LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH LINE BELOW
I model these descriptions on those of 1E0E, 1E6E, 1E2A, 1E24 (at least
insofar as the capital is concerned).
Now, I know that the correct appearance could be achieved using combining
characters, but it seems a pain to have to do this for one character only.
The other character - the one that just does not appear in a form commonly
used in egyptology - corresponds in function to the glottal stop (02C0),but
rather than represent this as something that looks like a right half ring
with a tail egyptologists have represented it with something that looks
like two right half rings stacked on top of each other. To illustrate this
rather poor description a little more graphically let me say that in
typescript egyptologists often just fake it by typing a "3". By the way we
typically refer to this character as "aleph", modelled on the Hebrew.
... Then there is the small issue that we like to use capitals in
transliterating proper nouns - but does it even make sense to have a
capital and small glottal stop and reversed glottal stop? I will stop now
before I embarass myself.
Many thanks to all who will reply.
- Spencer Tasker
