At 10:20 -0400 2001-04-20, Dean A. Snyder wrote:
>I believe that somebody HAS indeed "complained about the proposed
>architecture" for Hieroglyphic in Unicode. I have been told that there was
>an organized protest from within the Egyptological community against the
>proposal a few years ago as being entirely too premature and inadequate.
They only complained about the repertoire being unready. Which is
fine. Nobody said a thing about the proposed encoding, which
basically tries to map the Manuel de codage.
>Also at the University of Chicago conference on Electronic Publication of
>Near Eastern Texts in 1999 the consensus among the Egyptologists seemed to
>be that the current state of the art in Egyptian paleography and orthography
>did not bode well for a Unicode proposal in the near future.
We should, at a minimum, work on the architecture and the Gardiner
repertoire, which enjoys non-scholarly popularity and for which there
exists already non-Unicode software support.
>My experience with other ancient script systems has been that the Unicode
>Consortium should only entertain proposals to the standard after ACTIVELY
>seeking the input from the relevant (scholarly) communities - something
>which the ICE and UFU projects are doing for two cuneiform script systems.
We have been in discussion with Egyptologists, including those who
devised the Manuel de codage.
>And, if it isn't the case now, I would also propose that relevant input on
>proposals should somehow be formally tied to and registered with the various
>proposals themselves.
Not sure what you mean by this. There was a position paper from
Germany on the repertoire to which I responded, but those scholars
have not participated in direct discussions with us yet.
>(It would be hard for me to imagine that the rejection
>of the Hieroglyphic proposal by the Egyptological community has not been
>formally associated with the proposal itself.)
It addressed only the repertoire issue.
--
Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie
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