On 21/10/2004 01:24, Philipp Reichmuth wrote:
Dean Snyder schrieb:
I think you will actually find little trace of the quotation mark for
Egyptian transliteration in published work although I look forward to
hearing of examples Dean! The modern Egyptian Ayin convention is pretty much
established by end 19th century. Modern computer software all uses this
form.
As just one example, you can look at the transliteration section of Gardner's grammar and see that he uses the same character for both Egyptian ayin and Arabic ayin - an indication that he considered this symbol merely a glyphic variant of the left quotation mark used for ayin in Semitic languages.
For Semitics at least, this is *not* a "left quotation mark"; people normally use a left half ring wherever the character is available. (Take a look at Brill publications, such as the Encyclopaedia of Islam; Brill's Baskerville variant has a pretty distinct ayin.) The quotation mark is a substitute only. ...
Unicode of course already has the left half ring character, which is commonly used for Semitic transliteration. Any good reason why this character can't be used also for Egyptology?
"More or less"? Is there really a distinct upper case form? Is this in current use?... I guess the only difference in principle with the Egyptological version is that the Egyptological ayin more or less has an uppercase form.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
