At 12:16 -0800 2004-12-09, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> There is no mention in the Roadmap of Egyptian Hieratic and Demotic. Is > the intention to unify these with Egyptian Hieroglyphic?
We'll wait for more input on this from Egyptologists.
I met with James Allen earlier this year. It's clear that Demotic cannot be unified. Whether it can be encoded at all is a little iffy, though there is a Demotic alphabet which is pretty regular.
At this point it is proving difficult enough simply to move forward on the fairly obvious set of basic Egyptian hieroglyphs needed for the Gardner set and a few Gardner additions.
That's because it's not just a question of putting in some characters. If we want to serve the Egyptological community, we need to engage in a unification and source identification process not unlike CJK (though different in many details). Yes, the first set will be from "Gardner", but what that is really has to be documented more carefully than just churning out a code table from the index to his Grammar. To start with, there are signs in that grammar that aren't in the index as atomic characters.
That set missed Unicode 4.0 and now the Unicode 5.0 in the works. One can only hope that someone will seriously champion them for an as-yet unplanned Unicode 6.0 some years hence.
We have been working on making this activity possible.
> Finally, another historic script not yet roadmapped is the recentlyrediscovered Caucasian Albanian. See> http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/Cauc_alb.htm and
This is worth further investigation. If anyone wishes to provide an analysis to clarify the status of this, that would be great.
I pinged Jost a while back on this. Things are still a bit preliminary, and Jost would rather see progress on Avestan first, I believe.
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
