Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) documents about Egyptian Hieroglyphic (May 2017)

There are several updates and additions to the UTC document register concerning Ancient Egyptian since my previous post on the topic Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) documents about Egyptian Hieroglyphic (March 2017). Hieroglyphic was discussed during the UTC meeting (May 8-12, 2017) and some recommendations made: see L2/17-103 UTC #151 Minutes.

The place for questions, discussion and suggestions is the Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the UCS mailing list (see Informatique et Égyptologie, Cambridge, 2016).

Recent documents

• L2/17-076 Revised proposal for the encoding of an Egyptological YOD and Ugaritic characters; Michel Suignard; 2017-05-09. This replaces the earlier L2/17-076 submitted in March as Proposal for the Encoding of an Egyptological YOD. The names of the YOD upper and lower case characters to be LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH SPIRITUS LENIS and LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH SPIRITUS LENIS. This appear to be generally accepted so we can be cautiously optimistic that a future version of Unicode will resolve this long-standing anomaly.
• L2/17-122R A method for encoding Egyptian quadrats in Unicode (revised); Andrew Glass, et al; 2017-05-16. Minor revision to clarify some technical points following UTC meeting. See my earlier post A method for encoding Egyptian quadrats in Unicode for an overview.
• L2/17/153 Recommendations to UTC #151 May 2017 on Script Proposals; Deborah Anderson; 2017-05-07. Summary of the Script ad hoc group discussion on hieroglyphic, recommending UTC discuss the L2/17-122 quadrat proposal.
• L2/17-171 Future Additions to ISO/IEC 10646 (May 2017); UTC/Deborah Anderson; 2-17-05-17. Additions requested include the Yod (as above) and six Hieroglyphic format control characters characters from L2/17-122 (4 corner and 2 bracket-like controls but not the overlay aka stack control at this time) in addition to the two format controls recommended in January 2016.

Current status of Ancient Egyptian for future Unicode

No decisions appear imminent on hieroglyph repertoire expansion in Unicode but Michel Suignard is making progress on his candidate database.

UTC is now recommending an 8 control character set for representing hieroglyph quadrats in Unicode and this will be running through the standardisation approval pipeline. All those interested in digital hieroglyphic will want to study what is proposed and the degree to which it meets their needs. The controls are:

13430 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH VERTICAL JOINER
13431 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH HORIZONTAL JOINER
13432 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH INSERT TOP START
13433 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH INSERT BOTTOM START
13434 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH INSERT TOP END
13435 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH INSERT BOTTOM END
13437 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH SEGMENT START
13438 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH SEGMENT END

UTC is recommending two new characters for the Egyptological YOD. Namely

A7BC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH SPIRITUS LENIS
A7BD LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH SPIRITUS LENIS

There is a considerable amount of work needed to produce working implementations of the control system and guidelines for usage. There is a case for additional controls. I hope to deal with some of the issues in further blog posts an welcome any suggestions or feedback.

Bob Richmond