Demotic Egyptian Transliteration and Unicode Demotic Egyptian Transliteration and UnicodeIn support of its own research and publication efforts related to its many Demotic papyri, and to serve other papyrologists and Egyptologists, the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri is pleased to make available tools for entering ancient Egyptian transliteration in accordance with the Unicode standard. This document and the downloadable keyboards and font are the work of Donald Mastronarde, who also supports polytonic Greek Unicode input and fonts for Mac OS X through the GreekKeys package of the American Philological Association. CTP also makes available a free input (Mac or Windows) for Coptic Unicode.
A list of the characters used in the two major transliteration schemes is provided in a draft document available here in PDF format. Comments are welcome (directed to the address in the document). Most of the characters needed are already accepted in the Unicode standard and are present in one or more of the major system fonts of Mac OS X and Windows XP.
Most of the characters with diacritics can be composed from official Unicode codepoints, and in many cases there is also a Unicode codepoint for the precomposed character. There is also an existing proposal for the characters missing from the current Unicode standard: alef, yod, and ayin. This proposal has been discussed by the Unicode Technical Committee in early November 2005. [Download proposal n2241.pdf]. The upshot of that discussion is that uppercase and lowercase forms of alef and ayin will probably be added to Unicode standard, while the combining diacritic used to form yod will be supplied by an existing codepoint unless further strong arguments are presented to the UTC. The UTC sugested that the user community express a preference between U+0313 COMBINING COMMA ABOVE [ ̓ ] (this is the diacritic used for the smooth breathing of polytonic Greek, among other things) or U+0357 COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE [ ͗ ]. Of those who have expressed an opinion as of April 7, 2006, preferences have been fairly evenly split between the two choices, and several comments ask that the UTC reconsider approving a separate codepoint. Expressions of opinion on this question are still welcome.
For interim use, the missing characters have been added with temporary unofficial codepoints in the Private Use Area of Unicode in the free font New Athena Unicode (version 2.6 or higher).
There is a choice between a very strict, a strict, and a temporary less strict way to enter the characters needed for Demotic.
The very strict method is to use only existing codepoints in the Unicode 4.1 standard and to express composed characters (such as c with caron above) by using two codepoints (in this example, first type c and then enter the character encoded as the combining caron). If you follow this method, you will be unable to use Unicode until codepoints are approved for the missing characters. And in some applications, the composed characters on the screen and in print may look less than perfect.
The strict method is to make minimal use of the Private Use Area as an interim measure (only for alef, ayin, and yod), and to enter the other characters using either the separate codepoints as for the previous method or using the codepoints for existing precomposed characters. In the latter case, there will be a few characters that lack a precomposed form and thus may appear less than perfect.
The least strict way is to use as many precomposed characters as possible and to use the Private Use Area both for alef, ayin, and yod and for a few other precomposed characters not in Unicode. This should be regarded as an interim measure, necessary for practical cross-platform word-processing right now.
More details about the Unicode codepoints and methods of entering the characters in Windows and Mac OS X are provided in the PDF available for download.
For those using Mac OS X, an input is provided, entitled "Demotic Egyptian." Version 1 of this is now available for download. The document accompanying the download explains how to install and use it. This input is specifically designed to be used with New Athena Unicode font (to be downloaded separately), since this is currently the only font that has the PUA assignments that the input assumes. NOTE: The testing version (0.8) previously available is not as complete or as well documented, and users who installed it are advised to upgrade to the new release. It is strongly recommended when upgrading to turn off the Demotic Egyptian input in System Preferences:International (Input menu pane) before you install the new file "demotic.bundle" over the old one.
A comparable keyboard layout for Demotic Transliteration for Windows XP is now ready for testing, and may be downloaded here. The document accompanying the download explains how to install and use it. This input is specifically designed to be used with New Athena Unicode font (to be downloaded separately), since this is currently the only font that has the PUA assignments that the input assumes.