Preliminary inquiry: Sigla for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

[catherine butler]

"> Since the top scholars still haven't resolved the exact shapes, but all agree on the identities being indicated (man, woman, etc), could the Unicode leave the exact shapes up to future debate, but set aside some two-dozen slots using Joyce's own verbal designations? (HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy, etc) 
That's usually not how it's done."

The Phaistos Disc's Unicode block names the characters after best-guesses of what they depict. If it's ever solved, we might realize some guesses were wrong, and re-draw them, but the Unicode numbering can stay the same. This could work similarly.  The old Finnegans Wake Circular used ascii designations: $E, $A, $I.1, etc. that everyone agrees on. But trying to resolve subtle questions like "Is the middle horizontal of the 'E' shorter?" by collating all handwritten exemplars will be a labor of decades...