ISO 15924 : missing indication of support for Syriac variants

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 01:54:52 +0200
Philippe Verdy via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> In fact the ligatures system for the "cursive" Egyptian Hieratic is so
> complex (and may also have its own variants showing its progression
> from Hieroglyphs to Demotic or Old Coptic), that probably Hieratic
> should no longer be considered "unified" with Hieroglyphs, and its
> existing ISO 15924 code is then not represented at all in Unicode.

Writing hieroglyphic text as plain text has only been supported since
Unicode 12.0, so it may take a little while to explore workable encoding
conventions.

A significant issue is that the hieratic script is right to left but
Unicode only standardises the encoding of left-to-right
transcriptions.  I don't recall the difference between retrograde v.
normal text being declared a style difference.

For comparison, we still have no guidance on how to encode sexagesimal
Mesopotamian cuneiform numbers, e.g. '610' v. '20' written using the U
graphic element.

Richard.