ISO 15924 : missing indication of support for Syriac variants

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 7/17/2019 4:54 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
> then the Unicode version (age) used for Hieroglyphs should also be 
> assigned to Hieratic.
It is already.
>
> 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.

It *is* considered unified with Egyptian hieroglyphs, until such time as 
anyone would make a serious case that the Unicode Standard (and students 
of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, in both their classic, monumental forms and 
in hieratic) would be better served by a disunification.

Note that *many* cursive forms of scripts are not easily "supported" by 
out-of-the-box plain text implementations, for obvious reasons. And in 
the case of Egyptian hieroglyphs, it would probably be a good strategy 
to first get some experience in implementations/fonts supporting the 
Unicode 12.0 controls for hieroglyphs, before worrying too much about 
what does or doesn't work to represent hieratic texts adequately. 
(Demotic is clearly a different case.)

>
> For now ISO 15924 still does not consider Egyptian Hieratic to be 
> "unified" with Egyptian Hieroglyphs; this is not indicated in its 
> descriptive names given in English or French with a suffix like 
> "(cursive variant of Egyptian Hieroglyphs)", *and it has no "Unicode 
> Age" version given, as if it was still not encoded at all by Unicode*,

That latter part of that statement (highlighted) is false, as is easily 
determined by simple inspection of the Egyh entry on:

https://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html

--Ken


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