New CJK characters

[Ken Whistler]

Because *quadrats* are sequences of independent signs organized into 
square boxes for presentation. They are conceived of that way by modern 
day Egyptologists, and presumably also by the people who wrote them 
millennia ago.

Although both hieroglyphics and Han characters are graphically complex 
and both have concepts of dynamic (and somewhat recursive) principles 
for construction of more complex forms, when examined in detail the 
systems are quite distinct. And the way the writing systems map onto the 
languages involved is quite distinct as well.

And then there is the simple fact of precedent, which weighs heavily on 
encoding decisions for complex scripts.

For Han, we started with the existing fact of implemented JIS and GB 
systems and all their cousins, which encoded Han characters atomically 
(by necessity), and treated the dynamic structure of Han characters the 
same way almost all CJK dictionaries do: by enumerated list.

For Egyptian hieroglyphs we started with the Gardiner list of *signs* 
(fundamental to Egyptian study). Gardiner and Egyptologists (and the 
implementations) subsequently assumed that quadrats are built up from 
the signs dynamically. The atomic unit is not the quadrat.

--Ken

On 11/5/2021 6:25 AM, abrahamgross--- via Unicode wrote:
> Looking at TUS §11.4 Egyptian Hieroglyphs you can see that there they 
> decided to yes use control characters to shape complex characters.
> Anyone know why that is?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20211105/ac8495ac/attachment.htm>