Re: sampi et al. (was: A funny linguistic subway experience &c)

Raymond Brown wrote:

> My own feeling is that sampi could be used for transcription purposes;
That sounds right.  One could make an archaic-Greek font to represent
a consistent set of archaic glyphs, while using the same character
codes.  Then a mere font change would change the text from palaeographic
to readable.  :-)

> But if Unicode does not include all the forms that palaeographers would be
> interested in (and probably that is asking for too much), what do
> palaeographers do when they need to use such forms in electronic media?
Either use archaic fonts as described above, or more often, graphical
representations of entire documents.

> Or should there be Unicode norms for the (main) different local alphabets
> used amomg the ancient Greeks before the standard Ionian alphabet replaced
> them when Koine replaced the local dialects?
Not unless they are structurally different from standard Greek script.  If
there are distinct letters that are not in standard Greek, then let me know.

Currently Coptic is also unified with Greek (except for the six Coptic-specific
letters shei, fei, khei, hori, gangia, shima, dei); some people (including
me) think that was a mistake, and that Coptic should receive its own block
of Unicode characters.  Gothic OTOH is definitely not going to be unified
with Greek, despite its distinctly Greek-manuscript-ish appearance.

--
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