Comments on: Decipher http://www.samizdata.net/2004/07/decipher/ A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective Sat, 18 May 2013 08:53:31 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Evan McElravy http://www.samizdata.net/2004/07/decipher/#comment-56377 Evan McElravy Mon, 26 Jul 2004 15:10:11 +0000 http://192.168.200.139/?p=6439#comment-56377 Great review, by the way, Findlay.

]]> By: Evan McElravy http://www.samizdata.net/2004/07/decipher/#comment-56376 Evan McElravy Mon, 26 Jul 2004 15:07:33 +0000 http://192.168.200.139/?p=6439#comment-56376 The fascinating Alphabetum Unicode font, which I use, includes characters for, among quite a lot else, Ugaritic and Old Persian. According to the manual for this font, the former has 30 characters and the latter 50 (“The Old Persian repertoire contains 36 signs which represent consonants plus vowels, a set of five numbers (the rest numbers are built up by adding the base numbers together cumulatively), one word divider (a slanting wedge) and eight ideograms.”). Both are apparently part of the standard Unicode inventory, though of course fonts that use them are relatively few. Unicode, by the way, is one of the truly great open technology standards to have emerged, and yet another black mark against Microsoft is that it is another of these that they’ve ignored and marginalized for far too long, though they’ve finally gotten around to recognizing it and deploying it. In a rather inferior (at least to the internal Apple text rendering in OS X) manner, of course, but at long last nonetheless. (See http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/greekkeys/GreekKeys.html for a bit on that.)

]]> By: UnknownSage http://www.samizdata.net/2004/07/decipher/#comment-56375 UnknownSage Mon, 26 Jul 2004 14:09:16 +0000 http://192.168.200.139/?p=6439#comment-56375 On the Unicode website -

http://www.unicode.org/

- read Michael Everson’s proposal for a standard Unicode 16-bit encoding for Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Ugaritic (a Semitic consonantal alphabet that just looks like cuneiform) & Old Persian cuneiform (which is halfway between a syllabary & an alphabet in exactly the same way as the Indian scripts) are separate Unicode encoding proposals.

There’s a lot of very important Sumerian & Akkadian (Babylonian & Assyrian) literature, not only “belles lettres” but scientific stuff – including astronomy & even a rather sophisticated linguistics (just possibly the ancestor of the Paninian Indian tradition). Mesopotamian historical records are essential if we hope to assemble a unified history of the ancient world – one that handles Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Biblical, Old Persian & early Greek records synoptically.

]]> By: Francis http://www.samizdata.net/2004/07/decipher/#comment-56374 Francis Mon, 26 Jul 2004 08:22:01 +0000 http://192.168.200.139/?p=6439#comment-56374 FWIW a quick google indicates that there are plenty of bueiform fonts for compuetrs:- http://www.google.com/search?q=cuneiform+font&sourceid=opera&num=100&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

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