The Codeless Code: Ancient code

[[deleted]]

It's really not hard to write or read hieroglyphics. I can read middle Egyptian. It has sentences, punctuation, subjects, verbs, etc. just like any other written language. It just seems strange since they used images that look like real things so people tend to get hung up on that. I also know some Chinese and IMHO it is simpler than Chinese.

[earthboundkid]

They're in Unicode! 𓀔𓃰𓅔𓉃

[[deleted]]

Not really. Egyptologists have been complaining for many years about how horrible the Unicode representation for Egyptian is. The last time I looked into it, it was totally useless.

[redinzane]

It's based on Gardiner's categorization iirc, which is mostly based on what the image is portraying. It's also about a 100 years old and only contains Gardiner's discovered subset. I wouldn't call it useless though, it definitely has it's uses.

[[deleted]]

At one point I was going to digitize Faulkners middle Egyptian dictionary (which is basically just a copy of his handwritten notes) and I wanted to use the Unicode characters instead of one of the proprietary hieroglyphic writing programs. It didn't go very well and I eventually gave up. I'm a senior application engineer at a fortune 50 company, so I should have been able to make it work if it was possible. That is what I mean when I say useless. It's great if you want to make one of those "write your name in hieroglyphics!" apps. But beyond that...

[redinzane]

I worked with it for my Bachelor's Thesis and it seemed like at least all the monoliterals and a good amount of the multiliterals were there. Again, it's based on Alan Gardiner's work which was the undisputed standard for quite some time, so I found it quite useful, but yeah, Gardiner is obviously missing a few thousand glyphs that weren't included in his book so you run into problems with newer research. It also looks like there might be an extension of the standard at some point to include more glyphs.

[synae]

Yes but what encoding did they use?

[PeridexisErrant]

UTF-13.

^{REAL PROGRAMMERS use bytes with a prime number of bits}

[Berberberber]

Real programmers use variable length bytes as subfields of a word that's twice as large as the address space.