Wiktionary talk:About Demotic

Have you seen the Demotic Palaeographical Database Project? It’s still in beta, but there’s a wealth of resources here that could be ported over to Wiktionary without too much trouble. It’s also the only place I’ve ever seen functioning Unicode-based Demotic text. Rhemmiel (talk) 09:12, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Yep! That's what I've been using to draw all the images of Demotic characters we use in our entries. I went through the signlist in the database and collected all the glyphs attested more than 30 times to have a list of priority glyphs to draw, and for the actual process I use their manuscript facsimiles to check what the basic form is, which variant forms are more common, which glyphs are distinct from each other and which are not, and so on. (This doesn't always agree with how the Unicode font they use treats them – their font draws sn and  mꜣꜥ / ẖt as if they were identical, but if you look at how the scribes actually wrote them in the manuscript facsimiles, they’re always distinct within any given manuscript.) Demotic really needs to be encoded separately from hieroglyphs in Unicode (and probably will be, when Demotists get around to it) – between the many-to-one correspondences (  and   are both ), the one-to-many correspondences (  is both  and ), the ligatures that are really just new characters of their own (  is ), and the many characters that are used in entirely different ways from their hieroglyphic precursors, it doesn’t really make sense to treat it as a variant of the same script. It’s an impressive miracle of kludges that the Palaeographical Database has it working that way at all! – but for our part, as a long-term solution, I’d rather wait until Demotic itself is properly encoded.
 * Do you by any chance know what copyright/license their text corpus is under? I can’t seem to find it. I know the manuscript facsimiles are public domain, but it would be nice if we could also use their transliterations and translations. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 15:58, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah I saw the Demotic images you’ve been adding to entries, they look great! And I agree, Demotic is badly in need of separate unicode points, it’s a very different system. As far as Hieroglyphic unicode fonts go, have you seen Marwan Kilani’s Djehuty project/EgyptianHiero font? It works pretty well for me personally, although it’s ultimately not a substitute for properly formatted text with control characters, at least for a site like Wiktionary. Also, I looked around for the Demotic Database’s licensing info but couldn’t find anything either. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to shoot them an email. Rhemmiel (talk) 03:52, 27 November 2020 (UTC)