Talk:m-m

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Deletion discussion[edit]

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.


Person who marked it says the hyphen is outdated. The fuck if I know. Somebody look at the history and find hirm and tell hirm to make hirs case here. — [Ric Laurent]15:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, according to Wikipedia "The encoding system of the Manuel de Codage has since been adopted by international Egyptology as the official common standard for registering hieroglyphic texts on the computer." However, Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-09/Romanization of languages in ancient scripts 2 curiously doesn't mention allowing Egyptian in Latin script, though we do, and I don't think there's any appetite to delete them, is there? Anyway the user who nominated this for speedy deletion has been acting in good faith but should not be removing these. Please revert any instance of him/her speedy deleting Egyptian entries in Manuel de Codage format. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think I'm going to have to address a couple of things here. Firstly, my reason for marking it for deletion is that the hyphen should not be there (even in the Manuel de Codage system). Manuel de Codage uses the hyphen to indicate phrases which represent a single idea: e.g. wAD (blue) + wr (big) = wAD-wr (the sea). The hyphen in m-m seems to have been based on the idea that it was composed of m (in) + m (in), but that is no longer believed to be the case: Allen's Middle Egyptian Grammar, pg 84, which is definitive (for the time being) treats it as a single word, not a compound. The manuel de codage transliteration ought therefore to be mm (which is the same as the Gardiner/Allen/everyone else transliteration). This is why I speedy-deleted. I see now that my expanation for that decision was not very clear and that, the matter being more contentious than I thought, I should have rfded. I still think that it should be deleted
A couple of other things, regarding Egyptian (which you may wish to skip if you're not particularly interested): I have no intention of speedy deleting entries on the grounds that they are Manuel de Codage. However, I do think that a certain amount of consistency is necessary, and per several conversations on my talk page (e.g. User_talk:Furius#Redirects) and the talk page of WT:AEGY I have been converting them to redirects, soft or hard. Manuel de Codage is a transliteration for getting around the lack of the special characters which normal Egyptian transliteration requires (A problem which increasingly does not exist), and, as a workaround, I don't think it should receive primacy on wiktionary.
Thirdly, I not keen for Egyptian entries to have hieroglyphs in their namespace, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the main namespace does not display them correctly (even when they are not little boxes) - it just puts them one beside the other, so that what should be
it W
r
n
n
n
N36
N23 Z1
becomes
itWrnnnN36N23Z1
(jtrw - river), which is a bit like breaking Korean hangul up into its constituent parts (i.e. almost never done and hideous). Note that in the latter case, the r hieroglyph (the large flattened oval) now comes after the w hieroglyph (the curl), even though it is pronounced before it. Furthermore, the main Egyptian fonts (Aegyptus and its derived forms) are also so fine that the individual characters are difficult to read (quite apart from the fact that they aren't forming words in the way that a reader expects them to). Secondly, it assumes that hieroglyphs are far more static than they actually are - the writings are actually highly variable: jtrw has eight major variant forms, and nearly infinite variations on them. All variants, however, were understood as jtrw. Thirdly, many rarer hieroglyphs do not occur in unicode - making it impossible to put them in the namespace (s3qb is an example - its determinative is a rhinoceros, but it cannot be found in unicode (were it included, it would appear between 78034 & 78077, but it is not there, as you can see on this page: Appendix:Unicode/Egyptian Hieroglyphs). Furius (talk) 23:36, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What script to have Egyptian entries in seems like a BP matter. As for this specific entry: trusting Furius, I've deleted it. - -sche (discuss) 03:26, 20 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]