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  • Oct 10, 2026, 5:49 AM

    @ZDL For Greek Unification to be truly Greek, it must include unifying the Cyrillic 'ш' and Egyptian '𓆷' and perhaps also Hebrew 'ש' Backwards compatibility!

    Strangely, Unicode has unified the three first generations of Egyptian glyphs — hieroglyphs, Hieratic, and Demotic — together. Or, well, it pretended to. The transition covers over some three thousand years of literary cultures, and linear counterparts don't always exist. Coptic is separate, although there was an early attempt to unify it with Greek; didn't work out, so now Unicode has Greek-And-Coptic letters, and then separate Coptic letters.

    On the other hand, most Brahmic scripts are very closely related syllabaries, and yet, Unicode hasn't seen it fit to unify those, let alone the hundreds of different forms of the Hindu-Arabic decimal digits that have proliferated in Asian scripts.

    @dancingtreefrog @timtfj

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  • Oct 11, 2026, 11:38 AM

    @vnikolov Well, sort of.

    The corresponding Coptic letter is Ϣ. As you know, most Coptic letters come from Greek, but this one is one of the few that comes from Demotic Egyptian, specifically because Greek doesn't have the corresponding sound, and I suppose the loose reinterpretation technique that Greeks had used when Greek letters were still being actively invented, most significantly, to make a couple of Phoenician consonants into Greek vowels, had gone out of fashion.

    @ZDL @dancingtreefrog timtfj@mastodon.social

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  • Oct 11, 2026, 12:31 PM

    Right.

    I think the differences in phonetics jumped to my mind so fast that they shadowed the point about the connection between the origins of Cyrillic, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Phoenician writing.
    This is a simplified list in alphabetical order; chronological order would be better (with Cyrillic last), but I am not sure how to order then the variants of Greek writing versus Hebrew writing.

    @riley @ZDL @dancingtreefrog

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