2,000+ awesome hieroglyphs, coming soon to Unicode

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/21/michael-suignard.html

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So… one of the earliest emoji sets?

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The one I need the most isn’t in there, man pooping.

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I seriously just want barf to be a diacritic that can modify any face emoji (human or nonhuman).

I mean smiling cat face with heart eyes barfing? Of course that happens in real life!

Well wait, no, I want more:

  • Press and hold on cats and dogs to get a selection of species

  • Press and hold on lipstick for a rainbow of colors

  • Press and hold on apples to get a selection of varietals

I think you see the pattern here.

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Have I told you lately that I love you?

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Actually not so much. Emojis seem to be mostly used as ideograms (heart) and visual puns (eggplant). Although hieroglyphics were often of identifiable things, they represented the sound of the word rather than the idea, so mostly they were a rebus system. That is, to use the English equivalent, a “bee” hieroglyph would represent the insect but also the verb in “I’ll be there.” To use an Egyptian example, “son of Ra” was represented with a duck hieroglyph (a homonym, apparently, for “son”) and the Sun (Ra) hieroglyph. (Which means, if we used the same characters in a rebus system to represent an English phrase, it would, ironically, be “son of a duck.”)

Oh, it should be in there.

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Celebrate the ancient Egyptian way, with some artisanal heket:

https://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/beer.html

(Okay, the stuff is barely alcohol, but at least you can drive later.)

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Well if they have room for:

  • 1302C MAN STRADDLING TWO GIRAFFES JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMME-STYLE,
  • 13664 MAN ABOUT TO RIGHTEOUSLY BASH SOME CYMBALS, and
  • 13A40 WOMAN BREAST FEEDING A DUNG BEETLE

they mos def should have man pooping…

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Well, finally! The Ancient Egyptians have been asking for a Unicode font for thousands of years.

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OK, 130BA, and 130B8 are clear enough in their meaning, but what the heck is 130B9? It looks almost like a surgical procedure…

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Phallus croquet. Certainly no less practical than using flamingos, and far more educational.

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unicode_string = byte_stream.decode(‘heiroglyph-egypt’)

Finally I can correctly load those really old documents.

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Wow, the Unicode consortium taking a break from emoji. That’s not something you see every day.

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Maybe its not their job but I would love to see some standard fonts that would just plain work with all code points. I have had to write too many workarounds to get files with strange characters to render. They don’t have to be great fonts, just something that works across the board.

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What about Hieratic?

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Unicode range: U+13000–U+1342F (unified with Egyptian hieroglyphs)

According to google.

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Since hieroglyphics aren’t ideograms (occasionally they’re logograms where they represent what they look like), the object overlaying the phallus may not represent anything being done to or with the phallus and is is just there for phonetic value. I think the addition represents, by itself, a folded cloth, but it shows up combined with other symbols (e.g. a horned asp) to make up third hieroglyphics. According to something I saw, the hieroglyphic may represent an erection (or the process of becoming erect - it’s unclear to me).

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The one I need the most isn’t in there, man pooping.

But it is in there! You can find it on page 27 of the document.

image

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Written language has come full circle

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You laugh, but where I work we actually used this in a recent ebook.

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