Transliteration, keyboards and fonts

A selection of keyboards to ease the typing of transliteration, as well as a list of suitable fonts.

The logic behind those keyboards is the same as the logic of the Manuel de Codage. Basically, typing a will give you an ayin (ꜥ), shift-a (A) will give an aleph ꜣ ; typing x will give you a ḫ and shift-x will give you a ẖ. Uppercase transliteration letters are available when the Caps Lock key has been pressed. So, if Caps Lock is down, x will give you Ḫ, not ḫ or ẖ.

Information about transliteration

There is now a standard, which is the Leyden Unified Translitteration. Some problems are left out of the standard, such as the use of « e » in Late Egyptian, or the various specific signs used in demotic. But I'd suggest to follow it for the non-problematic cases like « q » vs. « ḳ », yod, ayin and aleph.

Today, it's much easier to enter transliteration of Egyptian texts, thanks to Unicode. Things are almost settled. The final touch has been the official attribution of a specific code to the “Egyptological Yod” in Unicode 12 (A7BD ꞽ and A7BC Ꞽ, with the names Latin Small Letter Glottal I and Latin Capital Letter Glottal I for lower and upper-case versions respectively). The only problem is that most fonts don't support this addition yet. Font support is described below.

The Wikipedia page on the subject is a good starting point, as is Daniel Werning's page on the subject

For scientific publication, I strongly advise against non unicode fonts. They will be much, much more difficult to handle for editors and publisher. Internally, a project might use its own encoding - for historical reasons, Ramses uses the old MdC encoding, for instance: that way, we restrict the possible choices between j and i̓, q and ḳ. But for external publication, the Unicode encoding is almost mandatory. Printed publication, in particular, should move to Unicode.

Less fundamental, but still important, it would also be time to avoid using the old english yogh (ȝ) and MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING (ʿ) as aleph and ayin. Both have now specific codes in unicode : ꜣ and ꜥ.

Qenherkhopeshef's keyboards

Mac version for the Leyden Standard

Those keyboards have been created through the great utility called Ukulele.

A set of keyboards for Mac users. Available for french keyboards and US keyboards, with a selection of possible yods.

Note: : I have decided to favour the so-called Leyden Unified Translitteration.

You will find the old keyboards in the folder Mac/legacy.

Windows version

Created through Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator. They are not as well polished as the Mac OS keyboards. I don't usually develop on Windows.

Download Windows Keyboards.

The current version of the Windows Keyboard is not up-to-date at all (no Leyden standard). I might create a Keyman french keyboard version at some point, but meanwhile would suggest the use of one of Daniel Werning's keyboards. He has a US keyboard which should be ok.

Old package

I have an outdated package with both an ugly font and convenient keyboards called pack_translit.zip.

I'd suggest to use other fonts (see above and below,) and to download my specific keyboards.

Fonts

As of february 2024 I haven't looked at the current state of affairs recently, so some fonts might have improved. I would suggest having a look at Daniel Werning page on Egyptological Unicode Fonts' for more recent information.

New Athena Unicode has all the characters you need, and are provided in most styles and weights, under an open-source licence.

Support for the recent A7BD code for "yod" can be found in the following fonts:

I used to suggest Charis SIL, which has all variations of bold and italic, or Gentium Plus which is nicer if you like old-style (Garalde) fonts, but currently lacks bold. However, those two fonts lack the "new" yod.

List of fonts which have at least egyptological aleph and ayin

This is a moving target. Expect the list to be extended. In some case, the glyphs have changed over time (for instance for Charis SIL).

Currently, if you are looking for free fonts, the most practical ones seems to be Gentium, Charis or New Athena Unicode, and perhaps Roboto (the latter if you want a sans-serif font).

If you know of a font (free or commercial) which should be added to this list, please mail me.

I haven't tested all fonts for the new yod code yet. If you know of fonts which cover the A7BC/A7BD code for yod, feel free to tell me.

Leyden-ready fonts

Other fonts

Some of those fonts might cover the full range of needed chars, but I haven't checked them recently.

Key

Yod

When a yod is available, list it:

A question mark is used to indicate that the uppercase variant hasn't got the correct position for the diacritic mark (in front of the "I"). Note that the "best" behaviour would be in theory (yod/A7BC, yod/313?, yod/486), as U+0313 should appear above the "I" to conform with other writing systems.

A font with just yod/A7BC would be perfect for “new” texts, but might be annoying if you must gather legacy transliteration texts (well, in this case, things being what they are, you are probably lucky if they are unicode at all).

Available Font Styles

The bold text (R, I...) refers to the main available styles:

Font Licences (currently very sketchy)

(thanks to Alexander Ilin-Tomich and So Miyagawa for pointers)

Other pages on the subject

A brief history of computer fonts for transliteration

(to be done)