On a rainy Sunday last fall, I decided to visit one the jewels of the world culture,
the Musée du Louvre in Paris I had not visited for years. Great treasures lie hidden within this
ancient structure, renewed by central glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei. That afternoon,
I planned to focus on the wonderful collection in the Egyptian antiquities department.
Of course I admired all the remnants of what used to be one of the cradles of the western civilization --
those monumental statues, those incredible sarcophagi, and all of those objects that are artifacts
from a glorious civilization. But more than those objects, there is one legacy that particularly
kept my attention during this visit: Writing! We've all seen hieroglyphs. They are not a mystery anymore, thanks to French scientist Champollion
- also contributor of the Musée du Louvre's creation - who decrypted the Rosetta stone.
However, they still excite imagination. Also perhaps they are a link between spirituality and day to day life.
And this is what writing has always been for the past 5 millenniums. Five thousand years later, by imagining those scribes laying down their text on a papyrus,
it came to my mind these crazy thoughts: What would an IT system look like today if it would have
to support hieroglyphic script? Indeed, the modern scribes have already changed from their lotus
seating position and parchments to comfortable chairs and Tablet PCs. But, would it be possible to
use a Windows system for ancient Egyptian? Of course, Hieroglyphic characters have yet to be officially proposed for addition into the Unicode Standard and hieroglyphic fonts do not exist today but we can imagine the possible engineering
work done to map to such fonts. Of course, there is no antique glossary that describes modern terminology.
But based on scientists and the enthusiast community, it could be possible to define neologisms
that keep a certain idea of the two-earths lifestyle. An Input Method Editor should also be set
to easily support the unilateral ideograms (alphabet) or the bi & triliteral ones (phonemes). User locales are an interesting topic too. Locales determine which default settings a user
wants for formatting dates, times, currency, etc. But could we consider a date format that corresponds
to our newer civilizations? Or would we also support the coexistence of possible double system of the
ancient Egypt (solar & lunar)? Number formats is a challenge as well since ancient Egyptians did
not know the decimal system, even though -we're lucky- they had a base-10 counting system.
The real challenge is definitely to write and read the glyphs. Hieroglyphic, as a divine writing,
obeys to rules that may not be compliant with Cartesian computing. Most of time, lines are read from right to left.
This direction is always indicated by the orientation of the heads drawn in hieroglyphs.
Thus, a complete mirroring would be needed by the operating system, not only in the script direction,
but also on the glyphs. Additionally, writing direction is sometimes modified when the proximity of
religious monument forces glyphs to look at the deities. Furthermore, hieroglyphs can be written from bottom to top,
or sometimes have alternate direction changes from line to line (from right to left on the first line,
then from left to right on second line, and so on). None of the bi-directional scripts used in IT systems today
- for example Hebrew or Arabic -, nor the Chinese modern writing can rival such complexity. Simplified forms of hieroglyphs, known as hieratic scripts, became the writing of the people in ancient Egypt,
leaving the divinity format to a rational way of expression. This would probably be the one we could technically
adapt today for modern computing. Nevertheless, arguing that hieroglyphic Egyptian is a dead script and that
there is effectively no business reason to support this language may reflect the today's world-ready issues
in IT projects, especially when international projects are supported by mono-cultural teams. So this could
be an interesting challenge for anyone who wants to create international software -- to think about this
leitmotif: "Can my software be ancient Egyptian-Ready?" Bibliography
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Other Myths, Other Languages…
Not only dead languages can increase demand for software internationalization. Some communities have
been working to define computing versions of some languages that… do not exist... For example: Support for Klingon language from
Star Trek was studied by the Linux community.
The The Lord of the Rings' Elvish Tengwar script
and the associated input methods also have some interesting Windows fans.
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