Towards a Systematisation of Palaeohispanic Scripts in Unicode: synthesising multiple transcription hypotheses into two consensus encodings

Abstract

This work is a preliminary attempt at the systematisation of the Palaeohispanic scripts into the Unicode standard, which have the goal to establish the basic set of meaningful signs in a script or a group of closely-related scripts. With regard to the number of character sets needed to encode all the Palaeohispanic scripts, our proposal is to classify them into two groups, the north-eastern Iberian, that includes the north-eastern Iberian script itself and the Celtiberian script, and the southern Palaeohispanic that includes the south-eastern Iberian script, the south-western script and the Espanca script. The basic set of signs for the north-eastern Iberian group is relatively easy to establish, as this script, attested in more than 2,000 inscriptions and nearly a dozen abecedaries, is almost fully deciphered. On the other hand, the selection of a basic set of signs for the southern Palaeohispanic group is a more difficult task, since only less than two hundred southern inscriptions are currently known, no other abecedary than the one from Espanca is attested, and more than a third of the southern signs are identified merely with a conventional code, since scholars disagree about their values, or they are simply unknown.