Honestly, my biggest question is: Why did this get its own Unicode block? It's weird that symbols found on literally one object in history have gotten their own unique Unicode assignments.
> Phaistos Disc characters, whether syllables, or letters, or board-game dingbats, have historical and cultural significance, as attested in the large number of publications dealing with it. As noted above, the Wikipedia has articles about the Phaistos Disc in ten languages. The 30+ documents listed in the bibliography in this proposal are by no means the only documents printed which deal with the Phaistos Disc characters. The English Wikipedia article gives Phaistos Disc characters inline in text as well as in tables (Figure 8). Other documents exist which present the Phaistos Disc characters either inline (Figure 8) or in tables (Figures 1, 2, 5, 6, 7). It is true that the image of the Phaistos Disc itself is easy to represent with simple drawing (see Figure 3) but the discussion of its characters inline in Latin text is not.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06095-n3066-phaistos.pdf
Also if you already had unicode machiinery, which you will if you're writing a paper, you'd now need a 2nd mechanism for rendering; the SVG you mentioned.
Unicode is meant to be universal so it makes sense to me.
[0] which is indeed on the disk, although the minoans likely didn't call it that.
My question is whether, considering these glyphs were included in Unicode for the purpose of usage as you described, those who would use it be technically sophisticated enough to actually do so?
i.e. we built it, but will they come?
But from that limited position, such characters are just numbers in the unicode spec.
If the appropriate font is installed on the document creators' and document readers' machines, it will render just like any other character such as the unicode you're reading here. If the font isn't present you'll probably get the number printed \u12345 or something similar.
But I am not an expert and if one wants to chime in here, please do.
Are there proposals to create a Unicode block for, say, the Voynich Manuscript? There's been much more written about that than this disc.
Any semantics we assign to it are a number (unicode value), possible collation (ordering), and the name (possibly other stuff, I don't know). So if we found more phaistos disks with punky-mohawk-guy on that, and we decided they were intended by the original creators to mean the same 'character' on all disks, all those glyphs would get the same unicode character. Scholars could then index them by the same 'character', look for relationsips between those characters they've established are the same.
More concretely, what a letter is in english doesn't link much to how it looks. For example, the uppercase letters here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gebrochene_Schriften.png are all english but to my eyes, each taken individually, are grotesques and some (like the capital 'H' in Textur font), are illegible to me. Literally I would not guess what letter it is. Yet they're all your common or garden alphabetical letters.
So the semantics are, whatever the 'H' looks like, we know what it is, how to sort with it, where to find it in an (english) dictionary, etc.
HTH (and IANAExpert)