“Da die Vokalisation ägyptischen Sprachmaterials aus vorkoptischer Zeit nicht annähernd vollständig zu rekonstruieren ist, hat es sich eingebürgert, eine künstlich konstruierte Hilfsaussprache zu benutzen, die keinerlei sprachhistorischen Eigenwert besitzt.
Selbst die in den allermeisten Fällen jegliche Authentizität entbehrende Aussprache einiger Zeichen als Vokale reichte nicht aus, zu bewirken, daß sich etwa in der Umschrift nur solche Lautfolgen ergäben, die von Gelehrten romanischer, slavischer, semitischer oder germanischer Zunge zwanglos hätten benutzt werden können.”
Since the vocalization of Egyptian linguistic material from pre-Coptic times is not nearly completely reconstructable, it has become common practice to create an artificial constructed auxiliary pronunciation that has no linguistic historically intrinsic value.
Even the pronunciation of some characters as vowels, which in the vast majority of cases lacks authenticity, was not sufficient to ensure that, for example, only those phonetic sequences would occur in the transcription that could have been used effortlessly by scholars of Romanesque, Slavic, Semitic or Germanic tongues.
The valuable thing about the standard Egyptological pronunciation is that people can sit around a table, read a text, and understand what is being read without having to learn a strange new phonetic inventory. How close it sounds to the real thing is irrelevant for what it's uses for. Anyone using phonetics to look at how Egyptian changed over time isn't using standard Egyptological pronunciation to do so. While Stuart Tyson Smith's reconstruction of an Egyptologist-approved dialect of Egyptian for the Stargate movie is pretty fun, it's not like we have any native speakers we need to communicate.
Different field, but it drives me crazy that people talk about Chinese philosophy and insist on using Mandarin pinyin for it. Mandarin is language that evolved from Classical Chinese thousands of years later! There are other, equally valid contemporary derived pronunciations like Cantonese or even Japanese and Korean. The reason to use Mandarin is because it is the most widely spoken language derived from Classical Chinese, but it's 100% not how Confucius or any of them spoke!
They are pretty well founded. You can read old rhyme dictionaries and see how the words evolved eg when borrowed by Japan at one time and then when borrowed again a couple of hundred years later. We can’t ever know 100% but it’s not idle speculation either.
> I live on a small farm with his wife, son, and two dogs.
Should you trust translations into English by someone who writes sentences like this? <joking>
In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal said hieroglyphics were actually a comic strip about a character named Sphinxy. Always hoped that was true.
Yes, this is not clearly explained. The "pronunciation" is more like an indication about how to conventionally pronounce the transcribed text, and not a faithful description of the original pronunciation.
The letters said to be pronounced "ee" and "oo" above, are not the vowels I and U, but the consonants I and U, which in English are written Y and W, like in "yet" and "wet" (i.e. they correspond to Semitic yodh and waw).
So in Egyptian they were normally followed by a vowel, which is not written, so usually unknown. Thus the conventional pronunciation described in the article recommends that instead of replacing the unknown vowel with E, like for the other consonants, one should pronounce Y and W as vowels, i.e. as long I and U, which in English are typically written as EE and OO.
The sign recommended to be pronounced "ah" was some guttural consonant, perhaps like Semitic aleph or ayin. It was also followed by an unknown vowel, so pronouncing it as a vowel is just a convention.
The indications about how to pronounce the vowels of other languages in English always appear comic for the speakers of other languages written with the Latin alphabet, due to the great discrepancy between how vowels are written in English and in the other languages, where it is seldom necessary to give word examples in order to describe precisely which vowels are meant.
While the reason why Egyptian did not write the vowels is uncertain, this fact had a huge importance in the history of the world.
The Semitic alphabet has inherited this feature, together with its later variants, e.g. the Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets. Other writing systems derived from Semitic alphabets, i.e. the European and Indian writing systems, have introduced means for also writing the vowels, but on the base provided by the separate writing of consonants.
All the other writing systems that have been developed completely independent from the Egyptian writing system have been based on signs for syllables or for words, which has resulted in much more complex writing systems than those that have started from the small set of signs needed to write only the consonants.
It's a class of script. A language with a script that omits vowels is called a "(pure) abjad(ic)" language. Egyptian (arguably, I'm not a linguist) and Arabic are examples of "impure abjad" languages. Usually they have diacritics that hint at vowel sounds but are otherwise devoid of explicit vowel glyphs, so I'm not sure if Egyptian strictly fits that bill - maybe someone else does. Point is, it's perhaps a bit foreign to latin-language speakers but there's a whole class of languages that do this, or something similar.
There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.
Yeah, definitely. Austrian German is a good example of this. When I first visited I thought I was buying counterfeit goods because it looked like all the familiar products were "misspelled". Turns out they omit vowels pretty frequently.
I’m not a linguist, just an Ancient Egypt amateur geek, but it’s worth noting that hieroglyphs were the formal, monumental script—used on temples, tombs, statues, and religious texts. They’re beautifully drawn and symbolic, but slow to write (think carved calligraphy rather than everyday handwriting).
There were also cursive forms. Ancient Egyptian had three main writing systems used in different contexts: hieroglyphic (formal), hieratic (a handwritten cursive), and later demotic (even more simplified, for everyday administration and legal texts).
To your point, our germanic linguistics Prof (Elmer Antonsen) pointed out memorably that the futhark (runes) were essentially the roman-phoenician characters shaped to coordinate with the grain of wood.
That doesn't explain omitting vowels here. Whatever brevity you gain from omitting vowels is more than made up by the phonetic complements and determinatives you need to make up for their loss. Besides, individual Egyptian hieroglyphs tend to contain a lot of unnecessary detail. Look to hieratic if you want to see what the Egyptians did when writing required some efficiency.
It also seems possible that they were sometimes used to stand for vowels even in real Egyptian phonology, in the same way that certain consonant signs are used in Hebrew and Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis
Aside from your conundrum I'm wondering what "ah as in yacht" could even mean; to this puzzled Brit there is no "ah" sound in "yacht". I'd spell it phonetically "yot" - do others pronounce it "yaht" or am I completely misunderstanding?
"Open your mouth and say ah" "tot" "yacht" - these all have very close to the same vowel sound to me as an American, although "tot" is more of an outlier and "taught" might be closer to how I conceptualize of the sound. I'm not sure I'd ever hear the difference in practice.
The wording here is a bit shall we say unhappy. As far as I understand it the classical Egyptian orthography proper—used for writing native Egyptian words—has indeed only consonants, something that Adolf Erman stressed in his 1894 Altägyptische Grammatik p7 (https://archive.org/details/agyptischegramma00erma/page/n31/...):
Unsere Umschreibung dieser Zeichen darf nur als 14 eine ungefähre Wiedergabe der betreffenden Laute gelten; sicher steht aber durch das Koptische (vgl. K§ 15) und durch die Art, wie semitische Worte im Ägyptischen, ägyptische im Semitischen wiedergegeben werden, daß sämtliche Zeichen Konsonanten darstellen. Die Vokale bleiben ebenso wie in den semitischen Schriften unbezeichnet. — Uber den ausnahmsweisen Gebrauch einiger Konsonanten zur Andeutung bestimmter vokalischer Endungen vgl. §§15— 16; 18; über das \\ i vgl. § 27.
Erman already hints at the extended usage of hieroglyphs that does include vowels, famously used for the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra (not that Cleopatra, they all had the same name) on the Rosetta Stone, and also for the name Alexander. However, that usage is not as simple as "𓄿 = a, 𓇋 = i, 𓅱 and 𓏲 = u". That's also known as the "alphabet for tourists", and while not entirely wrong, it is more of a caricature than anything.
As for the reasons vowels are omitted I can only offer speculations. I'd like to offer the observation that all writing is difficult and rare in the history of mankind; we've only had writing for the past 5,000 years or so whereas how to make fire has been known for at least 50,000, maybe up to 500,000 years (according to latest findings in Great Britain, that we know of, legal restrictions apply, etc).
Second, all writing is defective as compared to speech. It may also add things that are not in speech (something that Japanese orthography is famous for), but there are always important aspects of speech that are lost in the written. The way writing works is not like, say, a phonograph that reproduces sound waves, it works more like a punched tape that reproduces patterns of symbols. From those patterns, the reader must reconstruct the spoken word, re-enact it in a way that only works by filling out the gaps—many gaps in all kinds of writing. Now, when we look at what aspects of speech get omitted in writing, it's the weakest parts: frequent victims are phrasal prosodies, for which we have a bare minimum of '?', ',', '.', '!' in Latin, all of which are post-classical era developments. We also have spaces between words, only used sparingly in antiquity, and regularly from the Middle Ages (10th c or so). All of these used to not be written and were left for the reader to reconstruct. Similarly in Literary Chinese. Speaking of Chinese, if there's any aspect that can most easily be left out, it's the tones in alphabetic writing, and in fact that's what Vietnamese speakers often do when in a pinch. BTW Vietnamese uses an alphabetic orthography but although there were trends to use hyphens to connect syllables, post-1975 orthography is written only with spaces between syllables, with no way to tell where words start and end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_punctuation#Modern_...), which is likewise left as an exercise to the reader.
So back to the question—why didn't the Ancient Egyptians write vowels? Well, they sometimes did, especially when writing loan words or foreign place names from some point onward (I guess late Middle, early New Kingdom, but not sure), but otherwise, they left out vowels as the 'weakest' part of spoken language, coming right after word separators, sentence markers, prosody—all of the aspects of spoken language that are underrepresented in all orthographies. This consonants-only or consonants-mainly approach is, of course, inherited by Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Indian writing systems, all of which have consonants as their pivotal elements, with vowels taking a second, sometimes optional place.
It's like this for most of the "vowelless" languages. Hebrew, for instance, still has alef and ayin, and depending on whose lessons you go with, they can be described as silent letters or vowels, or just sort of ignored because no one really wants to explain them. And if they're anything like our own alphabet, the answers have changed over the years as pronunciation itself may have changed. Dumb question for you... is Y a vowel?
My 10 year old self would be all over those lessons. Currently I am studying Chinese, but I am wondering how much time does it take to finish the lessons. Also on the technical side, some parts of the website take a lot of time to load and clicking begin lessons on the home page gave me a "Failed to open page". I don't know if its because I am on Safari.
Might be getting hugged - some of the answers in the first chapter failed to load images, and then the second page failed to load.
This is a really neat page and, while I doubt I’ll ever get far into learning any of it, it’s really cool! For some reason I never stopped to wonder just how much we knew about hieroglyphs and assumed it wasn’t much, and I’m happily surprised!
It's interesting to see the "stool" being transliterated as "p" because in Cyrillic and Greek "p" / pi is written as something that looks like a little stool: П / π! I wonder.. does that come all the way from ancient Egyptian or was it chosen to fit later?
Even if not, it serves a nice aide-memoire. A bit like how the "r" here is a mouth, and "r" in Cyrillic is Р which looks like an emoticon mouth. "s" looks like a folded cloth, ф (f) looks kinda like a snake, and Ы arguably looks like double reeds. I may be overthinking this, though ;-)
Thanks for sharing, interesting they have both left to right and right to left writing form and that it’s so simple and intuitive to tell which way - but I guess now I want to know why they went with this dynamic system? Guessing it’s due to the form/medium and need for fitting things - perhaps like if you enter a room and are reading the wall as you walk through on your right side your are reading right to left as opposed to if the glyphs were on the left wall?
Typically in Egyptian tombs, around a doorway the writing faces (literally) the door, so on the left side you read right to left and on the right side you read left to right. I've also seen them written in columns to look like actual columns. I think it's best to think of hieroglyphs as an extension of art / drawing.
(I learned some hieroglyphs at school so this link takes me back! The school's textbook was Barbara Watterson - Introducing Egyptian Hieroglyphs.)
Gardiner's sign list. It's a modern categorization and ordering scheme. "Man and his occupations", "Woman and her occupations", "Anthropomorphic deities", "Parts of the human body", "Mammals", "Parts of Mammals", so on and so forth.
I've read that by the end of ancient Egyptian history they had used tricks like a picture of an eye for the letter or sound 'I' or a picture of a bee for the sound of 'B' there was a complete alphabet embedded within the system.
To be literate you had to know the tricks from the ancient and middle kingdoms as well. The result was three complete alphabets, similar to modern Japanese.
From that point of view the invention of the alphabet was more of a simplification. This always reminded me of the situation in modern enterprise development where lots of infrastructure was written in-house.
That's something that practically trips up a lot of students. They'll be missing some sign in the text because the "missing" sign is part of the illustration that readers tend to be blind to.
Don't trust the pronunciation:
To quote the great egyptologist Frank Kammerzell:
“Da die Vokalisation ägyptischen Sprachmaterials aus vorkoptischer Zeit nicht annähernd vollständig zu rekonstruieren ist, hat es sich eingebürgert, eine künstlich konstruierte Hilfsaussprache zu benutzen, die keinerlei sprachhistorischen Eigenwert besitzt.
Selbst die in den allermeisten Fällen jegliche Authentizität entbehrende Aussprache einiger Zeichen als Vokale reichte nicht aus, zu bewirken, daß sich etwa in der Umschrift nur solche Lautfolgen ergäben, die von Gelehrten romanischer, slavischer, semitischer oder germanischer Zunge zwanglos hätten benutzt werden können.”
Since the vocalization of Egyptian linguistic material from pre-Coptic times is not nearly completely reconstructable, it has become common practice to create an artificial constructed auxiliary pronunciation that has no linguistic historically intrinsic value.
Even the pronunciation of some characters as vowels, which in the vast majority of cases lacks authenticity, was not sufficient to ensure that, for example, only those phonetic sequences would occur in the transcription that could have been used effortlessly by scholars of Romanesque, Slavic, Semitic or Germanic tongues.
The valuable thing about the standard Egyptological pronunciation is that people can sit around a table, read a text, and understand what is being read without having to learn a strange new phonetic inventory. How close it sounds to the real thing is irrelevant for what it's uses for. Anyone using phonetics to look at how Egyptian changed over time isn't using standard Egyptological pronunciation to do so. While Stuart Tyson Smith's reconstruction of an Egyptologist-approved dialect of Egyptian for the Stargate movie is pretty fun, it's not like we have any native speakers we need to communicate.
Different field, but it drives me crazy that people talk about Chinese philosophy and insist on using Mandarin pinyin for it. Mandarin is language that evolved from Classical Chinese thousands of years later! There are other, equally valid contemporary derived pronunciations like Cantonese or even Japanese and Korean. The reason to use Mandarin is because it is the most widely spoken language derived from Classical Chinese, but it's 100% not how Confucius or any of them spoke!
What terminology should we be using? Old Chinese reconstructions on Wiktionary always look so wildly divergent to me.
Old Chinese reconstructions drive me crazy, or the fact that some scholars insist these are 99% correct instead of 'best guesses'
They are pretty well founded. You can read old rhyme dictionaries and see how the words evolved eg when borrowed by Japan at one time and then when borrowed again a couple of hundred years later. We can’t ever know 100% but it’s not idle speculation either.
What else would they use?
Of course they could pronounce the words in any modern Chinese language, but why not pick the largest and most standardized one?
> I live on a small farm with his wife, son, and two dogs.
Should you trust translations into English by someone who writes sentences like this? <joking>
In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal said hieroglyphics were actually a comic strip about a character named Sphinxy. Always hoped that was true.
𓇋𓅓 𓋴𓂋𓊪𓂋𓇋𓊃𓂧 𓊃𓄿𓏏 𓄿𓂋 𓊃 𓉔𓇋𓂋𓅱𓎼𓂋𓇋𓆑𓋴 𓄿𓂋 𓎡𓄿𓆑𓂋𓂧 𓃀𓄿𓇋 𓇌𓈖𓇋𓎡𓅱𓂧.
Even such rather exotic glyphs, like the biliteral 𓏞, which is U+133DE [1]. But I assume that the coverage by webfonts is somewhat bad.
P.S.: Sorry for such intended misuse of the principles of hieroglyphic writing.
[1] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+133DE
𓂧𓅱𓂜𓏏 𓆤 𓋴𓂋𓊪𓂋𓇋𓊃𓂧 ;)
> You might have noticed that there aren’t any vowels in the alphabet
Then in the next table:
> 𓄿 is pronounced “ah” as in “yacht”
> 𓇋 is pronounced “ee” as in “feet”
> 𓅱 𓏲 is pronounced “oo” as in “blue”
Are those vowel-sounding hieroglyphs only used in special occasions?
Also, does anyone know what the reason for omitting vowels altogether may have been?
Yes, this is not clearly explained. The "pronunciation" is more like an indication about how to conventionally pronounce the transcribed text, and not a faithful description of the original pronunciation.
The letters said to be pronounced "ee" and "oo" above, are not the vowels I and U, but the consonants I and U, which in English are written Y and W, like in "yet" and "wet" (i.e. they correspond to Semitic yodh and waw).
So in Egyptian they were normally followed by a vowel, which is not written, so usually unknown. Thus the conventional pronunciation described in the article recommends that instead of replacing the unknown vowel with E, like for the other consonants, one should pronounce Y and W as vowels, i.e. as long I and U, which in English are typically written as EE and OO.
The sign recommended to be pronounced "ah" was some guttural consonant, perhaps like Semitic aleph or ayin. It was also followed by an unknown vowel, so pronouncing it as a vowel is just a convention.
The indications about how to pronounce the vowels of other languages in English always appear comic for the speakers of other languages written with the Latin alphabet, due to the great discrepancy between how vowels are written in English and in the other languages, where it is seldom necessary to give word examples in order to describe precisely which vowels are meant.
While the reason why Egyptian did not write the vowels is uncertain, this fact had a huge importance in the history of the world.
The Semitic alphabet has inherited this feature, together with its later variants, e.g. the Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets. Other writing systems derived from Semitic alphabets, i.e. the European and Indian writing systems, have introduced means for also writing the vowels, but on the base provided by the separate writing of consonants.
All the other writing systems that have been developed completely independent from the Egyptian writing system have been based on signs for syllables or for words, which has resulted in much more complex writing systems than those that have started from the small set of signs needed to write only the consonants.
It's a class of script. A language with a script that omits vowels is called a "(pure) abjad(ic)" language. Egyptian (arguably, I'm not a linguist) and Arabic are examples of "impure abjad" languages. Usually they have diacritics that hint at vowel sounds but are otherwise devoid of explicit vowel glyphs, so I'm not sure if Egyptian strictly fits that bill - maybe someone else does. Point is, it's perhaps a bit foreign to latin-language speakers but there's a whole class of languages that do this, or something similar.
There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.
Ancient Hebrew (as found in Torah scrolls) also comes to mind. Though they added vowel hints at some point
The idea of leaving out most vwls isn't evn that frgn to latin scrpts. It's just not the default mode and only permissible with good reasons
Yeah, definitely. Austrian German is a good example of this. When I first visited I thought I was buying counterfeit goods because it looked like all the familiar products were "misspelled". Turns out they omit vowels pretty frequently.
The writing of vowels also varied greatly over time so any sweeping statement somebody makes can attract a chorus of "yes but"
If I had to carve stone to write something I'd look for as much to omit, while still preserving the meaning, as possible.
I’m not a linguist, just an Ancient Egypt amateur geek, but it’s worth noting that hieroglyphs were the formal, monumental script—used on temples, tombs, statues, and religious texts. They’re beautifully drawn and symbolic, but slow to write (think carved calligraphy rather than everyday handwriting).
There were also cursive forms. Ancient Egyptian had three main writing systems used in different contexts: hieroglyphic (formal), hieratic (a handwritten cursive), and later demotic (even more simplified, for everyday administration and legal texts).
To your point, our germanic linguistics Prof (Elmer Antonsen) pointed out memorably that the futhark (runes) were essentially the roman-phoenician characters shaped to coordinate with the grain of wood.
That doesn't explain omitting vowels here. Whatever brevity you gain from omitting vowels is more than made up by the phonetic complements and determinatives you need to make up for their loss. Besides, individual Egyptian hieroglyphs tend to contain a lot of unnecessary detail. Look to hieratic if you want to see what the Egyptians did when writing required some efficiency.
They represented consonants in the Egyptian language, but by convention we now read them as vowels. 𓄿 was probably a glottal stop, 𓇋 was probably like the y in yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...
It also seems possible that they were sometimes used to stand for vowels even in real Egyptian phonology, in the same way that certain consonant signs are used in Hebrew and Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis
Aside from your conundrum I'm wondering what "ah as in yacht" could even mean; to this puzzled Brit there is no "ah" sound in "yacht". I'd spell it phonetically "yot" - do others pronounce it "yaht" or am I completely misunderstanding?
"Open your mouth and say ah" "tot" "yacht" - these all have very close to the same vowel sound to me as an American, although "tot" is more of an outlier and "taught" might be closer to how I conceptualize of the sound. I'm not sure I'd ever hear the difference in practice.
Heh, very different to me then, thanks!
I’m ESL but always pronounced it as /jɑxt/ like in dutch https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-jacht.ogg
Native English speakers don’t do that. The “ch” only appears in spelling.
How are you pronouncing “yaht” ? I (American) would read “yaht” and “yot” exactly the same way.
This clarifies it I hope? It has audio & proper phonetic alphabet spelling for US vs UK.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/yacht
Assuming it's similar to "folly" vs. "foley".
The wording here is a bit shall we say unhappy. As far as I understand it the classical Egyptian orthography proper—used for writing native Egyptian words—has indeed only consonants, something that Adolf Erman stressed in his 1894 Altägyptische Grammatik p7 (https://archive.org/details/agyptischegramma00erma/page/n31/...):
Unsere Umschreibung dieser Zeichen darf nur als 14 eine ungefähre Wiedergabe der betreffenden Laute gelten; sicher steht aber durch das Koptische (vgl. K§ 15) und durch die Art, wie semitische Worte im Ägyptischen, ägyptische im Semitischen wiedergegeben werden, daß sämtliche Zeichen Konsonanten darstellen. Die Vokale bleiben ebenso wie in den semitischen Schriften unbezeichnet. — Uber den ausnahmsweisen Gebrauch einiger Konsonanten zur Andeutung bestimmter vokalischer Endungen vgl. §§15— 16; 18; über das \\ i vgl. § 27.
Erman already hints at the extended usage of hieroglyphs that does include vowels, famously used for the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra (not that Cleopatra, they all had the same name) on the Rosetta Stone, and also for the name Alexander. However, that usage is not as simple as "𓄿 = a, 𓇋 = i, 𓅱 and 𓏲 = u". That's also known as the "alphabet for tourists", and while not entirely wrong, it is more of a caricature than anything.
As for the reasons vowels are omitted I can only offer speculations. I'd like to offer the observation that all writing is difficult and rare in the history of mankind; we've only had writing for the past 5,000 years or so whereas how to make fire has been known for at least 50,000, maybe up to 500,000 years (according to latest findings in Great Britain, that we know of, legal restrictions apply, etc).
Second, all writing is defective as compared to speech. It may also add things that are not in speech (something that Japanese orthography is famous for), but there are always important aspects of speech that are lost in the written. The way writing works is not like, say, a phonograph that reproduces sound waves, it works more like a punched tape that reproduces patterns of symbols. From those patterns, the reader must reconstruct the spoken word, re-enact it in a way that only works by filling out the gaps—many gaps in all kinds of writing. Now, when we look at what aspects of speech get omitted in writing, it's the weakest parts: frequent victims are phrasal prosodies, for which we have a bare minimum of '?', ',', '.', '!' in Latin, all of which are post-classical era developments. We also have spaces between words, only used sparingly in antiquity, and regularly from the Middle Ages (10th c or so). All of these used to not be written and were left for the reader to reconstruct. Similarly in Literary Chinese. Speaking of Chinese, if there's any aspect that can most easily be left out, it's the tones in alphabetic writing, and in fact that's what Vietnamese speakers often do when in a pinch. BTW Vietnamese uses an alphabetic orthography but although there were trends to use hyphens to connect syllables, post-1975 orthography is written only with spaces between syllables, with no way to tell where words start and end (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_punctuation#Modern_...), which is likewise left as an exercise to the reader.
So back to the question—why didn't the Ancient Egyptians write vowels? Well, they sometimes did, especially when writing loan words or foreign place names from some point onward (I guess late Middle, early New Kingdom, but not sure), but otherwise, they left out vowels as the 'weakest' part of spoken language, coming right after word separators, sentence markers, prosody—all of the aspects of spoken language that are underrepresented in all orthographies. This consonants-only or consonants-mainly approach is, of course, inherited by Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Indian writing systems, all of which have consonants as their pivotal elements, with vowels taking a second, sometimes optional place.
It's like this for most of the "vowelless" languages. Hebrew, for instance, still has alef and ayin, and depending on whose lessons you go with, they can be described as silent letters or vowels, or just sort of ignored because no one really wants to explain them. And if they're anything like our own alphabet, the answers have changed over the years as pronunciation itself may have changed. Dumb question for you... is Y a vowel?
My 10 year old self would be all over those lessons. Currently I am studying Chinese, but I am wondering how much time does it take to finish the lessons. Also on the technical side, some parts of the website take a lot of time to load and clicking begin lessons on the home page gave me a "Failed to open page". I don't know if its because I am on Safari.
Might be getting hugged - some of the answers in the first chapter failed to load images, and then the second page failed to load.
This is a really neat page and, while I doubt I’ll ever get far into learning any of it, it’s really cool! For some reason I never stopped to wonder just how much we knew about hieroglyphs and assumed it wasn’t much, and I’m happily surprised!
If you're studying Chinese, maybe you realized that Chinese writing works in a very similar way.
That isn’t true.
It's interesting to see the "stool" being transliterated as "p" because in Cyrillic and Greek "p" / pi is written as something that looks like a little stool: П / π! I wonder.. does that come all the way from ancient Egyptian or was it chosen to fit later?
Even if not, it serves a nice aide-memoire. A bit like how the "r" here is a mouth, and "r" in Cyrillic is Р which looks like an emoticon mouth. "s" looks like a folded cloth, ф (f) looks kinda like a snake, and Ы arguably looks like double reeds. I may be overthinking this, though ;-)
IIRC, some of the Phoenician letters that were the origin of the Western alphabet were indeed related to/derived from Hieroglyphs a/o Hieratic.
Thanks for sharing, interesting they have both left to right and right to left writing form and that it’s so simple and intuitive to tell which way - but I guess now I want to know why they went with this dynamic system? Guessing it’s due to the form/medium and need for fitting things - perhaps like if you enter a room and are reading the wall as you walk through on your right side your are reading right to left as opposed to if the glyphs were on the left wall?
Typically in Egyptian tombs, around a doorway the writing faces (literally) the door, so on the left side you read right to left and on the right side you read left to right. I've also seen them written in columns to look like actual columns. I think it's best to think of hieroglyphs as an extension of art / drawing.
(I learned some hieroglyphs at school so this link takes me back! The school's textbook was Barbara Watterson - Introducing Egyptian Hieroglyphs.)
The flexibility seems to come from the fact that writing was never meant to stand alone
𓀀𓀁𓀂𓀃𓀄𓀅𓀆𓀇𓀈𓀉𓀊𓀋𓀌𓀍𓀎𓀏𓀐𓀑𓀒𓀓𓀔𓀕𓀖𓀗𓀘𓀙𓀚𓀛𓀜𓀝𓀞𓀟𓀠𓀡𓀢𓀣𓀤𓀥𓀦𓀧𓀨𓀩𓀪𓀫𓀬𓀭𓀮𓀯𓀰𓀱𓀲𓀳𓀴𓀵𓀶𓀷𓀸𓀹𓀺𓀻𓀼𓀽𓀾𓀿𓁀𓁁𓁂𓁃𓁄𓁅𓁆𓁇𓁈𓁉𓁊𓁋𓁌𓁍𓁎𓁏𓁐𓁑𓁒𓁓𓁔𓁕𓁖𓁗𓁘𓁙𓁚𓁛𓁜𓁝𓁞𓁟𓁠𓁡𓁢𓁣𓁤𓁥𓁦𓁧𓁨𓁩𓁪𓁫𓁬𓁭𓁮𓁯𓁰𓁱𓁲𓁳𓁴𓁵𓁶𓁷𓁸𓁹𓁺𓁻𓁼𓁽𓁾𓁿𓂀𓂁𓂂𓂃𓂄𓂅𓂆𓂇𓂈𓂉𓂊𓂋𓂌𓂍𓂎𓂏𓂐𓂑𓂒𓂓𓂔𓂕𓂖𓂗𓂘𓂙𓂚𓂛𓂜𓂝𓂞𓂟𓂠𓂡𓂢𓂣𓂤𓂥𓂦𓂧𓂨𓂩𓂪𓂫𓂬𓂭𓂮𓂯𓂰𓂱𓂲𓂳𓂴𓂵𓂶𓂷𓂸𓂹𓂺𓂻𓂼𓂽𓂾𓂿𓃀𓃁𓃂𓃃𓃄𓃅𓃆𓃇𓃈𓃉𓃊𓃋𓃌𓃍𓃎𓃏𓃐𓃑𓃒𓃓𓃔𓃕𓃖𓃗𓃘𓃙𓃚𓃛𓃜𓃝𓃞𓃟𓃠𓃡𓃢𓃣𓃤𓃥𓃦𓃧𓃨𓃩𓃪𓃫𓃬𓃭𓃮𓃯𓃰𓃱𓃲𓃳𓃴𓃵𓃶𓃷𓃸𓃹𓃺𓃻𓃼𓃽𓃾𓃿𓄀𓄁𓄂𓄃𓄄𓄅𓄆𓄇𓄈𓄉𓄊𓄋𓄌𓄍𓄎𓄏𓄐𓄑𓄒𓄓𓄔𓄕𓄖𓄗𓄘𓄙𓄚𓄛𓄜𓄝𓄞𓄟𓄠𓄡𓄢𓄣𓄤𓄥𓄦𓄧𓄨𓄩𓄪𓄫𓄬𓄭𓄮𓄯𓄰𓄱𓄲𓄳𓄴𓄵𓄶𓄷𓄸𓄹𓄺𓄻𓄼𓄽𓄾𓄿𓅀𓅁𓅂𓅃𓅄𓅅𓅆𓅇𓅈𓅉𓅊𓅋𓅌𓅍𓅎𓅏𓅐𓅑𓅒𓅓𓅔𓅕𓅖𓅗𓅘𓅙𓅚𓅛𓅜𓅝𓅞𓅟𓅠𓅡𓅢𓅣𓅤𓅥𓅦𓅧𓅨𓅩𓅪𓅫𓅬𓅭𓅮𓅯𓅰𓅱𓅲𓅳𓅴𓅵𓅶𓅷𓅸𓅹𓅺𓅻𓅼𓅽𓅾𓅿𓆀𓆁𓆂𓆃𓆄𓆅𓆆𓆇𓆈𓆉𓆊𓆋𓆌𓆍𓆎𓆏𓆐𓆑𓆒𓆓𓆔𓆕𓆖𓆗𓆘𓆙𓆚𓆛𓆜𓆝𓆞𓆟𓆠𓆡𓆢𓆣𓆤𓆥𓆦𓆧𓆨𓆩𓆪𓆫𓆬𓆭𓆮𓆯𓆰𓆱𓆲𓆳𓆴𓆵𓆶𓆷𓆸𓆹𓆺𓆻𓆼𓆽𓆾𓆿𓇀𓇁𓇂𓇃𓇄𓇅𓇆𓇇𓇈𓇉𓇊𓇋𓇌𓇍𓇎𓇏𓇐𓇑𓇒𓇓𓇔𓇕𓇖𓇗𓇘𓇙𓇚𓇛𓇜𓇝𓇞𓇟𓇠𓇡𓇢𓇣𓇤𓇥𓇦𓇧𓇨𓇩𓇪𓇫𓇬𓇭𓇮𓇯𓇰𓇱𓇲𓇳𓇴𓇵𓇶𓇷𓇸𓇹𓇺𓇻𓇼𓇽𓇾𓇿𓈀𓈁𓈂𓈃𓈄𓈅𓈆𓈇𓈈𓈉𓈊𓈋𓈌𓈍𓈎𓈏𓈐𓈑𓈒𓈓𓈔𓈕𓈖𓈗𓈘𓈙𓈚𓈛𓈜𓈝𓈞𓈟𓈠𓈡𓈢𓈣𓈤𓈥𓈦𓈧𓈨𓈩𓈪𓈫𓈬𓈭𓈮𓈯𓈰𓈱𓈲𓈳𓈴𓈵𓈶𓈷𓈸𓈹𓈺𓈻𓈼𓈽𓈾𓈿𓉀𓉁𓉂𓉃𓉄𓉅𓉆𓉇𓉈𓉉𓉊𓉋𓉌𓉍𓉎𓉏𓉐𓉑𓉒𓉓𓉔𓉕𓉖𓉗𓉘𓉙𓉚𓉛𓉜𓉝𓉞𓉟𓉠𓉡𓉢𓉣𓉤𓉥𓉦𓉧𓉨𓉩𓉪𓉫𓉬𓉭𓉮𓉯𓉰𓉱𓉲𓉳𓉴𓉵𓉶𓉷𓉸𓉹𓉺𓉻𓉼𓉽𓉾𓉿𓊀𓊁𓊂𓊃𓊄𓊅𓊆𓊇𓊈𓊉𓊊𓊋𓊌𓊍𓊎𓊏𓊐𓊑𓊒𓊓𓊔𓊕𓊖𓊗𓊘𓊙𓊚𓊛𓊜𓊝𓊞𓊟𓊠𓊡𓊢𓊣𓊤𓊥𓊦𓊧𓊨𓊩𓊪𓊫𓊬𓊭𓊮𓊯𓊰𓊱𓊲𓊳𓊴𓊵𓊶𓊷𓊸𓊹𓊺𓊻𓊼𓊽𓊾𓊿𓋀𓋁𓋂𓋃𓋄𓋅𓋆𓋇𓋈𓋉𓋊𓋋𓋌𓋍𓋎𓋏𓋐𓋑𓋒𓋓𓋔𓋕𓋖𓋗𓋘𓋙𓋚𓋛𓋜𓋝𓋞𓋟𓋠𓋡𓋢𓋣𓋤𓋥𓋦𓋧𓋨𓋩𓋪𓋫𓋬𓋭𓋮𓋯𓋰𓋱𓋲𓋳𓋴𓋵𓋶𓋷𓋸𓋹𓋺𓋻𓋼𓋽𓋾𓋿𓌀𓌁𓌂𓌃𓌄𓌅𓌆𓌇𓌈𓌉𓌊𓌋𓌌𓌍𓌎𓌏𓌐𓌑𓌒𓌓𓌔𓌕𓌖𓌗𓌘𓌙𓌚𓌛𓌜𓌝𓌞𓌟𓌠𓌡𓌢𓌣𓌤𓌥𓌦𓌧𓌨𓌩𓌪𓌫𓌬𓌭𓌮𓌯𓌰𓌱𓌲𓌳𓌴𓌵𓌶𓌷𓌸𓌹𓌺𓌻𓌼𓌽𓌾𓌿𓍀𓍁𓍂𓍃𓍄𓍅𓍆𓍇𓍈𓍉𓍊𓍋𓍌𓍍𓍎𓍏𓍐𓍑𓍒𓍓𓍔𓍕𓍖𓍗𓍘𓍙𓍚𓍛𓍜𓍝𓍞𓍟𓍠𓍡𓍢𓍣𓍤𓍥𓍦𓍧𓍨𓍩𓍪𓍫𓍬𓍭𓍮𓍯𓍰𓍱𓍲𓍳𓍴𓍵𓍶𓍷𓍸𓍹𓍺𓍻𓍼𓍽𓍾𓍿𓎀𓎁𓎂𓎃𓎄𓎅𓎆𓎇𓎈𓎉𓎊𓎋𓎌𓎍𓎎𓎏𓎐𓎑𓎒𓎓𓎔𓎕𓎖𓎗𓎘𓎙𓎚𓎛𓎜𓎝𓎞𓎟𓎠𓎡𓎢𓎣𓎤𓎥𓎦𓎧𓎨𓎩𓎪𓎫𓎬𓎭𓎮𓎯𓎰𓎱𓎲𓎳𓎴𓎵𓎶𓎷𓎸𓎹𓎺𓎻𓎼𓎽𓎾𓎿𓏀𓏁𓏂𓏃𓏄𓏅𓏆𓏇𓏈𓏉𓏊𓏋𓏌𓏍𓏎𓏏𓏐𓏑𓏒𓏓𓏔𓏕𓏖𓏗𓏘𓏙𓏚𓏛𓏜𓏝𓏞𓏟𓏠𓏡𓏢𓏣𓏤𓏥𓏦𓏧𓏨𓏩𓏪𓏫𓏬𓏭𓏮𓏯𓏰𓏱𓏲𓏳𓏴𓏵𓏶𓏷𓏸𓏹𓏺𓏻𓏼𓏽𓏾𓏿𓐀𓐁𓐂𓐃𓐄𓐅𓐆𓐇𓐈𓐉𓐊𓐋𓐌𓐍𓐎𓐏𓐐𓐑𓐒𓐓𓐔𓐕𓐖𓐗𓐘𓐙𓐚𓐛𓐜𓐝𓐞𓐟𓐠𓐡𓐢𓐣𓐤𓐥𓐦𓐧𓐨𓐩𓐪𓐫𓐬𓐭𓐮𓐯
I always thought it funny people use eggplant emoji while there're clearly more accurate symbols in various, um, states, on line 7.
This looks fun. What is the context and use of the above glyph list?
Gardiner's sign list. It's a modern categorization and ordering scheme. "Man and his occupations", "Woman and her occupations", "Anthropomorphic deities", "Parts of the human body", "Mammals", "Parts of Mammals", so on and so forth.
Also the order in Unicode. 1072 chars. (based on Gardiner's list),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...
In modern usage it is a shitpost called "Curse of Ra!"
This really does feel like a domain where ML advances can help: https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/fabricius/gwHX4...
Its cool to read about though. And of course, there will always be a need for experts.
I've read that by the end of ancient Egyptian history they had used tricks like a picture of an eye for the letter or sound 'I' or a picture of a bee for the sound of 'B' there was a complete alphabet embedded within the system. To be literate you had to know the tricks from the ancient and middle kingdoms as well. The result was three complete alphabets, similar to modern Japanese. From that point of view the invention of the alphabet was more of a simplification. This always reminded me of the situation in modern enterprise development where lots of infrastructure was written in-house.
The alphabet really is a massive simplification: fewer symbols, fewer historical traps, lower onboarding cost
Archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250912055105/https://www.egypt...
(The site may be hugged to death)
Wow text literally designed to live inside art rather than compete with it
That's something that practically trips up a lot of students. They'll be missing some sign in the text because the "missing" sign is part of the illustration that readers tend to be blind to.
So vulture would be like the Arabic letter ayn? That letter is also transliterated as 3 in arabi mobile typing.
Another cool lesson on higlys I found before:
Learn How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Ilona Regulski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ