Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009) (optional.is)

I think the author has forgotten to write about the most important part, namely, what each part of the hieroglyphics mean.

I found this article [1] for how the word "Welcome" is constructed, but how to understand the rest is beyond me.

[1] https://www.ancientegyptblog.com/?p=1458

What surprised me most is that there isn't a ton of publicly available information on translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that would make this reasonably easy, or even a website that would allow one to enter an English phrase and get back the hieroglyphic equivalent.

Oh, wait, there is: https://lingojam.com/HieroglyphicsTranslator except its translation of "Welcome, the entire land" looks very different from the symbols in the article.

This gives a pretty good explanation, although there is a slight difference from the translation in the original post: https://chatgpt.com/share/69136c44-94b0-8000-a564-ce55f92a14... Use it together with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_sign_list

(2009)

Well I don't recognise many of these, but I did happily recognise the horned viper thanks to a lot of time spent watching Only Connect.

I don't know if that is enough to put me in the intersection of their Venn diagram though.

Funny I have a shirt that reads "Prince of Susa" to the three people (not me) who can read Linear Elam.

Edit: To see the sequence you can paste "" into the corpus search at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam

Representing the alphabetic orthography for Hello World is obviously impossible in a written script lacking letters, revealing the folly implicit in the exercise.

A nitpick sixteen years too late: the idea behind five-digit years isn't bad, but there's no reason for time deltas to adhere to this rule! 5000 years ago, not 05000 years ago.

A bit of a digression: the article has the hieroglyphics presented as pictures, not as Unicode, even though Unicode has the entire(?) hieroglyph block already. After some digging, I found that this was because there aren't many (or any) popular fonts which implement the proper combinations of glyphs.

(While Unicode has combining diacritics, this isn't sufficient to e.g. stack the glyphs as shown in the article.)

However, it turns out that Microsoft has developed a tool that can modify an existing font to allow this, representing the hieroglyphyics properly. I've written a brief tutorial that shows how to actually use it:

https://marzchipane.com/notes%20and%20essays/interesting_uni...

(You may need to press Shift+F5 to reload fully if they don't show properly)

EDIT: hieroglyphs, not hieroglyphics

Great video on how to read hieroglyphics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ

They can be pretty complex and a neat form of 2D-positional language!

They're hieroglyphs.

The script is hieroglyphic.

Off/On topic. Where can I find a study group, of motivated people who want to learn hieroglyphs?

There are other languages like Linear A that could use attention as well!