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.
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 s...
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?
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
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?
Originally the aleph was intended to be merely a placeholder for a missing consonant at the beginning of a word, which effectively made it look like something representing (any) vowel.
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.
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.)
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.
“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.
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 ;-)
> 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.
26 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 24.7 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20250912055105/https://www.egypt...
(The site may be hugged to death)
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?
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 s...
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
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.
even more interestingly, it's pronounced like the "ach" in yacht
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
(I learned some hieroglyphs at school so this link takes me back! The school's textbook was Barbara Watterson - Introducing Egyptian Hieroglyphs.)
Learn How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Ilona Regulski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ
Its cool to read about though. And of course, there will always be a need for experts.
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.
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 ;-)
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.