Ancient Egyptian

At the dawn of this blog, it was written that linguistics will also be discussed here. No mention was made again on this subject after that. We are going to mend this thing here.

After some thought on what to write about, I chose one of the most unwelcoming languages around, ancient egyptian. I really do not know a reason why anyone would want to learn this language, other than it's strange attraction.

In the next 5 minutes you are going to learn how to read and write anything in Egyptian. Just kidding! What I shall write here is only a small and inexpensive introduction in the subject. Actually, I myself being no specialist of any kind in egyptology I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this, and everything written here should probably be checked.

First of all, ancient egyptian is a very difficult language. Its difficulty is twofold. First of all, the grammar is very different from the grammar of latin or germanic languages. Second, writing is quite difficult also.

Furthermore, there is not a single Egyptian language, but five different species: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic. These are not really different languages but rather different phases of the same language. The same can be seen in the case of the English language, where we have Old English (which is practically another language altogether), Elizabethan English, Modern English, etc. The grammar matters that appear here mainly apply to Middle Egyptian. This is considered one of the most important phases of Ancient Egyptian, a lot of works being written in this language.

As a side note, Coptic is still spoken today in Egypt but mainly as a ritual language for the Coptic Church. The people who are native coptic speakers generally use it with the family. If you are interested in being understood in modern day Egypt, you should learn Arabic, which is its official language.

These matters being clarified, we can now search deeper in this strange language. Here are the questions that I am going to answer:
1) How did Egyptian sounded like?
2) What is Demotic and Hieratic?
3) How is Egyptian written? Right to left? Left to right? Top to bottom?
4) What do the hieroglyphs represent? Are they letters? Or are they mainly ideograms, like in Chinese?

1) How did Egyptian sounded like?
I don't know as a matter of fact, nobody really knows. Researchers do know how some of the words sounded at some period or other in time, but this words are pretty rare and they cover only part of the spectrum. While the writing remained the same for almost 3000 years, the Egyptians were unable to keep the language from evolving (dramatically).

Here you may ask: If they do not know how it sounded, how come we are able to read it? The answer is pretty strange for someone who is not generally acquainted with semitic languages. The ancient egyptians (and a lot of other languages like hebrew, arabic, persian, etc.) did not write the vowels of the words. This is indeed cumbersome, but not as impossible to read as it seems. Watch this example:

Hr s a smpl xmpl t shw m pnt. (Here is a simple example to show my point).

The letter 'a' above is not really cheating, since Egyptian (and also Hebrew and Arabic) have some vowels. These vowels are however quite different in pronounciation than their equivalent in English or Romanian. Probably because of this, they are considered more like consonants than like vowels.

Back to the point. In some traditions, the consonants are considered the bones (body) of the word and the vowels its soul. That is a good way of thinking about it. Also, because the population that could actually read had an extensive training this was not quite difficult.

2) Hieratic and Demotic are two variants of writing Ancient Egyptian. If you look at the beautiful Egyptian hieroglyphs, you will probably notice that they are very detailed. Imagine a scribe forcing himself to record the order of the Pharaohs in such an incredibly detailed script. Probably they realized it was a problem with the writing, and because of that, the priests invented a second style of writing called Hieratic (which comes from the greek word for Sacred). After some time, people realized the advantages of a more fluid manner of writing and they invented their own writing, called Demotic (from Demos - people). Demotic was not quite an independent discovery (it was derived actually from Hieratic). In time this writing was used more and more instead of Hieratic.

So, while for 3000 years the hieroglyphs were used in a lot of official documents, Hieratic was also used for the same period of time. I have difficulties understanding how could a scribe write hastily and fluently without a script like those above.

3) How is Egyptian written? Right to left? Left to right? Top to bottom?

All of the above directions are possible. When egyptologists learn the language, they generally write it from left to right. However, in papyri, stuff is written both from right to left, from left to right, and from top to bottom. The PROPER way to read is to identify figures like birds and persons (which are very common). If they are looking towards the right, then you should read from right to left. If they are looking towards the left, you should read from left to right. Vertical writings are always read from top to bottom (never from bottom upwards). However, the first row that should be read is the left row, if the hieroglyphs look towards left, or vice-versa. Also, when reading, TOP has always priority. Top signs are read first, then bottom signs.

Hieroglyphs are written quite differently from the way we generally no modern languages are written. There is a rule relating to the harmony of things, known as "the fear of void". Hieroglyphs are amassed so that they are as compact as possible.

I will do my best to describe this in the following ASCII art. Suppose the rectangles filled with As, Bs and Cs are all hieroglyphs. A is tall and slim and B and C are short but wide. This is how you would write the word ABC in a wrong manner:

AAAA
AAAA
AAAA
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC  other signs here -->>>
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC

As you see, above the Bs and the Cs there is an inesthetic white space. The PROPER way to write ABC is this:

AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB    other signs here -->>>
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC

As you see, now there are no white spaces and everything is fitted nicely together. To read it now, you should however remember the rule that the TOP has always precedence over the bottom.

Note however, that if the sign would be written like this (i.e. vertically), you wouldn't necessarily read it ABC:

AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
other signs go below
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

How do you read it in this instance? Well, it depends. If A, B or C are figures facing left, you would read the word ABC. If they face right, you would read the letters BCA. I hope this makes some sense.

4) What do the hieroglyphs represent? Are they letters? Or are they mainly ideograms, like in Chinese?

I hear people (who don't know anything about the matter) debating on this problem endlessly. First of all, even in Chinese, some of the characters are generally not used by themselves.

In Egyptian, there are thee categories of signs: phonograms and ideograms. Ideograms are the most alike with Chinese signs. They represent an idea (or an object). They do not usually convey the sound of the word.

Phonograms are actual sounds. Even though most of them look very beautiful (for example the letter m is written like an owl), they are only sounds, and do not necessarily convey meaning all by themselves.

There are more than one type of phonograms though. There are letters that are just that. A simple letter. The egyptian alphabet has 24 single letters. Asides from that, there are letters which are combinations of 2 letters (these are called biliteral signs) and of 3 letters (triliteral signs). Most of the 3 letter signs and some of the biliterals and uniliterals have meaning of their own. However, they are NOT necessarily used only when reffering to this base meaning.

There is also a special type of logogram called a determinative. To understand the role of a determinative, look at the following sentence:

Here also lies Roland.

If we take out the vowels, we have:

Hr ls ls Rlnd.

If we are not aware about what is written, we could have something like:

Here lies also Roland.

Here, the meaning is not lost. However, there are situations when this danger may occur. This is especially true if we do not remember what were we writing about.

To avoid this situation, we will add a determinative:

Hr(a location) ls ls(an action) Rlnd(a person).

In this way, we will not transcribe Hr like Her instead of Here. Also, we won't be able to say "lies also" instead of "also lies". In Egyptian, instead of paranthesis, they used a logogram.

OK! That wraps it up. You could probably find easily the Egyptian uniliterals. However, to truly learn the language you should probably buy the book Middle Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner. This book is considered the de facto standard for Middle Egyptian.

Best wishes to your endeavours.