Mummy's Wrap

Hieroglyphs are entirely different from most western languages.This difference does not simply stem from the visual difference of using an alphabet such as the Roman-based alphabet of English, German, French and other western languages. The base structure of the hieroglyphs is entirely different from western languages.

There are three categories to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The first are sound signs or phonograms. Second are determinatives, or labeling signs. Finally, there are ideograms or logograms which stand for single ideas (Kamrin, Janice; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide; pg. 13-14). For this article, the focus will be on phonograms.

Unilateral Hieroglyphs with Translation and Transliteration

Phonograms are made up of three types of hieroglyphs. The uniliteral hieroglyphs are comparable to modern western alphabets with a single letter standing for a single sound. For example, the eagle symbol in hieroglyphs stands for the sound “A.” These unilateral symbols are used in modern cartouche jewelry where the name of a person is written in hieroglyphs. This is known as transliteration, not translation (Kamrin, Janice; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide; pg. 15).

To this point, the examples have been from the English language. The ancient Egyptian language is something quite different. As seen in the graph below, most of the uniliteral symbols have corresponding sounds in English. Notice, however, that many English letters are represented multiple times. In the English language, such symbols as “h” have but one sound. In the ancient Egyptian language, it is thought that “h” had sounds that do not exist in the English language. When performing transliteration, the first step in translating hieroglyphs, these extra sounds are represented by special characters. The transliteration alphabet looks something like what is seen above (Kamrin, Janice; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide; pg. 15).

Triliteral Hieroglyphs with Translation and Transliteration

Biliteral Hieroglyphs with Translation

Biliteral and triliteral symbols make up the majority of hieroglyphs and are somewhat more complicated than the above uniliterals.

Biliteral symbols represent two sounds. Whereas in the English language, two letters are needed to represent the “-sh-,” “-th-,” “-ph-,” and “-ch-” sounds, only one symbol would be needed to represent the same sounds in hieroglyphs (Kamrin, Janice; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide; pg. 43).

Triliteral symbols, as one may guess, represent three sounds. As writers of the English language know, three symbols are needed for the sound “-ing,” but in hieroglyphs only one symbol would be used (Kamrin, Janice; Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide; pg. 56).

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Tags: biliteral, biliterals, hieroglyph, hieroglyphic, hieroglyphics, Hieroglyphs, phonogram, phonograms, triliteral, triliterals, uniliteral, uniliterals

This entry was posted by Page Strong on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:34 and is filed under Hieroglyphs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.