“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.
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.
That's like complaining at names like Jesus, Paul, Moses, or Peter (with their English pronunciation) because that's not how those biblical figures pronounced their own names.
For starters, a Chinese language which preserves final stops (-p, -t, -k) would be a better choice (e.g. Cantonese). These disappear completely in Mandarin, leaving rhymes (the vowel + final consonant) underspecified or ambiguous in many cases.
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 used 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 can communicate with.
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 ;-)
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!
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?
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 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.
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.
The rebus principle where someone might use a depiction of an eye for the sound "I" and so forth is the very basis of the script and was there from the beginning. The complicated part is they'd use words with one to three consonants and strip the vowels. To continue the example, we might use 𓃠 to represent the consonants "ct" and thus use it to write "cat", "cot", and "cut."
There was an inventory of uniconsonantal or uniliteral signs dating back to the very beginning of the language which the ancient Egyptians could have used as an alphabet (or abjad if we want to be pedantic) if they had wanted to, but they never did—at least to write Egyptian. The basis of our alphabet, Proto-Sinaitic script, seems to have come about when speakers of Caananite languages in the Sinai Peninsula borrowed a small number of Egyptian hieroglyphs, assigned them the phonetic value for the thing depicted in their own Caananite language, and they didn't bother with anything other than uniconsonantal signs.
The "three different alphabets" thing is unrelated to any of this. Hieroglyphs and hieratic appear around the same time. Hieroglyphs were used for monuments and more formal contexts. Hieratic is a cursive form of hieroglyphs that was much faster to write with a brush pen and ink. It tended to be used for literature, correspondence, and record-keeping. From what we know of Egyptian scribal education, they started out with hieratic and then moved on to hieroglyphs, with not everyone progressing to the point where they started learning hieroglyphs. This is quite the reversal from how we approach things today, with virtually every student of ancient Egyptian language learning hieroglyphs (specifically, Middle Egyptian) first and then moving on to learning hieratic. Demotic was a later evolution of hieratic. And eventually, the Egyptians wrote their language using a modified Greek alphabet ultimately derived from their hieroglyphs (Coptic).
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.
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.
Of course they could pronounce the words in any modern Chinese language, but why not pick the largest and most standardized one?
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 ;-)
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!
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
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?
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.
There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.
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).
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
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/yacht
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.
(I learned some hieroglyphs at school so this link takes me back! The school's textbook was Barbara Watterson - Introducing Egyptian Hieroglyphs.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...
Its cool to read about though. And of course, there will always be a need for experts.
The rebus principle where someone might use a depiction of an eye for the sound "I" and so forth is the very basis of the script and was there from the beginning. The complicated part is they'd use words with one to three consonants and strip the vowels. To continue the example, we might use 𓃠 to represent the consonants "ct" and thus use it to write "cat", "cot", and "cut."
There was an inventory of uniconsonantal or uniliteral signs dating back to the very beginning of the language which the ancient Egyptians could have used as an alphabet (or abjad if we want to be pedantic) if they had wanted to, but they never did—at least to write Egyptian. The basis of our alphabet, Proto-Sinaitic script, seems to have come about when speakers of Caananite languages in the Sinai Peninsula borrowed a small number of Egyptian hieroglyphs, assigned them the phonetic value for the thing depicted in their own Caananite language, and they didn't bother with anything other than uniconsonantal signs.
The "three different alphabets" thing is unrelated to any of this. Hieroglyphs and hieratic appear around the same time. Hieroglyphs were used for monuments and more formal contexts. Hieratic is a cursive form of hieroglyphs that was much faster to write with a brush pen and ink. It tended to be used for literature, correspondence, and record-keeping. From what we know of Egyptian scribal education, they started out with hieratic and then moved on to hieroglyphs, with not everyone progressing to the point where they started learning hieroglyphs. This is quite the reversal from how we approach things today, with virtually every student of ancient Egyptian language learning hieroglyphs (specifically, Middle Egyptian) first and then moving on to learning hieratic. Demotic was a later evolution of hieratic. And eventually, the Egyptians wrote their language using a modified Greek alphabet ultimately derived from their hieroglyphs (Coptic).
https://web.archive.org/web/20250912055105/https://www.egypt...
(The site may be hugged to death)
Learn How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with Ilona Regulski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ