[HN Gopher] Welcome, the entire land - "Hello, world" in hierogl...
___________________________________________________________________
Welcome, the entire land - "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
Author : andrelaszlo
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-11-11 10:52 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (optional.is)
(TXT) w3m dump (optional.is)
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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
| yohannparis wrote:
| I completely agree, that's what I wanted to see.
|
| The goal of an HELLO WORLD is not to show it's printed, but the
| process of what everything is need to print HELLO WORLD. Every
| step, and every word and concept needs to be explained.
|
| Therefore this article is not a proper HELLO WORLD exemple.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Yes, what OS did the Egyptians use?
| zOneLetter wrote:
| RIGHT! I thought I missed a paragraph or something lol
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Start drawing the owl... Finished!
| maxdamantus wrote:
| Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is
| that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw
| the meaning but they tend to have particular pronunciations,
| and the selection of glyphs will usually depend on both the
| sound and the meaning of the word.
|
| I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each
| character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some
| characters having the same sound), but you spell words using
| certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic
| association of components (radicals) within each character.
|
| I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if
| either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty
| sure there are exceptions in both cases).
|
| This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0],
| showing correspondences between various scripts, including
| Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are
| included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew
| ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a
| similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ` sounds the same
| as the Arabic word for "eye" ('ayn, `yn) and the corresponding
| hieroglyph also looks like an eye.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...
| Y_Y wrote:
| https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-
| translatio...
|
| You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics"
| acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough
| transliterations, usually from local or English name.
|
| I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a
| stochastic patrot's approximation: United
| States Mei Guo Meiguo Beautiful Country China Zhong
| Guo Zhongguo Middle Country Japan Ri Ben Riben Origin
| of the Sun Germany De Guo Deguo Virtuous Country
| India Yin Du Yindu India United Kingdom Ying Guo
| Yingguo Heroic Country France Fa Guo Faguo Law Country
| Italy Yi Da Li Yidali Italy Canada Jia Na Da Jianada
| Canada South Korea Han Guo Hanguo Han Country
|
| * Obviously CJK etc countries already had names
| fluoridation wrote:
| Most of those are just phonetic approximations using
| convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have
| any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan
| are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the
| "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of
| the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun
| because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han
| are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental
| about any of those names.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Indeed, that is what I wrote
| pimlottc wrote:
| Sure, but there are multiple characters nearly every
| sound in Mandarin, I'm sure it's no accident they ended
| up with mostly flattering ones.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| +1, it's no accident. The most obvious case is with
| corporate names, which sometimes get carefully analyzed
| in translation. Coca-Cola is famously translated as Ke
| Kou Ke Le (Ke3 kou3 ke3 le4, numbers indicate tones),
| with individual characters meaning "can taste can happy",
| and intuitively meaning something like "drinkable
| deliciousness"
| yorwba wrote:
| (I'm not an egyptologist.) The _Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae_
| has a breakdown of / jm.j-r`-wpw.wt-htp.w-ntr-m-t-r-dr=f /
| "overseer of apportionments of the god's offering(s) in the
| entire land" https://tla.digital/lemma/850281 with / t /
| "land" and / r-dr / "entire".
|
| So we have most of / jy.tj-t-r-dr-?? / "welcome land entire
| ??" except for the at the end where I have no idea whether
| it's phonetic hr=f or a determinative
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.
| monoidist wrote:
| I think the =f at the end is a possessive, because r dr=f is
| an idiomatic phrase literally meaning "to its limit".
|
|
| jy.tj t3 r dr=f
|
| come [STATIVE] land [VOCATIVE] to limit its
|
| "Welcome, entire land"
|
| (I'm not an Egyptologist either.)
| yorwba wrote:
| Did you forget about the or does it get merged into the
| preceding word?
| monoidist wrote:
| I think is the end of the preceding word, dr. It is
| functioning as a logogram, not a phonogram:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative
| kmoser wrote:
| 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.
| z500 wrote:
| It looks like this isn't an actual translator, it's just
| transcribing the consonants into uniliteral hieroglyphs.
| maxdamantus wrote:
| > Oh, wait, there is:
|
| As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a
| translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as
| you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration
| is.
|
| It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese
| characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced
| by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
| pimlottc wrote:
| > It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese
| characters that sounds like an English sentence when
| pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with
| translation.
|
| Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words,
| like the names of other countries:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha.
| ..
| wdrw wrote:
| 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
| flobosg wrote:
| (2009)
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| 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.
| lolc wrote:
| 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
| quinndupont wrote:
| Representing the alphabetic orthography for Hello World is
| obviously impossible in a written script lacking letters,
| revealing the folly implicit in the exercise.
| Igrom wrote:
| 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.
| 5- wrote:
| doesn't the same argument apply to ordinal dates? i see some
| people on hn also using longnow-style five-digit years, but i
| really can't see the point.
|
| did the crossing of the rhine take place in 00406, 0406, or
| 406? what extra information do the two former styles convey?
|
| also, what about the year 100000?
|
| we are somehow doing just fine without leading zeroes for other
| quantities.
|
| there is an argument to be made about e.g. iso8601 datetime
| formats that need to be lexicographically sortable; but i don't
| see any of the longnow fans using anything like those.
| marzchipane wrote:
| 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
| Razengan wrote:
| 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!
| thisisauserid wrote:
| They're hieroglyphs.
|
| The script is hieroglyphic.
| dekervin wrote:
| Off/On topic. Where can I find a study group, of motivated people
| who want to learn hieroglyphs?
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm interested. So far I've just bought a
| couple books on Middle Egyptian and read a basic intro that my
| library had, but between all the languages I'm already
| learning, couldn't really justify putting in the time.
|
| A study group or study partner would probably be enough extra
| motivation to get basic proficiency at the least. So if you're
| willing let me know if you find/wish to create something.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-11 23:01 UTC)