L:Hieroglyphics was one of the first writing systems developed by man, dating back some 5000 years.
L:Yet, it is a surprisingly advanced system for its age and remained in use until the Roman age.
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L:It is thought that the semitic alphabets which developed later in the Sinai and in Canaan were inspired by, though not directly derived from, hieroglyphics.
L:These early semitic alphabets gave rise to most of our modern alphabets, including the one you are using now.
L:So, our modern alphabets seem to have a conceptual, if not direct, link to this ancient writing system.
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L:Hieroglyphics is essentially a phonetic writing system and most glyphs (glyph meaning an individual image, like that of an owl) are phonetic, i.e. merely represent sound, as in how the letter "m" merely represents a particular sound.
L:(In fact, in hieroglyphics the owl represents the sound of our letter "m".)
L:Most hieroglyphic words were primarily (if not completely) composed of these phonetic glyphs.
L:But, there are also ideogrammatic glyphs, i.e. glyphs that represent objects or ideas, similar to our glyph "5" which doesn't represent a sound but instead represents the concept of the fifth numeral.
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L:These ideogrammatic glyphs either stand alone as complete words or are tacked onto the end of a phonetically spelled word to help identify it's meaning.
L:When used to help identify the meaning of a phonetically spelled word, ideogrammatic glyphs are called determinative glyphs (or determinants) since they help "determine" the word's meaning by indicating what class (e.g., animal, tree, liquid) the word belongs to.
L:To help you keep track of which kind of glyphs are which, this tutor displays the phonetic glyphs in brown and the ideogrammatic glyphs (including the determinative glyphs) in red.
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L:Though there are hieroglyphic words which are composed solely of phonetic glyphs and others which are composed solely of ideogrammatic glyphs, most hieroglyphic words are composed of a string of phonetic glyphs terminated by a determinative glyph or two.
L:As an example of the standard hieroglyphic way of writing, let me take two English words and write them in a pseudo-hieroglyphic manner using phonetic and ideogrammatic glyphs (characters) commonly used today.
L:This produces the pseudo-hieroglyphic words "TU#" and "TU>>".
L:"T" and "U" are the phonetic glyphs (representing the sounds they typically represent) and "#" and ">>" are the determinative glyphs.
L:We can see from the phonetic glyphs that both these words are pronounced like the word "too".
L:The first determinant "#" is typically used to indicate numbers, so it's a safe guess that "TU#" represents the word "two".
L:The second determinant ">>" looks like an arrow which could possibly indicate direction.
L:This leads us to the conclusion that "TU>>" represents the directional word "to".
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L:Though we see from the preceeding example how determinants are useful, even in distinguishing between the two English homonyms "two" and "to", one reason the Egyptians used determinants so heavily is that their spelling system was far from perfect.
L:To begin with, many vowel sounds were not recorded.
L:Another failing is the sheer number of phonetic glyphs that existed, many of them representing the same sound.
L:Furthermore, many of these glyphs represented not one sound, like "m", but a string of two or three sounds like "ma" or "mut".
L:These are known as multiliteral glyphs.
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L:To make things even more complex, many times these multiliteral glyphs are preceeded or followed by other phonetic glyphs which are in fact redundent complements to the sounds within the multiliteral glyph.
L:For example, if one glyph representing the sound "nfr" is followed by two glyphs representing the sounds "f" anf "r", the total would probably be read simply as "nefer", not "neferefer".
L:Add to all this the many different ideogrammatic and determinative glyphs, stir well, and you have one big mess.
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L:But, we'll try to keep things simple and fun.
L:First of all, the tutor uses a simple multiple choice format.
L:Also, oftentimes, the tutor can offer hints if you should get stuck.
L:Futhermore, to keep the glyphs to a reasonable number, the tutor restricts itself to the more commonly used glyphs.
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L:The tutor is broken into four sections: Phonetics, Determinants, Transliteration and Vocabulary.
L:Since there are a finite number of determinative glyphs and many of them are relatively obvious, the Determinants section is probably the easiest place to start.
L:Once you are familiar with the determinative glyphs, you can go directly to the Vocabulary section and try your hand at translation.
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L:You can see that even a casual observer can use the determinant glyphs to guess the meanings of many of the hieroglyphic words.
L:But, the only true way to know one heiroglyphic word from another is to have memorized the sound of that word.
L:For example, the words for beer and wine both use the same "jug" determinant.
L:So, the only way to know which is which is to have memorized that "heqet" is beer and "irep" is wine.
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L:For this reason, and to more deeply appreciate the phonetics of the hieroglyphic writing system, you should now step into the Phonetics section.
L:Once you are mildly familiar with the sounds of the phonetic glyphs, go to the Transliteration section and try to piece together the sounds of these ancient words.
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L:Have fun.
