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Is Hieroglyphics/ancient Egyptian hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6746 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 9 of 22 11 February 2012 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
"Imagine you are an American man sitting on a bus next to a ca. 3rd century BC Egyptian woman..." Edited by Lucky Charms on 11 February 2012 at 9:55pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6379 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 22 11 February 2012 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The problem is that they didn't write the vowels. Attempts have been made to reconstruct them from Coptic, the modern descendant of the language, but I think most of it is just guesses and a lot of it is probably way off.
The birds and stuff is the formal writing, which is what has remained to this day, being chipped into stone and all that. The majority of writing was probably done in the Hieratic or Demotic scripts, which were much easier to write with a pen and papyrus. But the papyrus has mostly perished in the past millennia, so we're left with the birds and stuff.
The Arabic script developed ultimately from the Phonecian abjad via a bunch of intermediaries and it's probably unrelated to the Hieroglyphs. It entered Egypt when the country was invaded by the Arabs in the 7th century. Edited by Ari on 11 February 2012 at 10:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6234 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 11 of 22 11 February 2012 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Perfect 
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4806 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 22 11 February 2012 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Reminded me of this old post:
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6456 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 13 of 22 12 February 2012 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As for the vowels there ore other ways than using Copitc to reconstruct them, and there are some books that
discuss the matter — the big problem is: most egyptologists don’t care about it. Many dead languages scholars do not care, and have «dead, therefore dead, we cannot know, thus it’s no use trying» as a maxim. Names, cognates, known borrowings, misspellings, etc. etc. can be used to, to some degree, what it might have sounded like. The word for I was written ĭnk and is pronounced [i:nek] by scholars, but is reconstructed to [ja:nak] — which is much more similar to the semitic words for I, e.g. anāku [ana:ku] in akkadian. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4975 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 14 of 22 12 February 2012 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think it's not so hard.
I have tried to learn it, and I did not do well, but, I would say that the pictures are rather straightforward : you see a bird, and its meaning is "bird". Copying it may be different thing, of course. In Chinese there are people called Naxi, that use a pictografic script, I have some books on it. According to something (book, website etc) it takes 15 years to learn the script. Quite a long time. of course 'normal' people don't use them, it's only for religious leaders to learn it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 22 13 February 2012 at 2:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't know why but I am under the impression it's not so straightforward. "Big eye" would mean Ophthalmologist? Pyramid = "VIPs-only cemetery", "you are here"? And what's with the dude walking like, er, an Egyptian? "Gents this way"? Bird, bird, giant eye, pyramid, bird, giant eye, dead fish, cat head, cat head, cat head, "guy doing this" (Egyptian stance :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6176 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 22 13 February 2012 at 3:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I laughed out loud at this. Well done. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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