Mr Chris is right. Ancient Egyptian alphabet very different indeed. Doesn't have an equivalent for every letter in the English alphabet, despite what the papyrus sellers out there will tell you. It has 24 alphabet signs, and more than 2400 individual signs in total... I nearly cried when Paul came back from his day trip, pleased as anything with a piece of papyrus with 4 signs on it, claiming it was his name. I didn't dare tell him the first symbol was the sign for a sacred pool....
A lot of heiroglyphs mean whole words, not letters or sounds, and as far as I can remember from my lectures, they had no vowels in the written form, only vowel-equivalents like "Y". We add in the vowels when we pronounce it so it can be actually spoken. To an actual ancient egyptian, we could be speaking total garbage....
Yeah, the no vowel things is a bit confusing because I'm sure there are a few things that are a bit like vowels. I suspect I jsut don't have the linguistics knowledge to cover it though. :)
And yay! I'm knowledgeable on something that could almost be considered arts! :)
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Date: 2005-04-14 09:54 am (UTC)Mr Chris is right. Ancient Egyptian alphabet very different indeed. Doesn't have an equivalent for every letter in the English alphabet, despite what the papyrus sellers out there will tell you. It has 24 alphabet signs, and more than 2400 individual signs in total... I nearly cried when Paul came back from his day trip, pleased as anything with a piece of papyrus with 4 signs on it, claiming it was his name. I didn't dare tell him the first symbol was the sign for a sacred pool....
A lot of heiroglyphs mean whole words, not letters or sounds, and as far as I can remember from my lectures, they had no vowels in the written form, only vowel-equivalents like "Y". We add in the vowels when we pronounce it so it can be actually spoken. To an actual ancient egyptian, we could be speaking total garbage....
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Date: 2005-04-14 11:15 am (UTC)And yay! I'm knowledgeable on something that could almost be considered arts! :)