You'd think there'd be a ton of reptiles and amphibians in Egypt along the Nile and there really are quite a lot more signs, but they're variations of these signs, combinations of these glyphs with other signs, these creatures with headdresses, on poles as fetishes and as standards for cities, with royal implements, in boxes, on paths, around mummies, as mummies, spitting, in multiples, combined with other animals, words, letters, and sounds, snakes with legs and so on, but all that wild variety are of scant specialized utility. It just means they've been seen somewhere at some isolated point in this language's history.
No, the category for amphibians and reptiles is discouragingly small. But for the student, learning their sounds is essential because you see them everywhere in writing. The word for Egypt uses the crocodile skin, and the horned viper is used for "father" and "him," "his," "he" and the like along with grammatical conjugation. And the long cobra with the tail that droops over the side, one of my all time favorite glyphs, stands for one of the "D" sounds. The kind that sounds a bit like a "J" or a "DJ" combination so two of those phonemes together make the sound for the English word "judge," a very useful sign. You see these two snakes everywhere. While the striking cobra in a basket is used for one of the "Two Ladies," the other a vulture, both in their own basket, two baskets side by side for Wadjet and Nekhbet, the basket glyph represents "Lord." What fantastic imaginative representation for the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, a vulture to represent upper and a cobra to represent lower. I always thought that was amazing. Odd, though, from an Northern Hemisphere centric point of view, upper is South and lower, the delta, is North.
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Because, as you already know, the upriver and downriver re Nile, is the point of reference. You said once that they hated going out to sea. Were they interested at all in astrology. Prolly.
You have no idea how much I appreciate the time you take with your GIFs and other thingamajigs.
About the language itself, will you give a brief overview of how it is structured, etc.
In English we take a p and an r to make the pr sound. In Egyptian, I get the impression that pr, for example, might have its own symbol. Plus I assume individual symbols stand for single sounds, p (puh). And in many ways, if not most, hieroglyphs are like Chinese ideograms. E.g., the ideogram for crisis is danger plus opportunity, or some such.
So, will you please give an example of a word to break down its pronunciation?
Thanks for all the cool work you do here.
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