F. Group: Parts of Mammals

From Middle Egyptian Grammar Sign List by James E. Hoch. A Canadian professor, I think, somebody wrote about taking his class. This is workbook to help with his text.

This is a strange group. It is large and detailed, an important group. Going through the parts of animals makes one wonder if everyone was butcher back then or what. How else would some of these bizarre symbols end up in their written language?

The group starts with the front parts of large animals then list heads of canines, horns, things on the head then hindquarters and legs and tails, skins and abdomen, heart and a few signs for backbone then piddles out with half a dozen ways to draw intestines. An "S" shape drawn as many ways as possible. Spending a few days with the group is enough to put you off meat for awhile.

When you get to things like "heart and windpipe" and "lungs and windpipe" Honestly, who would look at innards this way? The way that they look at spines and drew them. They're important symbols wrapped up with their idea of beauty. The symbol appears everywhere in design. The lung signifying unity of two part of their country. The design for lungs become part of the woodwork in their furniture. Their headboard and footboard design is basically a lung. Of an animal. The heart that is seen everywhere as a vase is a picture of an animal heart.

I'm writing his whole book over again.

Except I'm not drawing them this time, I'm using JSESH and I'm getting a bit good at it.

Each sign here has an F number with it from 1 to 51. Entering the number in JSESH produces the sign. That is the number for the sign in the Manuel de Cordage, an international group that agreed on using Gardiner's original plan. Hoch is sampling Gardiner. I'm using Manuel de Cordage through JSESH. To use it I have to know the code for the sign and knowing how they're arranged systematically like this helps considerably.

JSESH will also accept the transliteration symbols that get at the sound of the signs adapted for computers. Knowing that code and how it's adapted helps speed things too. I'm getting really good at entering the code by mixing them. I guess that was the whole idea. It's kind of fun. I can open JSESH, type:

ms s H G36 w F23:N14 A40

Hit enter, boink.

That appears. See? The swallow is entered by G36 and the chick is entered by its transliteration symbol w code for its sound. Back and forth one after another there are two ways to get at the sign. Row after row of these things. Too many frames for Photoshop to handle. My stack of transparencies exceeds their 500 frame limit. So the file was saved to GIF using GIMP instead, another program like Photoshop except free. Gimp cannot save the timing of each frame. It assigns one speed for the whole thing.