An assistant has taken over her duties and for the first time this session we see the actual hieroglyphs being discussed in the text. This new teacher is telling her student how she is reading the texts and I must say it's the best that I've seen so far. She used the JSesh program to type her hieroglyphs and that does take a thorough knowledge of their Gardiner codes assigned to each glyph. As I showed you, a letter for the category, animals, parts of animals, plants, birds, buildings and so forth, then a number for the specific glyph. All birds are G-something, for example. So you use those codes, or you use the internet designation for their sound values to type. But that's a bit tricky because glyphs have different sound values, and their codes change on whim by the power of particular Egyptologists. For example we began learning that italicized i stood for English "i" but then a powerful British Egyptologist changed that to italicized j for some strange reason of his own. And I don't like that. So I stick with i. And now we learn the sound value is actually English "A." Also there already is a well known, highly used A symbol, the Egyptian eagle that differs slightly from a regular eagle. It can be a bit confusing. I expect it all drives the programmer types a bit batty. And incidentally, I notice that programmer types are very good at managing all this. They impress me.
The teacher broke down twenty or so Egyptian words. I re-drew only my favorite ten. Also, the letters representing sounds are not always the real sound, as I just mentioned j, there are others because our keyboard is limited. We need three types of sounds that approximate our "H" sound so Egyptologist use capitalized H, lower case h, and X for that guttural sound heard in Middle East languages and in German that sounds like you're working up a loogie from your throat to spit and that English writers think of (sort of) as a fairly gross H, or maybe a GH. At any rate, a sound that we do not have in our language so we don't have a letter for it. So when you see the circle with horizontal lines through it like levelers, and see it's assigned H, it's not really an H. It's that weird sound.
The glyphs might display different sizes because I resized each page to 500 to fit here on Blogger.
If you choose to look through, I honestly think you'll not see a more straightforward explanation on how these things are decoded.
I meant to say "oddly" not oddy.
Make that nine. I removed one because it didn't resize well at all.
2 comments:
I'm so embarrassed. I still don't get whether a symbol is a word or a symbol is just a sound so it takes several symbols to make a word. You've probably splained it in this very post but I'm that stoopid -- HELP!
They are logograms representing words
They are phonograms representing sounds
They are determinatives placed at the end to help clarify their meaning.
The sign for widow has a woman at the end specifying the root refers to a female widow and not a male.
Conceive has a pregnant woman (were it English) so that its not conflated with think an idea.
Naked has a picture of cloth as determinative so the sound "hard H+A+y isn't another word that sound like that.
And so on.
You see, the setup allows for tremendous punnage. Egyptians were outrageously fond of puns. Even more so than we are. There was not a real standard as to how to spell something. Sometimes elements are left off, sometimes rearranged for symmetry, and other times exceedingly explicit to avoid miscomprehension between homonyms.
That's why I appreciated this woman so much this time. She really lays it all out.
We have examples of buttressing letters that usually follow appearing in front of the word symbol instead of behind it. And we've seen determinatives appearing in front instead of at the end as they should be. We have complementing letters of the second sound instead of the first sound. And we have no complementing letters at all. And no determinatives at all. So all the rules we struggle to master get tossed right out the window in practice.
Just like sign language.
Your textbook and your videos can take you only so far. Then you meet the real world and you're all, what? What about all those rules we painstakingly mastered. No little actually fits when we see it.
And all that goes to free you. You're liberated to go off and do whatever you want. So long as it tracks with the rules.
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