Ptahhotep maxims, conclusion 2 of 7

There are 24 lines but they're mostly short. This poem sounds different from the rest. It's a lot more repeat-y. The word "hear" appears all over the place, often twice in a short line, sometimes "hear" appears three times in one line.

It's an animal ear, plus an owl at the end for the sound of "M" and sometimes with a folded cloth at the front for the sound of "S." So, whenever you see the animal ear you look for the folded cloth in front and the owl behind and include those as one thing; the sound "sDm" where capital D means a sound something akin to our D but with a bit of J to it.

And that animal ear sDm is used as a base to describe types of Egyptian sentence structures. But I never understood why. It's like "widget" is used to describe all economic and business scenarios. And here we do see how sDm works very well for this as it's used with different signs for "hears" and "hearing," "one who hears" and "heard," "listener" and "one who is listened to."

And right off you go, "there sure is a lot of hearing going on" and then realize "hearing" also means "heeding" and "obeying." For example a son "obeys" his father. All to describe how valuable these maxims are.

* Hearing is useful for a son who is a hearer.
* When hearing enters in a hearer,
* the hearer becomes the heard,
* good of hearing, good of speaking:
* a hearer, master of what is useful.
* Hearing is useful for the hearer:
* hearing is better than anything that is,
* for love of what is good ensues.
* How good it is for a son to receive when his father speaks,
* old age happens to him from it.
* One who hears is one whom the god loves;
* one whom the god hates cannot hear.
* the mind is what makes its owner
* into one who hears or one who does not hear;
* a man's mind is "lph" for him.
* the hearer is the one who hears speaking,
* but he who does what is said is the one who loves hearing.
* How good it is when a son listens to his father;
* how joyful is he to whom this is said,
* a son who is pleasing for having hearing.
* The hearer to whom it is said becomes effective in the womb
* and worthy with his father,
* for his memory is in the mouth of the living
* who are on earth or who will exist.

I approach each line differently now. It's chopped up to get at each word. Sentence parts are picked out, and word parts are picked out to get at the ends so the things between them can be seen as words. In their unlimited forms where redundancies seen and omissions noted for abbreviations. It goes faster. For this one, since "to hear" is used so much, I didn't have to look up so many words. It's a matter of discerning who's hearing whom.