| Did you ever wonder how birds and
men walking sideways could be part of a real language? It is difficult to think of these
pictures as letters, grammar, and sentences. But don't be fooled; Egyptian hieroglyphs
represent a well-developed, written and spoken language that is every bit as complex as
English. It has all kinds of grammatical features such as nouns, verbs, and prepositions.
And just think, they are also beautiful! |
The basic
Egyptian alphabet of twenty-five letters has two kinds of hieroglyphic signs: those you
read and pronounce (sound-signs, or phonograms, such as  the letter
m), and those you look at for the picture value (sense-signs, or ideograms). Many words in
Egyptian use both types of signs, first "spelling" out the word with
sound-signs, and then adding a pictorial sense-sign to help clarify the meaning. So, to
write the word "man" in Egyptian, you would spell out the hieroglyphic
equivalents for "m" + "a" + "n" and then add a picture of a
man at the end of the word: From here it gets a little
trickier. While a basic alphabet exists in Egyptian of only about twenty-five letters, it
is possible to write these letters in many different ways, making for literally thousands
of hieroglyphic signs. In English the letter "b" always means just that one
letter; but in Egyptian some signs stand for a single letter ( b),
other signs stand for two letters ( ba), and still others stand for
three (  nfr, pronounced nefer as in Nefertiti).
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