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Most difficult alphabet | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5518 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 42 29 April 2014 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Regular Egyptian hieroglyphs—the ones you see on temples and such—are quite lovely to work with. There are roughly 200 common signs, divided between phonetic signs and determinatives, which are basically written semantic classifiers that allow the reader to fill in the missing vowels (or would have, back when people still knew the vowels). Once you learn a bunch of basic signs, it's surprisingly pleasant. There's a related form of the script which appears in certain religious texts like the Book of Going Forth by Day. This is slightly simplified for hand-writing, but it's still quite legible. But once you get into ordinary texts, you start seeing hieratic, which gets a lot harder. It's basically an exercise in palaeography: There are books (mostly in German) which catalog dozens of variants of each cursive sign from different manuscripts and time periods. And demotic is also pretty intimidating. Granted, these probably get easier once you know the language really well, and you can decipher various squiggles from context. I used to struggle with bad French handwriting, too, but it got easier once I had done a lot of reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6645 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 42 of 42 29 April 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha, there actually exist cursive cuneiform, a more relaxed and less detailed style used in less formal writing. I've
seen old babylonian cursive and it was a mess because, worse then the formal furies simplification mergers, a lot of very frequent syllabic signs looked almost exactly the same, e.g. ma, ba and ku. But I presume that cursive hands are hard to read no matter what language they are written in. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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