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Is Hieroglyphics/ancient Egyptian hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6435 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 1 of 22 11 February 2012 at 8:36am | IP Logged | ||
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My only exposure to this was in 6th grade when our teacher gave us list of Hieroglyphics, each with a corresponding English letter next to them, and we had to write our names in Hieroglyphics.
I'm almost entirely positive that real Hieroglyphics works nothing like that, and the exercise was just for fun because we were all little kids and thought ancient Egypt was cool, and it's not like anyone actually knew that language so no one would raise their hand and be like "this is wrong." I remember reading somewhere that it's super impossible to learn and there are only a few people in the world who can read stuff written in Hieroglyphics and it takes them a long time because they have to look everything up. Is that just because it's so old that everything has to be translated indirectly? Can someone give me Cliffs Notes on this language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 22 11 February 2012 at 9:45am | IP Logged | ||
Why do you say that? As far as I know, hieroglyphs were used both as picto/ideograms and for their phonetic value, so equating one glyph with one English letter might not have been an exact translation, of course, but if you wanted to write your name in hieroglyphs, that's probably pretty much what you'd need to do. Except that you'd have to watch out for silent letters and the like. Oh, and hieroglyphic writing is an abjad, so the vowels aren't written. And often consonants are reduplicated, and multi-consonant characters are used. So I guess you're right, it doesn't really work like that at all. I think Assimil has an Ancient Egyptian course with a French base, though I don't know whether or not it teaches hieroglyphs. EDIT: Actually, nevermind, just read the Wikipedia article. It looks pretty good. Edited by Ari on 11 February 2012 at 9:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5597 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 3 of 22 11 February 2012 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
It does teach them. I think, the Assimil course may be more accessible for bloody beginners than more academic, though utterly excellent and didactic works like Middle Egyptien by James Allen. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5224 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 4 of 22 11 February 2012 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is Hieroglyphics/ancient Egyptian hard?
Not if you use Rosetta Stone. 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 22 11 February 2012 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently studying the Assimil beginner's course for a bit of fun on the side (which is great as it comes with audio CDs as well - although pronunciation is of course theoretical and largely based on liturgical Coptic), and previously used Collier and Manley's excellent "How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" along with some web resources back in 2010. Although it's no piece of cake, I think it's well within the capabilities of most people to learn Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics...it's just a lot of hard work, that's all.
As Ari rightly points out, there are many facets to reading hieroglyphics, including pictograms, duplicated sounds, morphological markers, and determinatives (signs that give you a clue to the overall context of the word). Therefore it might help to think of Egyptian hieroglyphics as a mixture of languages like Japanese (which uses a mixture of kanji and kana) and Arabic (a related Semitic language that has a similarly rich and complex morphology). Edited by Teango on 13 February 2012 at 11:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4979 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 6 of 22 11 February 2012 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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"super impossible" = what is it with people not being able to something like "hard" or "difficult"...
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| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6435 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 22 11 February 2012 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | ||
Can I use Pimsleur instead? 
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| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6435 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 8 of 22 11 February 2012 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
That kinda makes sense. I read on the wikipedia article that there were over 2000 characters so I figured it wasn't just phonetic. Does anyone speak it? Or are attempts at speaking it just a guess? Also, it seems like it would've been really inefficient to write, having to draw like birds and stuff for each letter. Was there a shorthand? Or did it eventually evolve into modern Arabic writing (which actually looks like it could be written pretty quickly since it mostly just looks like a horizontal line with some squigglies*) *pretty sure I will get flamed and/or corrected for saying that :p edit - I take back my comment. Sometimes it looks like a horizontal line with some squigglies: http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/mdduw.gif I think that could be written pretty quickly by someone who knew what they were doing. But then I saw this, which looks like it would take a lot longer to write: http://library.thinkquest.org/2834/gather/egypt/arabic2.gif And this, which has a lot of vertical lines, thus invalidating my "horizontal line" comment earlier: http://arabicgenie.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/arabi c_tattoo_design_strength_courage_wisdom.png And this one is like a mixture of them all: http://www.tattoospot.com/data/media/81/arabic-writing2.jpg What does it mean when there's a long line. Is that just stylistic or is it a string of letters that are just written as a horizontal line, such as this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Basmala.s vg Edited by IronFist on 11 February 2012 at 7:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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