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Is Hieroglyphics/ancient Egyptian hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 17 of 22 13 February 2012 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||
Hopefully there's more than only a few people able to read it. And you can read it as easily (or as painfully) as you read any other language. As for the numbers of signs, there are roughly 700 used in Middle-Egyptian but I would say you only need to know 200 of them to read appoximately anything. Most of the 500 remaining signs are determinatives, meaning that they are written at the end of words to indicate his "category" but they have no pronunciation of their own. The real challenge when begining to learn Ancient Egyptian is not the number of signs but the fact that one sign can be a pictogram, a phonogram or a determinative. Thus the reader must decide which value is meaningful in the sentence he is reading. Another hinderance is the lack of punctuation and separation between words. But after a few months of practice, it's no more a problem. Edited by akkadboy on 13 February 2012 at 10:41am 4 persons have 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 18 of 22 13 February 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
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So while we're on the subject, how much literature do we have in Ancient Egyptian, and what kind of stuff is there? Is it interesting stuff or is it all "Imhotep gave Omhotep five chickens in return for one ox" and that sort of stuff?
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| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5406 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 19 of 22 13 February 2012 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
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If by "literature" you mean "belles lettres", not much. Some tales, some "teachings" (i.e. "how to be a perfect gentleman/scribe", some poetry (especially love poetry) and a few texts whose purpose is not clear (account of real events or fiction).
But if we accept a broader definition of "literature", there's a huge amount of royal/religious/private texts. A lot of them are carefully written and could be ranked among "belles lettres", others are less refined. At the bottom of it, there's a great number of legal texts, letters, contracts and other everyday-life witnesses. Last but not least, there's also a complete literature in Coptic which means written in Ancient Egyptian but almost exclusively christian in content (apocryphals, martyrdoms, homilies and of course legal texts, letters, contracts, etc). The problem might be that Ancient Egyptian literature is actually made of texts in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic which are written in hieroglyphics, hieratic script, demotic script or Coptic alphabet. Edited by akkadboy on 13 February 2012 at 11:18am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6550 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 20 of 22 13 February 2012 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
I think he meant "belles hieroglyphes" ... here is a blog that covers a bit of what is available on line. As the first link is now dead, you'll have to fiddle with the wayback machine. link to archive Edited by zenmonkey on 13 February 2012 at 11:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5133 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 21 of 22 03 January 2016 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here for you guys who want to learn ancient Egyptian:
http://omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 22 04 January 2016 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Omniglot is a nice beginning, but serious learning requires at least Assimil :) And academic study generally requires English+German+French, with some important resources in each language. Edited by Serpent on 04 January 2016 at 11:43am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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