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Is Hieroglyphics/ancient Egyptian hard?

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22 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
akkadboy
Triglot
Senior Member
France
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Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish
Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh

 
 Message 17 of 22
13 February 2012 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
IronFist wrote:
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?

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

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Ari
Heptaglot
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Norway
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 Message 18 of 22
13 February 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged 
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 5168 days ago

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Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish
Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh

 
 Message 19 of 22
13 February 2012 at 11:10am | IP Logged 
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

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zenmonkey
Bilingual Tetraglot
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Germany
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Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German
Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew

 
 Message 20 of 22
13 February 2012 at 11:24am | IP Logged 
akkadboy wrote:
If by "literature" you mean "belles lettres", not much.


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

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Monox D. I-Fly
Senior Member
Indonesia
monoxdifly.iopc.us
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 Message 21 of 22
03 January 2016 at 1:55pm | IP Logged 
Here for you guys who want to learn ancient Egyptian:
http://omniglot.com/writing/egyptian.htm
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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 Message 22 of 22
04 January 2016 at 11:42am | IP Logged 
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



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