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Essential hieroglyph decks for Anki | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 5 31 August 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Long ago, I made an Anki deck with the 200 most common hieroglyphs. I've just translated that deck to English, pruned the less useful cards, and added explanations and example vocabulary.
For more information, see: Essential Hieroglyphs: Flashcards for Anki This deck is based on my actual, first-hand experience with Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique and several authentic texts: I've added a handful of important signs, removed signs that beginners don't need to know, and cross-referenced various confusing signs. Here are two sample cards: 
You can download this deck directly from the Anki site. Enjoy! 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 5 31 August 2014 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sorry but every time someone talks about hieroglyphics I can only ever see the Simpsons episode where Principle Skinner is giving dictation.
Skinner: All right, read me back what I have so far, Mrs. Krabapatra. Krabappel: Bird, bird, giant eye, pyramid, bird. Skinner: Mmm-hmm, very good. Uh, giant eye, dead fish, cat head, cat head, cat head, guy doing this ... [strikes the "walk like an Egyptian" pose> 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 5 01 September 2014 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Heh. :-) My favorite bad Egytian joke is probably this one here: "Oh, fer cryin' out loud, you never end a sentence with a <bird symbol>!"
Hieroglyphs are actually a very nice writing system, but they only work for Egyptian. They're basically an abjad (consontonal alphabet) like Hebrew and Arabic, but with two additions: 1. Semantic determinatives, which resolve ambiguity and which probably helped Egyptians insert the correct vowels. 2. Multiliteral signs. Here's an example of a multiliteral sign for sS with two different determinatives: 
sS v. to write 
sS n. scribe We could also write that with the single-letter symbols for s and S: 
sS v. to write Or, for compactness, we could replace s with z, which apparently sounded the same in Middle Egyptian: 
sS v. to write So "spelling" is certainly a bit flexible, but a native speaker could probably have grasped the basics readily enough when the classic language was still spoken. Scribal education apparently took a decade or so, which seems like a lot. But scribes were a respected profession, and maybe they were expected to learn a bunch of other stuff, too. For example, cursive forms of Egyptian can get pretty challenging. Anyway, once you learn ~150 signs or so, it's a pretty nice writing system. Not as nice as a modern alphabet with punctuation, perhaps, but there are larger and more complicated writing systems in use today. My Anki deck is a lot shorter than Hesig's Remembering the Kanji! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5386 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 5 01 September 2014 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Your cards looks nice.
How do you write the hierogylyphs here? Which font du you use? Are you typing in Gardinernumbers or have you to go through a list to find the right glyph? And how do you arrange them (top, bottom, direction, cartuches etc.) That would interrest me much! Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 5 01 September 2014 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
The big hieroglyphs at the top of the cards are just ordinary Unicode characters, using the Gardiner.ttf font from this page. The vocabulary words at the bottom of the cards are rendered using JSesh, an open source hieroglyphic typesetting tool. Normally, hieroglyphs are entered using the Manuel de Codage conventions. So, for example, I would type: 
z:S-Y3-Y1 Here, ":" means "stack" and "-" means "next to". Hieroglyphs can be entered using either the equivalent characters (when they're unambiguous and in the software's dictionary) or by using the Gardiner codes ("A1", "Y3", etc). JSesh has a catalog of hierogylphs and a search function. The inline images in my last two posts were created using my hierogloss software, which works with a web-based version of the JSesh renderer that I hacked together a while back. If you know the Manuel de Codage rules, you can actually generate transparent PNGs by writing down the codes for a set of hieroglyphs, URL-escaping them, and sticking them into URLs of the form http://i.hierogloss.net/mdc/z%3AS-Y3-Y1.png. For example, here's how to render s "man" using hieroglyphs: 
z:A1*1 http://i.hierogloss.net/mdc/z%3AA1*1.png For those who use Linux systems, I've also created ibus-ancient, which includes an actual input method like you'd use for Chinese or Japanese. You can enter a sequence of several letters and pick the appropriate glyph from a pop-up menu. By itself, this can't stack hierogylphs properly, but it can enter the Unicode characters. And hierogloss supports actual Unicode characters in addition to regular Manual de Codage abbreviations, so it's actually quite civilized. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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