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The written Egyptian language, hieroglyphics, is made up of three types of symbols. Alphabetic signs (phonograms) correspond to a letter or sound produced by that sign. Syllabic symbols stand for sounds produced by a group of letters, a syllable. Determinative signs (ideograms) relate to a specific object or idea, such as man, woman, and water. Hieroglyphics can be read from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. The direction depends on the direction the symbols are facing.
Hieroglyphic writing is phonetic...That means symbols stand for certain sounds (unlike the English alphabet where some letters have many sounds or can be silent). Let's start out with an example, the word freight. While the F, R, and T sound the "normal" way, the G and H are silent and the E and I make one sound (long A). There are 7 letters in the word, but only 4 sounds (F, R, long A, and T) are heard. So to spell freight with hieroglyphs, you'd use the symbols for those 4 sounds:Four different sounds are used to say "freight," so four symbols-- no more, no less-- are needed to write it the Egyptian way.
Vowels were often left out...The Egyptians often used only hieroglyphs for consonant sounds to write their words. Thus, you can spell freight like this:But is that freight, fort, or ferret? You have to look at the word in the context of the rest of the sentence to figure it out. Or you could use a determinative...Q: If you leave out the vowels, what does (G-S) mean? 1. Gus 2. GooseA: Either one. We can’t tell unless a determinative is written with the other hieroglyphs. F-R-T or
A determinative is a hieroglyph that has no sound. It’s just there to give a clue to the meaning of a word. Determinatives were tacked on to the ends of words to indicate its general meaning. goose Gus
