How To Read Hieroglyphs
| Education : University 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. Our spelling is more complicated than it needs to be. Like, why do we spell phone with a PH when we have a perfectly good F just going to waste? And why bother with C when we already have K and S? Why have double letters (like the M's in rummy) when we only pronounce it once? And then there are words like knight, technique, and phlegm! When you use hieroglyphs, you spell your words phonetically (the way it sounds), so you leave out silent letters: height: the E,G, and second H are silent maybe: A and E are long, the Y is silent hey: the EY sounds like a long A Christmas: the CH sounds like K, the T is pretty much silent, and the A sounds more like a short I rogue: the U and E are silent saxophone: the X is really a KS sound, the PH is an F sound, and the E is silent. Alone or in pairs, vowels stand for lots of different sounds. And sometimes they're silent. When any English letter (whether it's a vowel or a consonant) is silent, don't include a hieroglyph for it. Some English sounds weren't spoken in ancient Egypt... English and ancient Egyptian aren't from the same language family, so some of the sounds they said don't exist in our alphabet. And some of the sounds we make did not exist in Egyptian. For example, they didn't need a hieroglyph for the TH sound because they didn't say any words containing that sound. You'll notice in the chart at the bottom that some sounds (like F and V) that are different to us weren't distinguished by the ancient Egyptians, so we have to use the same hieroglyph. Why F and V? Because these two sounds are articulated in roughly the same place in your mouth. Try saying "ffffff" and then change it to "vvvvvv." See how changing the flow of air in your mouth makes a subtle difference in the sound? 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: F-R-T or But is that freight, fort, or feret? 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? Gus goose A: Either one. We can't tell unless a determinative is written with the other hieroglyphs. A determinative is a hieroglyph that has no sound. It's just there to give a clue to the meaning of the word. Determinatives were tacked on to the ends of words to indicate its general meaning.
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