Talk:Egyptian hieroglyphs

Vertical Stroke meaning disputed
"they are always accompanied by a mute vertical stroke indicating their status as a logogram" -- I agree this is the consensus interpretation of the Z1 vertical stroke(coptic - roht).

Nearly example I've ever seen follows a glyph with an "r". I consider this glyph to be an "r" determinative(still silent), but signifying that there is an "r" present. Whether this is after "per" or "re". It is also possible that a glyph has 2 different readings(ie 2 words for goose), where one of the words has an "r", and this signifies which word for the glyph to use. So I believe this logogram theory/interpretation is incorrect; both interpretations make the z1 heiroglyph silent, so it is mostly theoretical as to the why. 2601:58B:E7F:8410:30E3:3636:9B1C:7EB0 (talk) 19:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)


 * See WP:NOR.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 05:34, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Obscure word example
O34-G38-G1-A47-D54 - keep, watch This particular word does not exist in Faulkner, Vygus, Dickson, or AED(German) dictionaries, with a g38, but does exist with a g39 (wrong goose is shown). And the translation is wrong according to 3 dictionaries, and is based solely on the A47 glyph (guard determinitive).

There is no coptic equivalent of keep or watch starting with an s, or an s-s; the translation is suspect. The word has multiple determinatives(ignored glyphs), and is a bad teaching example. O34-s [in ptolemys] G39-Coptic smoune - goose, large duck (not gb/geb as in g38) G1-Coptic Ahom - eagle, vulture A47-Coptic eloiH? - shepherd (determinative?)(or guard determinitive?) D54 - walk/move determinative or suffix?

"linger, await, creep" -- AED/Dickson/Vygus

'Ancestral to the alphabet'
'The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet.'

This may or may not be technically true, but the phrasing is misleading, as it mixes apples and oranges. Hieratic and demotic are true continuations of the hieroglyphic logographic-consonantal system with the principles and structure virtually unchanged. The West Semitic abjad is fundamentally different in its principles and its (postulated) relation to the hieroglyphic script is highly indirect.

'Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use...'

Even the oft-repeated claim that the hieroglyphic script is 'ancestral' to the majority of modern scripts or, as the cited (non-linguistic) source says, that the Semites 'adopted about 30 hieroglyphs', has always been imprecise. A sign consists of the signifier and the signified - 'borrowing' the signifier without its signified (either in terms of sound or in terms of meaning) is not what you would normally mean by 'adopting' it. (This reminds me of the Cherokee 'adoption' of the Latin script.) The Semites neither borrowed the Egyptian phonetic values (saying, having the ox picture represent the sound sequence kʾ based on the Egyptian word for 'ox') nor used the 30 signs logographically as in Egyptian (say, having the ox picture denote the word *ʔalp- that has the meaning ox) - which are the the two ways Sumerian cuneiform signs and Chinese characters truly have been adopted by surrounding peoples. The only allegation is that they borrowed the specific shape of their signs, i.e. the specific way in which the pictograms depicted the concepts they relied on, and the general idea of exploiting the names of the concepts depicted for their sound values (and even then they did it very differently, using only the first consonant of the word that stood for the depicted concept, unlike the Egyptians, who generally let the sound value be determined by all the consonants that truly occurred in the word). The shapes were arguably the least important aspect of their innovation - they could have easily used other shapes. They are supposed to have basically reverse-engineered some of the basic principles of the origins of the Egyptian system (by then extremely far removed in time) and to have applied them to their own language in a drastically reduced and altered form - an extremely convoluted process which can hardly be called 'derivation', 'adoption' or, arguably, even a case of 'ancestry'; more like 'inspiration'. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 05:26, 1 May 2024 (UTC)