Believe it our not, hieroglyphs are a surprisingly nice writing system. During Middle Egyptian times, there were approximately 900 to 1,000 total signs in use, out of which maybe 200 make up the core writing system. Signs fall into a few main categories:
- Uniliterals. Each of these stands for one consonant.
- Biliterals and triliterals. These stand for two or three consonants, respectively.
- Determinatives. These are used sort of like written-only "semantic classifiers", to disambiguate words.
Uniliterals
This is the core "alphabet" of hieroglyphs, capable of representing any word in the language:
A | i | y | a | w | b | p | f | m | n | r | h | H | x | X | z | s | S | q | k | g | t | T | d | D |
So the Egyptians were perfectly aware of alphabets, but they still chose to add a couple hundred extra signs, probably because it made things easier for them to read.
Biliterals and triliterals
Courtesy of Wikipedia, here's one of the most commonly-carved names in all of Egypt, the "son of Ra" name of Ramesses II. As Wikipedia puts it, "He is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire." And in all likelihood, it was either him or his son who faced off against Moses.
Here's his name, which I looked up on Wikipedia. Note that parts of his name are written out of order to (a) make a pleasing cartouche and (b) honor the gods by writing their names before any related words.
sA ra ra-ms-sw mry-imn
"Son of Ra, Ramesses Meryamun"
Here, let's look at the name of the god imn "Amun", embedded in Ramesses' name:
This is written as three signs: a uniliteral for i, a biliteral for mn, and finally (on the bottom right) the unliteral for n. The sign for mn gives this a certain visual distinctiveness that makes it just jump off the page, even in the absence of spaces between the words. The extra n is redundant, but very commonly written. Realistically, you need to know perhaps 60 common biliterals to make your life easy.
Determinatives
Like many Afroasiatic languages, Egyptian features "triconsonantal roots," where the consonants stay the same when a word is inflected, but the vowels in between the consonants change. Wikipedia gives the example of "k-t-b", which is used for many words related to writing:
kataḇ | כתב | "he wrote" |
miḵtaḇ | מכתב | "letter" |
Here, you can see that in both Hebrew words, the stem is written as כתב without any vowels.
The Egyptians, on the other, were kind enough to disambiguate. Take the stem sS, which is used for words related to writing, and notice how the Egyptians used a silent "determinative" sign to make it clear:
sS + the determinative for "abstract idea, writing"
"to write", "document"
sS + the determinative for "man"
"scribe"
Another lovely example is the word r(m)T "people", which is written with a compound determinative, and without the inconveniently large sign for m:
r(m)T + "man" + "woman" + "plural"
The Egyptian language is actually surprisingly egalitarian about plurals compared to the Romance languages: The plural pronouns are all neuter, and words like "people" typically include both men and women.
A large fraction of the ~900 signs in Middle Egyptian are rare determinatives. But these are surprisingly easy to learn, because many of them are self explanatory. For example, here are the determinatives for "sandal" and "crocodile":
You don't need to make Anki cards with Hesig-style mnemonics to learn those!
Comparing Egyptian hieroglyphs to modern writing systems
Let's look at some places where Egyptian shines:
- Middle Egyptian has far fewer signs to learn than Chinese or Japanese.
- Unlike Hebrew and Arabic, the Egyptians actually draw little pictures to clarify ambiguous words. Nice!
- The writing system is well-matched to the needs of the language, and native speakers would have automatically known the sounds for many biliterals and triliterals.
But apart from that, the language is simple: The conjugation charts for the entire language fit on two pages, gender is usually clear from the spelling of the word, and—unlike classical Arabic—there are no cases. And there are truly excellent learning resources available. If you want a fairly exotic language with a minimum number of tables to memorize, and no pressure to produce output, it's a fun choice. Plus, it's pretty cool to actually look at pictures or exhibits of ancient carvings and sometimes be able to read them.