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Everyone knows how hieroglyphic texts first appear to us : it’s double Dutch ! At least, for a large majority of people. Here is my suggestion : try to show you how it worked. I’m not a teacher, and though I am reading hieroglyphs for several years, I can only show you what I understand (myself). In other words, anyone who is abble to complete this will be welcome ! The article is divided into two parts : some recalls first, then then word construction. If you feel at home enough with basic knowledge, then jump directly...

However, this article requires basic knowledge of hieroglyphs. To know these basic notions and to understand this article, reading the article "Introduction to hieroglyphs" is necessary to learn about this basic knowledge and to understand...

First recall

There are three hieroglyph types : phonograms, ideograms and determinatives.

Phonograms represent a sound, a syllable : there are three groups of them :

Unilateral sign

Le son de la lettre b

Unilateral signs

Sign of one consonant. For example, the sound for the letter b

Bilateral signs

Sign of two consonants. For example, the sound of bd

Trilateral signs

Sign of three consonants. For example, the sound of nfr

Each symbol is representing a consonant, a semi-consonant or a syllable. Indeed, vowels don’t exist. In fact, as the language is lost, every « weak sound » could’nt be retranscribed, so we usually replace them with an "e", for the pronunciation :

example : the trilateral sign "nfr" (which is shown on the left) is read "nefer". We insert some "e" arbitrarily, like this : CvC (Consonant-vowel-Consonant). (whereas we could have made it another way : "nefre," "enfer," or "enfre"...)

n, f and r

the wave, the horned viper with horn and the mouth

To help us reading the symbols, a phonetic list was drawn up. We call this transliteration : retranscribing phonetically (with symbols that are only used in egyptology, don’t ask me why) the differents symbols. At first, the unilateral signs are sounds that we meet in Egyptian speaking. Basically, the n, the f and the r (the wave, the horned viper and the mouth) are becoming one with the symbol of the lung and the trachea : the triliteral nfr.

nfr

Ideograms, as everyone knows, are representing an idea. Determinatives are telling us about the category the category of the noun (man, god, woman, plants, vertebrate, invertebrate...).

Second recall

The second recall is about direction of reading. Hieroglyphs are placed in a cadrat, and can be read from left to right, from right to left and from top to bottom. A demonstration is available online

Everything is okay ? Did you understand the global working of hieroglyphs ? So you’re ready to jump to step two : the word composition and grammary.

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