Egyptian Hieroglyphic Alphabet (2015)

Posted4 months agoActive3 months ago

teleforce

40 points

15 comments

discoveringegypt.comOtherstory

calmpositive

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Egyptian HieroglyphsWriting SystemsLinguistics

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Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Writing Systems

Linguistics

The post shares a resource on the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet, sparking discussion on the complexity and evolution of hieroglyphic writing, as well as its functional and aesthetic roles.

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Sep 19, 2025 at 3:15 AM EDT
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Discussion (15 comments)

Showing 15 comments

antihipocrat

3 months ago

3 replies

School left me with the impression that hieroglyphs were primitive constructs - purely logographic and ideographic. It was a shock to later learn that they are also alphabetic and phonetic.

The opportunities for creative expression are amazing in such a system

jhbadger

3 months ago

1 reply

Yes, the system is reminiscent of written Japanese in that way in that a word is sometimes spelled out phonetically, sometimes with an ideograph, and sometimes both for good measure if one or the other isn't viewed as clear enough.

Pet_Ant

3 months ago

I have heard it described as not quite an "alphabet" but more like a rebus[1] using an alphabet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus

RataNova

3 months ago

No wonder the scribes were so highly regarded

glimshe

3 months ago

Very few, if any, real world writing systems are purely ideographic.

WalterBright

3 months ago

4 replies

The Egyptians were evolving from picture to phonetic alphabets, because picture languages don't work very well. (What's the picture for "slow"?)

In modern times, our alphabet is devolving into a picture language, due to a disorder called "iconitis".

downboots

3 months ago

2 replies

๑ï

thaumasiotes

3 months ago

If you believe people who have no idea what they're saying, it's "慢".

I like yours though.

In the actual development of writing, it isn't likely that a picture of a snail would be used to represent a semantically related word. Even in the earliest systems, where you could use a picture of a snail to represent the word "snail", it would be limited to (a) the word "snail", or (b) some other word that was pronounced identically. This is how it worked in Egyptian, Akkadian, and Chinese.

For example, 慢 is the Mandarin word for "slow", and it's pronounced "màn". There is a logic to its appearance: the component on the left, 忄, represents that it is a mental state† (I'm not sure why this was felt to be true of "fast" and "slow", but it was), and the component on the right, 曼, just so happens to be pronounced "màn".

(Most sound indications in Chinese characters are no longer that exact. They used to match better, but many centuries of language change followed. 丁 is dīng; 打 is dǎ.)

† Some more typical characters in the same category: 情 "feeling" (n.), 怕 "fear" (v.), 懂 "understand" (v.), 恨 "hate" (v.).

maxbond

3 months ago

Those darn Lombards! I'm going to stick it to them in this marginalia.

nradov

3 months ago

1 reply

In a few decades we'll probably see emojis showing up in formal writing like textbooks, news articles, and scholarly journals. Our descendants will find it odd and quaint to read English texts without them.

WalterBright

3 months ago

No, they won't. Nobody will remember 10,000 emojis.

I used emojis for a while on phone texting. I eventually realized they were juvenile and stupid, and stopped.

Save the artwork for wonderful things like the illustrations in the Pooh books.

nuc1e0n

3 months ago

The Latin alphabet that we use is itself an evolution of Heiroglyphics. The linked site also says we have no knowledge of how the ancient Egyptians reached their mathematical conclusions.

That's not true. The Rhind mathematical papyrus documents worked mathematical problems. Matt Parker of the youtube channel "stand up maths" did a collaboration video recently with Ilona Regulski of the British Museum about it.

RataNova

3 months ago

Maybe we're not devolving so much as looping

cwnyth

3 months ago

That website is a super simplistic breakdown. There is so much more to actual hieroglyphs. You get semi-alphabetic, bi-consonantal, tri-consonantal, determinative, and logographic functions all in the same system, and the order you see it isn't always the order it's read.

RataNova

3 months ago

Fascinating how something so visually intricate also served such a functional role in record-keeping and language. I'd always assumed hieroglyphs were mostly decorative or ceremonial

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