Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
Mood
calm
Sentiment
mixed
Category
other
Key topics
Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Linguistics
Language Translation
The post discusses a 'Hello, World' translation into Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, sparking a discussion on the complexities of hieroglyphic translation and the availability of resources for learning.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
4h
Peak period
33
Day 1
Avg / period
8
Based on 40 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 11, 2025 at 5:52 AM EST
14 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 11, 2025 at 9:34 AM EST
4h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
33 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 15, 2025 at 6:59 AM EST
10 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
I found this article [1] for how the word "Welcome" is constructed, but how to understand the rest is beyond me.
The goal of an HELLO WORLD is not to show it's printed, but the process of what everything is need to print HELLO WORLD. Every step, and every word and concept needs to be explained.
Therefore this article is not a proper HELLO WORLD exemple.
𓇳𓁉𓀃𓀀
Usually it goes something like this, for example HTML:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<body>HELLO WORLD</body>
</html>
Then you explain what a tag is, why they need closing or not, what the body is, etc. This is a basic HELLO WORLD example. If I dumped the above code and says done, that will be useless to anybody.
I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some characters having the same sound), but you spell words using certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic association of components (radicals) within each character.
I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty sure there are exceptions in both cases).
This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0], showing correspondences between various scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ع sounds the same as the Arabic word for "eye" (ʿayn, عين) and the corresponding hieroglyph also looks like an eye.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...
You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name.
I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation:
United States 美国 Měiguó Beautiful Country
China 中国 Zhōngguó Middle Country
Japan 日本 Rìběn Origin of the Sun
Germany 德国 Déguó Virtuous Country
India 印度 Yìndù India
United Kingdom 英国 Yīngguó Heroic Country
France 法国 Fǎguó Law Country
Italy 意大利 Yìdàlì Italy
Canada 加拿大 Jiānádà Canada
South Korea 韩国 Hánguó Han Country
* Obviously CJK etc countries already had namesSo we have most of 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑 / jy.tj-tꜣ-r-ḏr-?? / "welcome land entire ??" except for the 𓈐𓆑 at the end where I have no idea whether it's phonetic ḥr=f or a determinative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.
𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑
jy.tj t3 r ḏr=f
come [STATIVE] land [VOCATIVE] to limit its
“Welcome, entire land”
(I’m not an Egyptologist either.)
(It doesn’t have the glyph layout chops, though…)
Oh, wait, there is: https://lingojam.com/HieroglyphicsTranslator except its translation of "Welcome, the entire land" looks very different from the symbols in the article.
As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration is.
It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
Getting a native French speaker to recite these to native English speakers is hilarious! Especially when the French speaker is trying to work out why what they've said is seemingly so funny.
Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words, like the names of other countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...
did the crossing of the rhine take place in 00406, 0406, or 406? what extra information do the two former styles convey?
also, what about the year 100000?
we are somehow doing just fine without leading zeroes for other quantities.
there is an argument to be made about e.g. iso8601 datetime formats that need to be lexicographically sortable; but i don't see any of the longnow fans using anything like those.
A study group or study partner would probably be enough extra motivation to get basic proficiency at the least. So if you're willing let me know if you find/wish to create something.
The script is hieroglyphic.
Edit: To see the sequence you can paste "" into the corpus search at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam
(While Unicode has combining diacritics, this isn't sufficient to e.g. stack the glyphs as shown in the article.)
However, it turns out that Microsoft has developed a tool that can modify an existing font to allow this, representing the hieroglyphyics properly. I've written a brief tutorial that shows how to actually use it:
https://marzchipane.com/notes%20and%20essays/interesting_uni...
(You may need to press Shift+F5 to reload fully if they don't show properly)
EDIT: hieroglyphs, not hieroglyphics
I don't know if that is enough to put me in the intersection of their Venn diagram though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ
They can be pretty complex and a neat form of 2D-positional language!
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.