Let's Learn Ancient Egyptian Together

[alexander]

Ok, some of you, at this point, are probably thinking why, wha, who, waaaa? But let me explain first, who this is for and what the goal is, and generally why i want to do this :Exclamati

 

So, first of all what this is about. It has been my goal recently to pick up a language that will look really random and cool on one's resumee, and i have stopped at ancient egyptian, because one, they can never test you on the thoroughness of your knowledge, and two, it will get them soo confused when they see a dead, not all that well known or understood language.

 

That's why i started learning about and learning ancient egyptian. There is also no right way to pronounce the syllables, we have ideas, but its all up for debate, aka, you are never wrong in the pronounciation.

 

There aren't all that many people that know ancient egyptian, so you are at a plus there as well, writing in it would be a sort of easy and quick way to share thoughts, securely (more or less).

 

So let's learn it together (there is little info out there, i was able to get a beginner book for it, but its mostly explaining what we were able to learn about the language, and general rules, so perhaps some people have some dusted books they would like to share, or an online reseource they can point to, to learn this).... i wonder how many people are as crazy as me to do this :(

 

i'll create a group for this, once, and if anyone responds...:Exclamati

[modest]

Once upon a time, there was a TV show that showed some Egyptian hieroglyphs. They didn't say what it meant and there was one glyph obscured. So, I spent a couple hours trying to discover its meaning only to give up. I did eventually find out the meaning. Here is what they showed:

 

 

What do ya think

 

And, also, yeah, where are the good internet sources I could have used to decipher this?

 

~modest

[Thunderbird]

First letter is an s or saw sound ?

 

Egypt Name Translator

[modest]

Yes, the left most symbol is the same as the alphabet glyph "s".

 

~modest

[Thunderbird]

Can I buy a vowel ?

[modest]

If they had vowels, I'd sell you one. But, I don't think they do.

 

~modest

[Moontanman]

****, no vowels?

[alexander]

ok, the left most sound is an s sound, the birdie there is an Ah sound. having problems with the last 2 letters...

 

lets see the syllable to the left of the bird looks like an upside down papyrus shoot... it looks somewhat like an h, though i would not count out an r or in fact an m sound there, though leave it for now...

 

last syllable is even harder to find, i think it has the meaning of an overseeer, at least that is the closest thing to that figure i could find..

 

middle one i am still trying to figure out, shooting for something more of an h or an m there...

 

so we get

 

s, blank ,(i think m or n, or a d), a and its all an overseer of some sort, methinks...

 

well either an overseer, or, well i guess it would miss a syllable for being overseen, so it must be an overseer, which would probably mean its a name, even though there's no cartouche there...

 

names that would fit this

 

sabah - which seems to fit closely

sanura, though we are missing the classical ra sign there, so likely no

salihah - which i guess it could be though not as neatly as the first guess here

sabola - also a possibility...

 

case here being that most names that fit this description have an a after the s syllable, which means it s a safe thing to assume, with some degree of certainly, that the second syllable, is quite possibly an ah sound as well...

 

 

those would be my guesses with a little book research...

[alexander]

yes and no, on the vowels, there are no direct vowels in hieroglyphs, though not to say that some sounds could not have resembled a vowel..

 

egyptians had hard time pronouncing letters like L and O, in fact from the earliest two names translated, Ptolemy and Cleopatra, the vowen we pronouce as O, would have likely been pronouced as wa, as the sound for the corresponding syllable indicates. Also the t in cleopatra, which is a differeny syllable from the Ptolemys t would have likely been a harder, D sound, and the letter l would have been pronounced as r or an rw sound. It's a scary sounding language when the name we seem to know as Ptolemys was likely pronounced as Ptwarwmys. The beautiful cleopatra would have been pronounces closer to Krwiwapadra... this gives you some more interesting facts on ancient egyptian, and the way it would have sound when spoken...

 

neato, right?

[modest]

ok, the left most sound is an s sound, the birdie there is an Ah sound. having problems with the last 2 letters...

 

lets see the syllable to the left of the bird looks like an upside down papyrus shoot... it looks somewhat like an h, though i would not count out an r or in fact an m sound there, though leave it for now...

 

last syllable is even harder to find, i think it has the meaning of an overseeer, at least that is the closest thing to that figure i could find..

 

middle one i am still trying to figure out, shooting for something more of an h or an m there...

 

so we get

 

s, blank ,(i think m or n, or a d), a and its all an overseer of some sort, methinks...

 

The full word is:

 

 

I should clarify that I never did figure out what this meant myself - someone else did. So, I would be worthless as far as how to solve it. I can, however, say that there is no 'm' or 'n' but there is a 'd'.

 

well either an overseer, or, well i guess it would miss a syllable for being overseen, so it must be an overseer, which would probably mean its a name, even though there's no cartouche there...

 

The absence of a cartouche is not editing or a mistake. It properly doesn't have one and you correctly infer that it is not then a name. It is a verb. I don't think overseer or overseen is in any way related. But, I may be wrong. For all I know this word and overseer have the same root word or something. It doesn't seem directly related to me.

 

case here being that most names that fit this description have an a after the s syllable, which means it s a safe thing to assume,

 

Very nice! You are correct. The latin transliteration has an 'a' at the end after the 's'.

 

Let me know if you want me to tell you.

 

~modest

[alexander]

yes, i actually did think it could be a verb, you see the last character there fairly oftenly in some verbs. It's hard to decypher the characters without having enough reference... i only have one book on it, though i intend on bying more in a little while.

 

the other thing is that in glyps, it is very common that certain things will be expressed differently by different writers.

 

that is actually how heriatic came into use, quicker way of writing... and then coptic, which was basically a unified writing style everywhere in the kingdom, except places of worship. If you think about it, its like they went from typed text, to a hybrid between typed and fast hand, to fast hand writing, and there is a hybrid of greek and egyptian too, that was something rather interesting as well, what was it called, coptic i think...

[alexander]

last char may also describe an enemy-type object or action...

 

the verb (that you eventually solved) is therefore sda, shda or sahda or sada, close to that

 

could it be

sDA - to depart ?

 

hey i'm a newbie in this, so its still very challenging and fun to do this :D

[modest]

last char may also describe an enemy-type object or action...

 

the verb (that you eventually solved) is therefore sda, shda or sahda or sada, close to that

 

So, so close.

 

could it be

sDA - to depart ?

 

A very, very close variation on this :D

 

hey i'm a newbie in this, so its still very challenging and fun to do this :evil:

 

Hey, you've as much as got it.

 

~modest

[modest]

In fact, you have solved it. I'll let the rest of the cat out of the bag.

 

The verb is swD3 or swDA and is most properly "to cause death" or to cause someone or something to die.

 

 

It is from the show Lost. The original screen cap is:

 

 

A google search for "lost hieroglyphics" now has blogs and blogs about it.

 

Very impressive Alex.

 

EDIT: Now that I'm looking at it again, does it just mean "to die"? If so, many of those blogs are wrong. Humm...

 

~modest

[alexander]

neato.... ooh ooh, what's the next puzzle?

[modest]

I don't know about a puzzle, but I do have a question that maybe you've run across an answer to. Actually, you got me thinking about it with this.

 

There aren't all that many people that know ancient egyptian, so you are at a plus there as well, writing in it would be a sort of easy and quick way to share thoughts, securely (more or less).

 

Is there a way to adapt modern words (perhaps phonetically) into ancient Egyptian? I would think logically that going backwards from Coptic would be the way to go rather than going backwards from Latin (or a latin language like english) - but I wonder if anyone has done this. I realize there's no need to do it seeing as how it is a completely dead language versus a language like Hebrew where 'reverse engineering' words has been necessary.

 

It's something I was thinking about in any case.

 

~modest

 

EDIT: A link, in case I'm making no sense:

Neologism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[alexander]

well, it is a dead language, i don't think it should stop one from expanding it... it would be sweet to take the language and continue adapting it to technological terms. Following the make up of words, there are symbols that may be added. It's like arabic, another language that does not have a lot of adaption to the modern world, but, all the tech support is there...

 

So we know, noone is bringing back the language to use massively, but using heriatic and expanding the meaning of the language may be an interesting way to communicate... besides, if you show easy adaptability in a language, it will become like English, in the roman empire, the language that was used exclusively by the scientists because the language showed to be easily adaptable to scientific terms... this may be the next English ;)