Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

I thought I’d post one of the old blog posts I was able to retrieve from the original Aspiring Polyglot blog. I’ve edited it a little but it remains more or less the same as the original post…which I wrote about two years ago.

I’ve often wondered why Ancient Egyptian is not normally listed as a ‘must-have’ language for polyglots, aspiring or actual. Coptic and Middle Egyptian both have their charms but you rarely hear language enthusiasts saying that these are languages they plan to add to their ‘collection’. They may tackle Ancient Greek, Latin or Sanskrit but few dare to touch Egyptian hieroglyphs, even if they have an affinity for character-based languages such as Chinese or Japanese.

In all fairness, there probably are a number of reasons why many language enthusiasts shy away from the ancient Egyptian language. First of all, the majority of textbooks are either aimed at those studying Egyptology or linguistics (making it boring or less accessible for the average enthusiast) or they provide only a very superficial overview of the language. Second, some find the lack of vowels to be a challenge. While Arabic and Hebrew also tend to leave out some vowels in the written form, students of these languages are at least aware of how the words are pronounced and what vowels are used in certain words. Coptic has an alphabet and Egyptologists and linguists have made ample use of the language to try and figure out what ancient Egyptian sounded like but, of course, this method has its limits. Third, hieroglyphs can be tricky to work with. As someone who’s studied Chinese and dabbled with Japanese on and off, pictograms don’t send me running for the hills. Egyptian determinatives remind me of the radicals used in Chinese characters as they give the reader an idea of what the preceeding collection of phonograms and logograms represents. Like Chinese and Japanese, they can help differentiate homonyms, something with is particularly useful when working with a language that doesn’t display all of its vowels!

I’ve toyed with the idea of learning to read basic Egyptian texts (if such a thing exists!) as I’ve been something of an amateur Egyptologist for many years. I would like to get around to Latin and Ancient Greek in future, mostly to satisfy my interest in etymology and word derivation, but ancient Egyptian seems like a real challenge and might be something fun to work on when I want to take a break from my ’serious’ language study. I have a number of books on hieroglyphs in my collection including the best-selling How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs by Mark Collier and Bill Manley. The book is a fairly good step-by-step guide on learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and, while limited, is a good starting point for enthusiasts.

Has anyone else ever considered learning ancient Egyptian or one of its variants? If any has attempted to do so, feel free to share your tips!

Two years later, I’m still considering learning how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. I’ve read a few chapters in the Mark Collier and Bill Manley book but I still find the Egyptian script difficult to learn, especially since there are so many alternative spellings for certain words. The grammar is also quite tricky and the vocabulary used in the example texts and exercises are all very ritualistic and formal…which is hardly surprising given that the Egyptian hieroglyphic script was mostly used on temple and tomb walls to honour the living god (i.e. the Pharoah) and the deceased. Memorising ancient Egyptian vocabulary is a challenge and yet it feels so rewarding to recognise the odd word on an ancient artefact in the museum.