STUDY GUIDE FOR KAMRIN
CHAPTER ONE
LESSON 1, 2, AND 3
LESSON 1
Pages 13-14
The title of this chapter is "The Egyptian Alphabet". As you'll see later on, "alphabet" isn't exactly the
right word to call these first signs you're going to learn.
The things I want you to learn from Lesson 1 are the concepts: phonograms, determinatives, and
logograms.
Many people think that Egyptian hieroglyphs each individually stand for a complete word. Not true -
most of the time. The ancient Egyptians usually "spelled" their words, but the way they "spelled" them
is very different from our idea of spelling.
Since some people might still not have the book, I'll repeat in my own words what Kamrin covers in
the text and then add a few comments of my own.
All hieroglyphs fall into at least one of three categories:
1) most represent sounds, more or less like the letters of our alphabet. these are called phonograms.
When hieroglyphic writing was first developed more than 5,000 years ago, none of the phonograms
stood for vowels. The vowels were ignored. This isn't as bad as it seems. Arabic and Hebrew today
are usually written without vowels, only consonants are used. Egyptian started the same way. Some
Egyptian consonants don't exist in English and imperfectly suggest the sound of English vowels.
Phonograms can stand for
a) single consonants (monoliterals)
b) two consonants (biliterals) - the two consonants could be separated by unindicated vowels
c) three consonants (triliterals) - three consants.
2) some indicate, in general terms, the broad class of object the word belongs to. These are called
determinatives. It's as if I spelled 'hs' and then drew a house after it, to indicate that it was "house" I
wanted to spell and not "hose", "his" or anything else. The 'hs' part of the word would consist of one or
phonograms as mentioned above, and the picture of the house would be the determinative, because it
helps determine the intended meaning of the sentence.
The first two signs are monoliterals and spell 'p' and 'r'. The last sign is the determinative. It means
that the word refers to a building of some sort. (It's a picture of a simple floor plan.)
Here's another sample of another word that uses those same two consonants but has an obviously
different meaning:
Yep. That's a pair of legs and those legs are for walking. "Going forth", actually.
Determinatives are your friends. They help you determine the meaning of the word and they usually
(but not always) come at the end of a word. This is important because Egyptian does not use any
punctuation, spaces between words, nothing. They just keep on writing wordswithoutanybreaksatall.
3) some glpyhs do stand for complete words. These are called word signs or ideograms or logograms
(I'll use both terms interchangeably, just to get you used to seeing both). In the example above, the last
sign could be written all by itself and still should be read as 'pr' with the meaning "house". Often an
ideogram will be written with a short vertical line next to it, either below it or following it, the line
indicating that the object depicted is what the writer intended you to read, but even here there can be
issues. For example:
is a human face, with a following stroke, as I mentioned above. And it can mean "face". The
consonants for the word "face" in Egyptian are 'Hr' , but these consonants also could spell the
preposition which means "upon". So the little stroke can mean "read this as 'face'" or "read this as
'upon'". How do you know which?
Context. Usually.
Things you need to know from lesson 1
Know the meaning of the following:
phonogram
monoliteral
biliteral
triliteral
determinative
ideogram
Important concepts:
No vowels
LESSON 2
Pages 14-16
At the time that hieroglyphic writing was first developed, a bit more than 5000 years ago, a number of
signs very quickly became associated with the consonantal sounds which were used to pronounce the
became more associated with the sound of 'm' rather than with owls. Although the sign can stand for
"owl", probably every time you ever see this sign it will, instead, represent the sound of 'm'. Whatever
the vowels of the original word for owl were, we don't know. All we have is the 'm'.
It is more convenient for us, when writing about the ancient Egyptian language, to express ourselves
not in hieroglyphs but in some sort of alphabetic script. Actually, there are two such scripts and, lucky
you, you have to learn both of them. Both of these scripts have something in common: they are only
concerned with the sounds of the language, they don't deal with determinatives. Logograms are spelled
out as if the original text had done so.
The first script is simply called the transliteration script. It has been used by Egyptologists for more
than a hundred years. You will see a lot of it. Its bad point is that it uses a special font. It looks like
this: AiyawbfpmnrhHxXzsSokgtTdD. Yes, I know there are more than 24 there, I'll explain later. As you
can see, that font has lots of letters which you can't type on your keyboard. For that reason, yet another
transliteration scheme has been developed, sometimes called the "computer" font, more often called the
Manuel de Codage, or MdC for short. It looks like this: AiyawbfpmnrhHxXzsSqkgtTdD. Nearly as
incomprehensible but at least it's typeable. You will need to use the MdC in correspondence because
not everyone will have the standard transliteration font installed.
Yes, I know you see vowels in there. That's a function of the font and it has nothing to do with the fact
that at least originally, these signs were consonants. Some may have been used as semi-consonants /
semi-vowels for special purposes at later stages in the history of the language
So the first two hieroglyphic words on page 1 are both transliterated as 'pr'. The word with the face in
it is transliterated 'Hr'. Note: Upper and lower case in MdC must be carefully used, otherwise you get
the wrong word. 'Hr' is very different from 'hr'. When using MdC don't go capitalizing intial letters in
sentences or names or anything unless the font requires you to.
LESSON 3:
Pages 16-25
If you have the book go to page 18 and learn the signs and the transliteration. Do not worry about the
"equivalent" column. You'll pick that up as we go along. There is an order to these signs. In the book,
the order is down the columns. There is one more piece of information you'll need.
Go to my website at http://bobmanske.com/monoliterals.shtml and view the monoliterals page. There
the order is left to right across the screen. You'll find the same signs and the same transliteration font.
But this page also gives you the MdC which Kamrin does not. You need to learn that.
So, your assignment is:
1) know the meanings of the terms phonogram, determinative, ideogram, logogram.
2) learn the glyphs. Draw them lots of times. Don't worry about handwriting, the only person who'se
going to see these glyphs you draw is you, unless you show them to someone else.
3) learn the transliteration that goes with each sign.
4) learn the MdC that goes with each sign.
5) learn the order of the signs. <- this is important because all, repeat, ALL, dictionaries and word lists
occur in this order. (To our knowledge, the Egyptians did not have any such order.)
It may help you to notice that, unlike the letters in the alphabet you learned in school, hieroglyphs
occur in groups of somewhat related sounds. The website groups them by sound.
The book gives you some exercises on page 24 and again on page 27. I don't care if you do them or
not, they won't appear on any homework list.
In fact, there is no homework to send in for the these first three lessons.