Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphic
I've begun studying Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphic, this is a long term project that I plan to work on slowly over several years to come. There are so many nuances to this language that I didn't know of at all before, though I've had a great interest in the ancient Egyptian culture. For example, I had the impression that all words were pictures and the writing was singularly pictographic, with some glyphs for letters to spell names and similar. In fact, most of Hieroglyphic writing consist of single, double or triple letters, called "phonographs". The "ideograms", i.e. the "pictures of words" are actually quite rare.
Hieroglyphic, Cursive, Hieratic and Demotic
There are four major forms of ancient Egyptian writing. The Hieroglyphic is used for wall carvings (the word comes from Greek and means "sacred carving"), while the other forms were used writing on papyrus, Cursive and Hieratic by priests and Demotic by ordinary people.
Spelling Words
Words are spelled with mostly consonants, same as Hebrew and Arabic, the descending languages. Letters are written in any direction except from down to up, there are no spaces between words, and they can be stacked on top of each other to compress the text. To know which is the reading direction, look at where the signs are facing and read from that direction, i.e. if the signs are facing to the right, then read from the right to the left. Stacked letters are read from top to bottom. There is no unified spelling of words, and some words require a bit of understanding of the Egyptian culture to know how to read, similar to abbreviations, or smilies.
Flavouring Words
One of my favourite aspects of Hieroglyphic writing is the "determinative", which adds a context to words. We have nothing similar in any modern language I know of, therefore we have to use adjectives when translating from Egyptian. The determinative can give the same word completely different meanings, e.g. the word for "mother" mut have the determinative a sign of a woman, but when changing to a sign for divinity it becomes the mother goddess Mut. The determinative gives the text a very poetic flavour.
