Introduction, Lesson I and Exercises

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Suggested amendments (to pencil in the margin)

Introduction: p2, section 3: The currently accepted term for the language group to which ancient egyptian belongs is 'Afroasiatic' (not 'Hamito-semitic'). There are about 5 major branches of this language family, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Semitic.   p5, section 4: The phases of the language: [note BCE = Before the Common Era] Old Egyptian, Dyn 1-8, about 3000 - 2135 BCE Middle Egyptian, Classical ME was about 2135-2000 BCE (Dyn 9-12) Post-classical (or Late ME), about 2000-1300 BCE (Dyn 13-18) Late Egyptian, about 1300-715 BCE (Dyn 18-24) Demotic, about 715 BCE - 470 CE Coptic, 3-16th Centuries (and still used today in the Coptic church)   p8, section 6, 1: Ideograms also called Logograms.   Lesson 1.   p25, section 17: uni-/mono-, bi-, triliteral signs = also called mono-, bi-, and triconsonantal signs.   p27, alphabetic signs: Vulture A (1st sign in the table); phonological value is probably an 'L' rather than a glottal stop. It was no longer pronounced by the New Kingdom, and later used as the vowel /a/ in the graeco-roman era. Click here for more on phonology.   Transliteration: You should be aware of two rather different systems of transliterating the hieroglyphs (ie. into phonetic symbols). Gardiner uses a very simple system (which is still the english and american standard), whereas the German system uses a more thorough method of designating different types of suffix (with dots, dashes and equals signs). There is also the problem of representing the transliteration symbols on computers, and I will be using the 'Manuel de Codage', explained fully at the CCER web site, which uses standard keyboard letters to represent them. I will come back to this topic later. See here for Geoff Grahams's comments on transliteration.   Vocabulary a) Include the grammatical categories of the words. Gardiner probably assumes you know these anyway, but it is worth just noting them in the vocab list at the end of the lesson. m, n and r (prepositions). pn and tn (demonstrative pronouns). ky and kt (nouns). im, (adverb) bw, x.t (nouns) PtH (noun; name) iw (particle) rn (noun) Dd (verb, biconsonantal or biliteral) Hna (prep.)   The exercises are very simple. See the answers at the Ashmoleum Museum web site. You can compare these to my answers (given below).

: Encoding Egyptian transliteration (extract from the CCER web site)

Hieroglyphic transcription is mostly used by Egyptologists as a transliteration of the hieroglyphic writing into 'latin' writing, using characters from our own latin alphabet differentiated by diacritical points for sounds unknown to modern western languages.   The use of these characters with diacritical marks proved a problem to early computers. Therefore the Manuel de Codage first of all offers a way of translating Egyptian transliteration to the normal computer keyboard, using the easily accessible range of key-values from "a" to "z" and "A" to "Z" without extended characters.   According to the Manuel de Codage, the Egyptian "alphabet" is transcribed to computer as shown on the left.

See a some typical examples of transliteration (as described by Geoff Graham), here.

EX. I, Part B.

(Write in hieroglyphs) - answer below is shown as a link from the Ashmoleum Mus. web site

EX. I, Part C.

(Translate from English into Egyptian, with transliteration)

	TRANSLITERATION	TRANSLATION
	1. ... r ky bw	... to another place This is just an isolated phrase (not a complete sentence). In current grammars it would be called an prepositional phrase, consisting of an initial preposition (r, to) followed by a noun (actually a nominal phrase), ky bw, 'another place'.
	2 .... n ptH	... to Ptah. Another isolated phrase, again an prepositional one (prep. and a noun). Why was n used instead of r ?
	3. iw k.t x.t im	Another thing is there. This is a complete sentence. I have added an initial particle, iw, to make it a simple statement of fact. Nominal subject (k.t x.t, 'another thing'). Adverbial predicate (just the adverb, im, 'there'). The sentence does not have a verb, so is non-verbal (also called an adverbial sentence). Note my use of dots to indicate feminine suffix endings (not used by Gardiner, but is used in the German system of transliteration).
	4. ... m rn pn	... in this name. Isolated (prepositional) phrase (preposition + nominal phrase).
	5. iw ptH im m bw pn	Ptah is there in this place. Non-verbal statement of fact (or simply a sentence with adverbial predicate). Nominal subject (ptH), adverbial predicate (simple adverb, im, there). This is followed by a prepositional phrase (ie. m bw pn,' in this place') that acts as an adverbial modifier of the predicate, im.
	6. ... Hna ky rn	... together with another name. Isolated (prepositional) phrase, consisting of a preposition and a nominal phrase (ky rn, 'another name'). Note the use of ky (rather than k.t) to agree in gender with the following noun.
	7. iw x.t m bw pn	A thing is in this place. Non-verbal (or adverbial) sentence. Nominal subject (x.t, thing). Adverbial predicate (m bw pn, 'in this place') consisting of a prepositional phrase (ie. pronoun followed by a nominal phrase). The initial iw makes the sentence a statement of fact.
	8. iw Dd ptH r x.t tn	Ptah speaks in respect of this thing. Verbal sentence*. Subject is nominal (ptH), predicate is adverbial (ie. a prepositional phrase consisting of a prep. + nominal phrase). Note the word order, verb before the subject. More generally it is called VSO (= verb, subject, object). Note also the agreement between tn and x.t. I have added an initial particle (iw) to make this a statement of fact.

Note: I follow the school (M. Collier, A.Loprieno, et al.) that takes the verb Dd as untransformed, and as a verbal verb form. This is more in line with Gardiner (see section 27, p34), and contrasts with the Standard Theory (based on Polotsky's ideas), which would take the verb in this case as being transformed into a circumstantial form, which is 'adverbial'.