Late Egyptian FlashCards(2)

The writing system

The writing system of LE is often a bit puzzling for the beginner. We have been taught, when working on Middle Egyptian texts, to consider very seriously all

in a word, and we are now confronted to such writtings as

for the infinitive of sgb, "to shout" !

A few rules will help here :

final "t" in a word were not heard as early as the middle kingdom. With the generalisation of the definite article ,, it was no longer useful to write it. The result was that the presence or absence of "t" at the end of a word is basically meaningless. For instance, in , the possessive article proves that the word is in fact the feminine mry.t, port. Yet the "t" is left unwritten. In other cases, a "t" might be written after a masculine word : , pAy grH, this night.
On the other hand, final "t"s were heard when followed by suffix pronouns. In this case, they were indicated by written after the word. iAt=f, his function. Note that this tw is only there for phonetic purporses, and has nothing to do with, for instance, a passive. You will find however the translitteration iAt.tw=f for the previous group, but it only indicates that the scholar wanted to be faithfull to the observed writing.
LE scribes tried to adapt the hieroglyphic system to the language they used. A number of writtings can be explained as attempts to render some features of it. In particular, , , in the end of words are probably attempts to render vocalic features. However, there was little normalization, and these indications are to be considered only as hints.
the preposition is often written .
simple prepositions are often ommited, especially in later texts.
The scribes wrote usually in hieratic, and often saw signs as groups. There is often a certain mechanical tendency to automatically write these groups, which leads to strange writting. One may find the writing for the demonstrative nn, for instance. In this case, the scribe "stole" this orthography from the divine name
LE scribes have a tendency to use lots of determinatives in a word. Consider for instance sbAy.t mtr. In some cases, the determinatives were borrowed from words with similar writings. One might find, for instance, for the infinitive of nHm, to take. In these cases, the scribe was clearly wrong.

Group writing

Group-writing is an important sub-system of Late Egyptian orthography. It was used when traditional orthography didn't exist or was forgotten. It's in particular true for foreign words, but also for new egyptian words. There are a number of theories on this system. They all make good points, but it's quite difficult to choose one. In fact, it's quite likely that the scribes used multiple systems, and not one coherent iso-9001 certified system.

In a number of cases, it seems that the system attempts to write syllables.

Cuneiform system

In this system, a group stands for a specific syllable, with a given vowel.

would be read as Hu.

Devanagari system

Here, groups stand for Consonnant + a. When the vowel is not "a", it's indicated by the correspondant weak consonant (

consonantic system

In this system, the groups are considered as writing a single consonnant. In demotic, the uniliteral signs are often derived from group writing. For instance, the demotic for & and A come from

and

respectively.

In practice, the safer way to go is to transliterate only the consonnants.

Hannig's dictionnary has got a discution of these, and a list of groups, p. LI-LV.

List of values

(mainly compiled from Junge, Neveu, and Hoch's semitic words)

The following list is a pratical tools, for dictionary searching mainly, so I ommited the possible vowels, except when it was too important to bypass.

i, ia, mark a vocalic attack at the beginning of a word.
i, ê
; ; ; i
; a
w
; ; ;
;; p
f
; m
; ;
; r/l
l : this groups is a specific writing for "l". It's found, for instance in the word , bl, outside.
; r (the latter at word ends).
h
; H
x
; ; s
S
q note that q, g and k might be confused.
; ;
; ; t note confusions between t,T,d and D.
; T
; ; d
; D
i
; u

When a word starts with a vowel (from a western point of view), it's indicated by a prothetic yod. This use of the yod is similar to the use of aleph in semitic alphabets, and is the reason for the funny accent on the i.

The presence of a weak consonnant sign after the yod might be an indication for a specific vowel :