Comment

Comment by maxdamantus

Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw the meaning but they tend to have particular pronunciations, and the selection of glyphs will usually depend on both the sound and the meaning of the word.

I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some characters having the same sound), but you spell words using certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic association of components (radicals) within each character.

I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty sure there are exceptions in both cases).

This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0], showing correspondences between various scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ع sounds the same as the Arabic word for "eye" (ʿayn, عين) and the corresponding hieroglyph also looks like an eye.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...

parent maxdamantus 11 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton