What is it about?
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs write sounds or meanings. Meaning-signs are peculiar because they can be tuned up to convey particular meanings. They can be added or reversed, or their shape can be modified. In this article, I briefly present four cases in which meaning-signs are used to mark linguistic units, like different parts in compound words (like English screw-driver); or they function like images to express cultural categories; or they mark grammatical categories like the first person (I) but not the other persons; or they can make entities ('the beautiful one') out of qualities (like 'beautiful').
Featured Image
Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This paper helps us understand how fine-tuning semograms enriches the writing-reading process of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Modulating Semograms: Some Procedures for Semantic Specification and Re-categorization in the Pyramid Texts and Other Mortuary Texts, April 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004721043_012.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
