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I mean, who here can read or write or speak or at least understand it? surprised

See, I was watching The Mummy on TV (the one from 1999), and I was wondering if any of us in this guild know the language.

I mean, I'm sure we all know at least some names, and I've picked up a couple words from all my years of research and study, but that doesn't really count. xd

So, how familiar are you with the ancient language?

**I of course specified 'ancient' Egypt, as now modern day Egyptians speak mainly Arabic, I believe.

That's awesome. biggrin

I miss a month, and see the Rennie is still kickin' butt at being a knowledge queen. ^__^

There are books that can help you, especially the ones that teach you how to read hieroglyphics.

I find it useful learning an ancient language because if something/someone annoys you runt in that language and they will have no idea what you are on about whee

I must say that learning to read hieroglyphics is so much easier then learning to read Arabic!

With the Egyptian language they are small words, sa is son, sat is daughter, hotep is peace, Ra is the God and sun and so on. The only difficulty is teaching yourself how to speak the language without the aid of vowels and learning around 3000 hieroglyphic signs ... good luck whee

I am studying Middle Egyptian. 3nodding I have been for about three years now, though I'm not as far along as you'd probably expect me to be by now. LOL! If anyone's interested in learning Middle Egyptian, my friend Karen runs a Yahoo! mailing list called Glyph Study, where you can plug through James P. Allen's grammar along with other similarly interested amateur linguists. It always helps to have a group to work with- they can check your answers, help you reason things out when you're wrong, lift your spirits and keep you going when things get difficult. (This group also has connections with the Ancient Egyptian Language List, btw, where the skill level is much higher, so when they get stumped they still have somewhere to turn.) I never would have made it as far as I have without the friends who study with me.^_^

Personally, I don't find the lack of vowels to be the most difficult thing about the language- I rarely actually speak it, though I find phonetic reconstruction to be a fascinating area of study, and reading it only requires me to recognize patterns of consonant values and determinatives. What I find really bewildering are the verb forms- there is no past, present, or future tense per se but there are many aspects to the verbs which don't occur in English. Like being a repetitive action versus something that happens once, or the action of being in a state rather than actively doing something, or the action of doing something which is desirable or probable or contingent upon some other action. Heh. It's difficult to wrap my mind around them much of the time, and to make matters worse most of them seem to look exactly the same! Ha! So I guess that'd make writing Middle Egyptian a bit easier, but reading it... well, I can see why literacy was considered a magical act in old Kemet. sweatdrop

Fortunately, a basic knowledge of Middle Egyptian is much more easy to come by than actual fluency, and still quite helpful to further study in the areas of linguistics, magic, or any other aspect of ancient Egyptian culture. smile

If I ever manage to get Middle Egyptian to a satisfactory level, though, I would love to also study Old Egyptian, Coptic, and at least one form of contemporary Greek. heart

It's like Hebrew and Arabic, we aren't sure how the vowels are pronounced (I found that statement confusing ... can't remember where I read it though). For example the God Ra is spoken in two ways:
R-ay
R-ar (That's how I pronounce it anyway)

We will never exactly know how the Egyptians spoke though, but it's close enough 3nodding Remember my thread on how people say Tuthmosis/Thuthmose, it's a bit like that.

There's two 'x' that I can think of:
arrow In my book a 'x' means that this sentence or group of hieroglyphs have never been found so the author has made it up.
arrow The other 'x that you could be refering to is the star like sign. This is pronounced as dwa.