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.
You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name.
I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation:
United States 美国 Měiguó Beautiful Country
China 中国 Zhōngguó Middle Country
Japan 日本 Rìběn Origin of the Sun
Germany 德国 Déguó Virtuous Country
India 印度 Yìndù India
United Kingdom 英国 Yīngguó Heroic Country
France 法国 Fǎguó Law Country
Italy 意大利 Yìdàlì Italy
Canada 加拿大 Jiānádà Canada
South Korea 韩国 Hánguó Han Country
Most of those are just phonetic approximations using convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental about any of those names.
The goal of an HELLO WORLD is not to show it's printed, but the process of what everything is need to print HELLO WORLD. Every step, and every word and concept needs to be explained.
Therefore this article is not a proper HELLO WORLD exemple.
(I'm not an egyptologist.) The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has a breakdown of 𓅓𓂋𓄋𓏏𓏝𓊹𓊵𓏏𓅓𓇾𓂋𓇦𓂋𓆑 / jm.j-rʾ-wpw.wt-ḥtp.w-nṯr-m-tꜣ-r-ḏr=f / "overseer of apportionments of the god's offering(s) in the entire land" https://tla.digital/lemma/850281 with 𓇾 / tꜣ / "land" and 𓂋𓇥𓂋 / r-ḏr / "entire".
So we have most of 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑 / jy.tj-tꜣ-r-ḏr-?? / "welcome land entire ??" except for the 𓈐𓆑 at the end where I have no idea whether it's phonetic ḥr=f or a determinative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.
Representing the alphabetic orthography for Hello World is obviously impossible in a written script lacking letters, revealing the folly implicit in the exercise.
What surprised me most is that there isn't a ton of publicly available information on translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that would make this reasonably easy, or even a website that would allow one to enter an English phrase and get back the hieroglyphic equivalent.
As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration is.
It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
> It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words, like the names of other countries:
I think the author has forgotten to write about the most important part, namely, what each part of the hieroglyphics mean.
I found this article [1] for how the word "Welcome" is constructed, but how to understand the rest is beyond me.
[1] https://www.ancientegyptblog.com/?p=1458
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...
https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-translatio...
You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name.
I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation:
* Obviously CJK etc countries already had namesMost of those are just phonetic approximations using convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental about any of those names.
I completely agree, that's what I wanted to see.
The goal of an HELLO WORLD is not to show it's printed, but the process of what everything is need to print HELLO WORLD. Every step, and every word and concept needs to be explained.
Therefore this article is not a proper HELLO WORLD exemple.
(I'm not an egyptologist.) The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has a breakdown of 𓅓𓂋𓄋𓏏𓏝𓊹𓊵𓏏𓅓𓇾𓂋𓇦𓂋𓆑 / jm.j-rʾ-wpw.wt-ḥtp.w-nṯr-m-tꜣ-r-ḏr=f / "overseer of apportionments of the god's offering(s) in the entire land" https://tla.digital/lemma/850281 with 𓇾 / tꜣ / "land" and 𓂋𓇥𓂋 / r-ḏr / "entire".
So we have most of 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑 / jy.tj-tꜣ-r-ḏr-?? / "welcome land entire ??" except for the 𓈐𓆑 at the end where I have no idea whether it's phonetic ḥr=f or a determinative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.
I think the =f at the end is a possessive, because r ḏr=f is an idiomatic phrase literally meaning “to its limit”.
𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑
jy.tj t3 r ḏr=f
come [STATIVE] land [VOCATIVE] to limit its
“Welcome, entire land”
(I’m not an Egyptologist either.)
Did you forget about the 𓈐 or does it get merged into the preceding word?
Start drawing the owl... Finished!
RIGHT! I thought I missed a paragraph or something lol
Funny I have a shirt that reads "Prince of Susa" to the three people (not me) who can read Linear Elam.
Edit: To see the sequence you can paste "" into the corpus search at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam
Representing the alphabetic orthography for Hello World is obviously impossible in a written script lacking letters, revealing the folly implicit in the exercise.
This gives a pretty good explanation, although there is a slight difference from the translation in the original post: https://chatgpt.com/share/69136c44-94b0-8000-a564-ce55f92a14... Use it together with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_sign_list
Well I don't recognise many of these, but I did happily recognise the horned viper thanks to a lot of time spent watching Only Connect.
I don't know if that is enough to put me in the intersection of their Venn diagram though.
(2009)
What surprised me most is that there isn't a ton of publicly available information on translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that would make this reasonably easy, or even a website that would allow one to enter an English phrase and get back the hieroglyphic equivalent.
Oh, wait, there is: https://lingojam.com/HieroglyphicsTranslator except its translation of "Welcome, the entire land" looks very different from the symbols in the article.
It looks like this isn't an actual translator, it's just transcribing the consonants into uniliteral hieroglyphs.
> Oh, wait, there is:
As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration is.
It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
> It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.
Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words, like the names of other countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...