Transliterations Probably the first source of confusion for a beginner approaching Egyptian is the writing system. I don't mean by that the hieroglyphs themselves. With a little familiarity, these become less mysterious and one can begin to see the inner logic of their use. I'm speaking instead of the transliteration scheme used by Egyptologists to represent the sounds of the glyphs. A special transliteration font consisting of the letters AiawbpfmnrhHxXsSqkgtTdD is employed. You can see the approximate pronunciation of the letters on my transliteration chart.

In recognition of the fact that we don't really know the vowelling patterns of Egyptian, the vowels are left out in standard transcription (the letters Aia aren't really vowels, but are treated as if they were, for historical reasons). But, to make the words pronounceable, the default vowel e is added back into speech when required. So, the glyph "beautiful" is transcribed nfr and pronounced nefer. We have no idea what the actual vowels of the word were. If Egyptian was similar to other Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, regular vowel patterns were applied to the consonantal roots to form parts of speech, but what those patterns were, we generally don't know.

One thing I had trouble with is exactly where the e's go. Consider the phrase Hm.t=f nfr.t "his beautiful wife". I have no trouble pronouncing this as hemtef nefert, but maybe this is just due to my native language's sound features. Maybe a Japanese person would need to say hemetefe neferete, while an Arabic speaker might have no trouble with hemetf. As it turns out, the standard practice is to fully expand the words with e's; but I must confess I sometimes leave some out!

There is no punctuation as such in this transcription system, but certain punctuation characters are used with special meanings. Two are shown in the phrase above. The period . is used to show suffixes added to a root which are integral parts of a word, such as the feminine suffix .t in the word Hm.t "wife". The equals sign = is used to show suffixes which are optional on a word, such as the masculine possessive suffix =f  "his". Another sign often used is the dash -, which shows prefixes added to roots, such as the causative verb prefix s-, as in the word s-nm "to feed" (literally, "cause to eat").

To cope with e-mail and other situations in which the special transcription symbols can't be used, another transcription system was devised, the Manuel de Codage system. This uses standard ASCII keyboard characters to represent the special symbols. If you don't have the Transliteration font installed on your computer, you are seeing the Egyptian transcriptions on this page in Manuel de Codage format. You can see this system on the transliteration chart, also.

On the chart you will also find a column titled Budge. This refers to the transliteration system used by the early Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. You may be familiar with his book Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics. In the Dover reprint edition, this book has been widely distributed, and chances are you have seen, or even bought, a copy (Dover specializes in reprinting works that have gone into the public domain, which is why they are so cheap). The book isn't looked on highly by modern students. It's hopeless as a textbook, and Budge's transcription system is unusual and different from that used today. Nevertheless, since the book is so common, I decided to add his system to the transcription chart, so one can compare his renderings to the modern form.

We should not be so hard on Budge, though. After all, his book was first published in 1910, only a few decades after the study of Egyptian began in earnest. Although the book can't really be used as a textbook (and I understand some of his grammatical conclusions and sign readings have since been proven wrong), it does have a lot of simple texts that you can read on your own, ignoring his transcriptions. I also like the Egyptian font he uses, and have used the book many times to help me distinguish confusing glyphs.

© 1999, Terrence Donnelly