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Welcome, the entire land - "Hello, world!" in hieroglyphics

https://optional.is/required/2009/12/03/welcome-the-entire-land/
43•andrelaszlo•5h ago

Comments

probably_wrong•1h ago
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

yohannparis•1h ago
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.

zOneLetter•59m ago
RIGHT! I thought I missed a paragraph or something lol
__mharrison__•56m ago
Start drawing the owl... Finished!
maxdamantus•48m ago
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...

Y_Y•35m ago
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:

  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
* Obviously CJK etc countries already had names
kmoser•24m ago
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.

z500•10m ago
It looks like this isn't an actual translator, it's just transcribing the consonants into uniliteral hieroglyphs.
maxdamantus•8m ago
> 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.

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