3 ms·

Still strange, given the rebus principle of phonetic hieroglyph use mentioned above: why would I use a pictures of a bee and a rock to form the sound baroque? W

by usrusr 8y ago

Still strange, given the rebus principle of phonetic hieroglyph use mentioned above: why would I use a pictures of a bee and a rock to form the sound baroque? Why not a bar and a rock (or a ba, whatever that would be)? If you take existing, drawable words you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants, unless explicitly ruled out by convention. Maybe the answer is dialects, that there was much wider consensus over the spoken consonants than over the spoken vowels. Lacking audio recordings we will never find out (it's crazy enough that we can reconstruct those languages to the point where so many translations turn out somewhat plausible)

jrochkind1 8y ago
I'm not sure what is obvious or implicit to you was obvious or implicit to people speaking/writing ancient egyptian languages. Hebrew still (mostly) lacks vowels (and Arabic has a few, but is missing some we'd expect as important to pronunciation), to this day. I wonder if we asked a contemporary Hebrew speaker if "you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants" when you combine phonetic representations, if they would agree. In any event, it's usually a mistake to assume you know what was obvious or implicit or straightforward to people living thousands of years ago. Different things were.
- usrusr 8y ago
  When you have a symbol representing a word, it represents all the defined (by convention) properties of the word. All the semantics, all the the vocalization. The defined part, that is. You don't get any undefined parts, e.g. if you had separate symbols for "read (past tense)" and "read (present tense)" they would "naturally" include relative speed but not relative pitch. If vowels are significant at one point in the language's use, but the rebus principle allows for mismatching substitutions it would be a strong indication that at some earlier point they were not, either because they had regionally differing conventions (while still mutually understood) or because they were just filled in ad-hoc based on context (e.g. how pitch is decided upon when speaking a language where it is not significant: just make it sound pleasant and/or communicate macro structure). Of course, over time weird things do happen and you might end up with a mess like english where the relationship between phonetic encoding and actual vocalization is incredibly weak and serves only as a hint for narrowing down the actual encoding+context to semantics to vocalization lookup chain.
jhbadger 8y ago
Actually in ancient Egyptian in many cases there are multiple ways to write a given word as multiple characters could yield the same sounds.

by usrusr 8y ago

jrochkind1 8y ago

I'm not sure what is obvious or implicit to you was obvious or implicit to people speaking/writing ancient egyptian languages. Hebrew still (mostly) lacks vowels (and Arabic has a few, but is missing some we'd expect as important to pronunciation), to this day. I wonder if we asked a contemporary Hebrew speaker if "you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants" when you combine phonetic representations, if they would agree. In any event, it's usually a mistake to assume you know what was obvious or implicit or straightforward to people living thousands of years ago. Different things were.

usrusr 8y ago
When you have a symbol representing a word, it represents all the defined (by convention) properties of the word. All the semantics, all the the vocalization. The defined part, that is. You don't get any undefined parts, e.g. if you had separate symbols for "read (past tense)" and "read (present tense)" they would "naturally" include relative speed but not relative pitch. If vowels are significant at one point in the language's use, but the rebus principle allows for mismatching substitutions it would be a strong indication that at some earlier point they were not, either because they had regionally differing conventions (while still mutually understood) or because they were just filled in ad-hoc based on context (e.g. how pitch is decided upon when speaking a language where it is not significant: just make it sound pleasant and/or communicate macro structure). Of course, over time weird things do happen and you might end up with a mess like english where the relationship between phonetic encoding and actual vocalization is incredibly weak and serves only as a hint for narrowing down the actual encoding+context to semantics to vocalization lookup chain.

jhbadger 8y ago

Actually in ancient Egyptian in many cases there are multiple ways to write a given word as multiple characters could yield the same sounds.