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In which way are Egyptian hieroglyphs and their hieratic form [1] not an alphabet? There is a huge number of ligatures and some determinatives, but that's an ad
by closedloop129 4y ago
In which way are Egyptian hieroglyphs and their hieratic form [1] not an alphabet? There is a huge number of ligatures and some determinatives, but that's an ad-on. You can use the single characters like any other alphabet.
E.g. hn: 𓉔 𓈖.
[1] https://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian_hieratic.htm https://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian_hieratic.htm
- simonh 4y agoHieratic and hieroglyphic are not fully phonemic, which is the distinctive characteristic of alphabetic scripts.
- closedloop129 4y agoBy that logic we also don't use an alphabet because we have started using symbols like the smiley. Which non-phonemic symbol have they used that couldn't be replaced by a phonemically created word?
- simonh 4y agoHieroglyphs include some alphabetic elements, but it’s not an alphabetic system. There are no significant historical texts written in it purely alphabetically. If you wrote out a complete text spelling out the words usually represented logographically in phonetic form they’d have thought you’d gone mad. Nobody used it that way. Sure you will find some places where hieroglyphs are referred to as “an alphabet”, such as in childrens books, but we’re talking about the historical development of writing systems. We can’t do that accurately without distinguishing clearly between different types of writing systems, and this is well established terminology. You’re probably right about emoji. Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the ‘word of the year’ in 2015.