> You might have noticed that there aren’t any vowels in the alphabet<p>Then in the next table:<p>> 𓄿 is pronounced “ah” as in “yacht”<p>> 𓇋 is pronounced “ee” as in “feet”<p>> 𓅱 𓏲 is pronounced “oo” as in “blue”<p>Are those vowel-sounding hieroglyphs only used in special occasions?<p>Also, does anyone know what the reason for omitting vowels altogether may have been?
Yes, this is not clearly explained. The "pronunciation" is more like an indication about how to conventionally pronounce the transcribed text, and not a faithful description of the original pronunciation.<p>The letters said to be pronounced "ee" and "oo" above, are not the vowels I and U, but the consonants I and U, which in English are written Y and W, like in "yet" and "wet" (i.e. they correspond to Semitic yodh and waw).<p>So in Egyptian they were normally followed by a vowel, which is not written, so usually unknown. Thus the conventional pronunciation described in the article recommends that instead of replacing the unknown vowel with E, like for the other consonants, one should pronounce Y and W as vowels, i.e. as long I and U, which in English are typically written as EE and OO.<p>The sign recommended to be pronounced "ah" was some guttural consonant, perhaps like Semitic aleph or ayin. It was also followed by an unknown vowel, so pronouncing it as a vowel is just a convention.<p>The indications about how to pronounce the vowels of other languages in English always appear comic for the speakers of other languages written with the Latin alphabet, due to the great discrepancy between how vowels are written in English and in the other languages, where it is seldom necessary to give word examples in order to describe precisely which vowels are meant.<p>While the reason why Egyptian did not write the vowels is uncertain, this fact had a huge importance in the history of the world.<p>The Semitic alphabet has inherited this feature, together with its later variants, e.g. the Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets. Other writing systems derived from Semitic alphabets, i.e. the European and Indian writing systems, have introduced means for also writing the vowels, but on the base provided by the separate writing of consonants.<p>All the other writing systems that have been developed completely independent from the Egyptian writing system have been based on signs for syllables or for words, which has resulted in much more complex writing systems than those that have started from the small set of signs needed to write only the consonants.
><i>𓄿 is pronounced “ah” as in “yacht”</i><p>even more interestingly, it's pronounced like the "ach" in yacht
It's a class of script. A language with a script that omits vowels is called a "(pure) abjad(ic)" language. Egyptian (arguably, I'm not a linguist) and Arabic are examples of "impure abjad" languages. Usually they have diacritics that hint at vowel sounds but are otherwise devoid of explicit vowel glyphs, so I'm not sure if Egyptian <i>strictly</i> fits that bill - maybe someone else does. Point is, it's perhaps a bit foreign to latin-language speakers but there's a whole class of languages that do this, or something similar.<p>There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.
Ancient Hebrew (as found in Torah scrolls) also comes to mind. Though they added vowel hints at some point
The idea of leaving out most vwls isn't evn that frgn to latin scrpts. It's just not the default mode and only permissible with good reasons
The writing of vowels also varied greatly over time so any sweeping statement somebody makes can attract a chorus of "yes but"
If I had to carve stone to write something I'd look for as much to omit, while still preserving the meaning, as possible.
I’m not a linguist, just an Ancient Egypt amateur geek, but it’s worth noting that hieroglyphs were the formal, monumental script—used on temples, tombs, statues, and religious texts. They’re beautifully drawn and symbolic, but slow to write (think carved calligraphy rather than everyday handwriting).<p>There were also cursive forms. Ancient Egyptian had three main writing systems used in different contexts: hieroglyphic (formal), hieratic (a handwritten cursive), and later demotic (even more simplified, for everyday administration and legal texts).
To your point, our germanic linguistics Prof (Elmer Antonsen) pointed out memorably that the futhark (runes) were essentially the roman-phoenician characters shaped to coordinate with the grain of wood.
That doesn't explain omitting vowels here. Whatever brevity you gain from omitting vowels is more than made up by the phonetic complements and determinatives you need to make up for their loss. Besides, individual Egyptian hieroglyphs tend to contain a lot of unnecessary detail. Look to hieratic if you want to see what the Egyptians did when writing required some efficiency.
They represented consonants in the Egyptian language, but by convention we now read them as vowels. 𓄿 was probably a glottal stop, 𓇋 was probably like the y in yet. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...</a><p>It also seems possible that they were sometimes used to stand for vowels even in real Egyptian phonology, in the same way that certain consonant signs are used in Hebrew and Arabic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis</a>
Aside from your conundrum I'm wondering what "ah as in yacht" could even mean; to this puzzled Brit there is no "ah" sound in "yacht". I'd spell it phonetically "yot" - do others pronounce it "yaht" or am I completely misunderstanding?
"Open your mouth and say ah" "tot" "yacht" - these all have very close to the same vowel sound to me as an American, although "tot" is more of an outlier and "taught" might be closer to how I conceptualize of the sound. I'm not sure I'd ever hear the difference in practice.
I’m ESL but always pronounced it as /jɑxt/ like in dutch <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-jacht.ogg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Nl-jacht.ogg</a>
How are you pronouncing “yaht” ? I (American) would read “yaht” and “yot” exactly the same way.
This clarifies it I hope? It has audio & proper phonetic alphabet spelling for US vs UK.<p><a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/yacht" rel="nofollow">https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/yacht</a>
Assuming it's similar to "folly" vs. "foley".
The wording here is a bit shall we say unhappy. As far as I understand it the classical Egyptian orthography <i>proper</i>—used for writing native Egyptian words—has indeed only consonants, something that Adolf Erman stressed in his 1894 <i>Altägyptische Grammatik</i> p7 (<a href="https://archive.org/details/agyptischegramma00erma/page/n31/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/agyptischegramma00erma/page/n31/...</a>):<p><i>Unsere Umschreibung dieser Zeichen darf nur als 14 eine ungefähre Wiedergabe der betreffenden Laute gelten; sicher steht aber durch das Koptische (vgl. K§ 15) und durch die Art, wie semitische Worte im Ägyptischen, ägyptische im Semitischen wiedergegeben werden, daß sämtliche Zeichen Konsonanten darstellen. Die Vokale bleiben ebenso wie in den semitischen Schriften unbezeichnet. — Uber den ausnahmsweisen Gebrauch einiger Konsonanten zur Andeutung bestimmter vokalischer Endungen vgl. §§15— 16; 18; über das \\ i vgl. § 27.</i><p>Erman already hints at the extended usage of hieroglyphs that does include vowels, famously used for the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra (not <i>that</i> Cleopatra, they all had the same name) on the Rosetta Stone, and also for the name Alexander. However, that usage is not as simple as "𓄿 = a, 𓇋 = i, 𓅱 and 𓏲 = u". That's also known as the "alphabet for tourists", and while not entirely wrong, it is more of a caricature than anything.<p>As for the reasons vowels are omitted I can only offer speculations. I'd like to offer the observation that all writing is difficult and rare in the history of mankind; we've only had writing for the past 5,000 years or so whereas how to make fire has been known for at least 50,000, maybe up to 500,000 years (according to latest findings in Great Britain, that we know of, legal restrictions apply, etc).<p>Second, all writing is defective as compared to speech. It may also add things that are not in speech (something that Japanese orthography is famous for), but there are always important aspects of speech that are lost in the written. The way writing works is not like, say, a phonograph that reproduces sound waves, it works more like a punched tape that reproduces patterns of symbols. From those patterns, the reader must reconstruct the spoken word, re-enact it in a way that only works by filling out the gaps—many gaps in all kinds of writing. Now, when we look at what aspects of speech get omitted in writing, it's the weakest parts: frequent victims are phrasal prosodies, for which we have a bare minimum of '?', ',', '.', '!' in Latin, <i>all</i> of which are post-classical era developments. We also have spaces between words, only used sparingly in antiquity, and regularly from the Middle Ages (10th c or so). All of these used to not be written and were left for the reader to reconstruct. Similarly in Literary Chinese. Speaking of Chinese, if there's any aspect that can most easily be left out, it's the tones in alphabetic writing, and in fact that's what Vietnamese speakers often do when in a pinch. BTW Vietnamese uses an alphabetic orthography but although there were trends to use hyphens to connect syllables, post-1975 orthography is written only with spaces between syllables, with no way to tell where words start and end (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_punctuation#Modern_punctuation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_punctuation#Modern_...</a>), which is likewise left as an exercise to the reader.<p>So back to the question—why didn't the Ancient Egyptians write vowels? Well, they sometimes did, especially when writing loan words or foreign place names from some point onward (I guess late Middle, early New Kingdom, but not sure), but otherwise, they left out vowels as the 'weakest' part of spoken language, coming right after word separators, sentence markers, prosody—all of the aspects of spoken language that are underrepresented in <i>all</i> orthographies. This consonants-only or consonants-mainly approach is, of course, inherited by Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Indian writing systems, all of which have consonants as their pivotal elements, with vowels taking a second, sometimes optional place.
It's like this for most of the "vowelless" languages. Hebrew, for instance, still has alef and ayin, and depending on whose lessons you go with, they can be described as <i>silent letters</i> or vowels, or just sort of ignored because no one really wants to explain them. And if they're anything like our own alphabet, the answers have changed over the years as pronunciation itself may have changed. Dumb question for you... is Y a vowel?
Originally the aleph was intended to be merely a placeholder for a missing consonant at the beginning of a word, which effectively made it look like something representing (any) vowel.
We were taught Y was a semi-vowel at school. I'll take that. If you are a Welsh speaker then W is too.