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ELA 6: Can You Read in Pictures? 92 Views


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Description:

Whenever you're lamenting having to learn all the rules of English spelling and grammar, just be grateful you're not dealing with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

if you've ever seen ancient Egyptian artifacts like a sarcophagus or

00:07

an obelisk, you might have noticed that they're covered in tiny little drawings [Egyptian artifacts shown]

00:11

or stuff like herbs and baskets, well these drawings weren't the works of

00:15

graffiti artists who were really into birds and baskets. they are

00:18

hieroglyphics. hieroglyphics are an ancient Egyptian alphabet that uses

00:22

pictures of common objects and animals instead of letters. think of it like you

00:27

know ancient wingdings. these symbols also known as glyphs can

00:31

be divided into two main categories- phonograms and ideograms. well phonograms

00:37

are kind of like the letters in english with each one representing a different

00:41

sound. so instead of using our tried-and-true or W for the wood sound

00:45

an ancient Egyptian would draw a quail chick. which you have to admit is a whole

00:51

lot cuter than a W there. ideograms on the other hand represent objects or [bird next to a "w"]

00:55

ideas. that means if you wanted to express an idea like movement instead of

00:59

writing out all those letters well you just draw a pair of legs. it's

01:03

pretty smart. that saves you the time of writing to eight characters that make up

01:06

the English version of MOVED. but it could be a real pain to write if you get

01:12

too focused on and getting those ankles just right. but we guess it was best not

01:17

to be too much of a perfectionist when writing in hieroglyphics. with all those [man draws cartoon legs]

01:21

phonograms and ideograms the hieroglyphic alphabet ended up being

01:24

quite vast containing over 700 pictures. well you can kind of imagine why the

01:29

hieroglyphic typewriter never really caught on .despite having all those

01:33

symbols there weren't any for punctuation or spaces. that said if you

01:37

have trouble remembering the rules for commas and are tempted to switch to

01:41

hieroglyphics where we really don't recommend it here at shmoop. your teacher [woman frowns over papers]

01:44

probably doesn't want to spend hours translating from an ancient writing

01:47

system just because you're not a huge fan of comas. even though the Egyptians

01:51

used hieroglyphics for over 3,500 years there was a long period of over a

01:55

thousand years when no one could figure out what those drawings meant. it wasn't

02:00

until Napoleon's army found the Rosetta Stone in 1799 that things started to make

02:06

sense. well this stone had three texts-[ napoleon and army pictured]

02:10

written in the strange hieroglyphics but one written in a more familiar Greek

02:14

script which was used to translate the hieroglyphs. well it took a lot of work

02:18

but you can imagine the thrill of discovering that a picture of an owl

02:21

means the n sound. yeah well maybe thrill is a strong word. [man smiles behind stack of papers]

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