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ELA Drills, Intermediate: Main Idea 1. Which of the statements is best supported by the passage?
ELA Drills, Intermediate: Point of View. Is the statement in the video true or false?
ELA Drills, Intermediate: Textual Analysis 3. Which of the following best summarizes the author's feelings about welfare?
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.
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
Full Transcript
- 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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