Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/833

HIEROGLYPHICS 795 complex signs should be placed figures of divinities in which the human form has special headdresses or insignia. The value of ideographic signs may be discovered in various ways. The representative signs only need that the thing represented should be determined. The symbolic signs are often (rather, sometimes) explained by classical authors ; they may also be explained by careful study of bilingual documents, as the Rosetta Stone (and the Decree of Canopus). The sense, and more certainly the reading, can be discovered by an exact knowledge of the words written by phonetic combined with ideo graphic signs, and above all by the variants allowed in writing the same word with signs of different classes. (The result may be thus tabulated : Ideographic Signs. Phonetic Signs. representative. Symbolic. Alphahetic. Syllabic. Dr. Brugsch in his Gram. Hier. (p. 3) gives the following- scheme : Phonetic Signs. Ideographic Signs. General. Alphabetic. Syllabic. Special. Here the ideographic signs are classed, not according to their nature but according to their use, which will be later noticed. M. de Rouge s seems the more logical classification.) PHONETIC SIGNS. As the phonetic signs represent either (a) a simple articulation or (/3) a complete sound, i.e., a complete syllable, the hieroglyphic method comprehends (a) an alphabet and (/3) a syllabary. Champollion held that the alphabet originated from giving to each object the phonetic value of the initial of its name : thus the mouth <czr> " ro" would become " r." This probable principle cannot now be tested for a great part of the alphabet, probabh" in consequence of the loss of many archaic words. The alphabet of the Greek and Roman periods pre sents a great number of homophones .for each articula tion. The more we advance towards antiquity the more the method simplifies, and the alphabet of primitive times admits but a very small number of homophones. Dr. Lepsius (Lettre d Itosdhni) first scientifically treated this distinction. ARTICULATIONS OF THE EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE. The determination of the exact number of articula tions which the scribes distinguished in the Egyptian language presents great difficulties. Comparison with the articulations of languages which occur in bilingual texts cannct give sufficiently precise results, for the shades of sound are far from being the same in the languages thus placed in juxtaposition. The Romans and Greeks had many letters which, though quite distinct in their languages, the Egyptians confounded in their transcriptions. On the other hand, there were some Egyptian articulations preserved in the Coptic language which had no special representative in Greek or Latin ; hence certain letters derived from the demotic were added to the Greek alphabet on its adoption by the Copts. (It must also be remarked that the Greek and Roman rule was an age of literary decay and ruin for classical Egyptian, in the depression of which little effort seems to have been made to represent accurately foreign sounds. The student must not be misled by the greater accuracy at this time in rendering the vowels, which was merely due to the decay of the system of writing, by which the Egyptian vowels usually following; certain consonant signs came to be disregarded.) Happily those Egyptian articulations which were unknown to the Greeks and Romans have at least analogues in thi Semitic languages. Moreover, the many transcriptions of Semitic words (made while the Egyptian was in full vigour), joined to the traditions of the Coptia language (which has ceased for a hundred years to be a living speech), enable us to appreciate sufficiently those articulations unknown to the Greeks and Romans (and this indication may be followed in the cases of the rest of the letters). The words common to Egyptian and Semitic in the earliest known condition of the Egyptian language must be omitted from comparison ; the more exact tran scriptions of the scribes of the Ramessides (Dynasties XIX., XX.) must take precedence of the looser ones of the earlier period of the Empire (Dynasty XVIII.). Coptic, having long existed in a languishing state and under the influence of Arabic, whence the colouring of the latest dialect, the Bashmuric (Revillout ap. Rossi, Gram. Copto-Ger., 30, n. l),and certain peculiarities of the present pronunciation, is not an absolutely safe guide. It might be thought that the study of the various modes in which words are written would furnish an exact table of homophones, and give us at once the list of distinct articulations; thus we might suppose that variants shewing two characters might enable us to assume their identity, as when in reading Greek we assume that 6 is the same as S. But in Egyptian, as in other written languages, there are certain licensed irregu larities of orthography, and also oscillations between the different shades of sound in the same class of letters when, used for the same word: a small number -of variants between two letters therefore does not prove their perfect homophony. Hence certain differences of opinion among Egyptologists, according- to the weight, greater or less, which they give to this or that series of variants. Thus the number of letters under the "t" group differs with different scholars. Without denying that there may have been some shades of sound in the different signs here called homo phones, as in the sounds represented by the English " th," the chief guide should be the estimate the Copts made of the elements of their language, when they adopted the Greek alphabet, completing it for their purpose by adding six special letters taken from demotic writing. The Egyptian Christians in adopting the Greek alphabet, which had vowels with fixed sounds, made their writing undergo a radical change : up to that time they had only vague vowels which were, as in the Semitic alphabets, simple aspirations, susceptible of being- coloured by the sounds of different vowels (but this vague character must be limited by the vowels falling, as in Semitic, into three groups of sounds; the vagueness was therefore not unlimited. This characteristic of the old Egyptian influenced the Coptic, which presents in the vowels varieties of orthography of the same word, these varieties, however, usually falling within the three ancient groups. It is only in the Coptic helping vowel that absolute vagueness is found, like that of the primitive " shgva" of Hebrew.) Following these indications we find ]5 leading articu lations in Egyptian the shades of sound which may be most certainly distinguished would indicate an alphabet of 21 divisions. They are transcribed by letters taken, one, x> not to be confused with the Coptic , excepted, from the Latin alphabet, according to the principles of

the Standard Alphabet. Cf. Lepsius, Standard Alphabet*