Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/478

470 EGYPT (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) A. D., and the gradual transition from the obscure and difficult demotic to the more in- telligible Coptic alphabet can be easily dis- cerned. Demotic words were occasionally transcribed in Greek letters, pure Coptic oc- casionally in the demotic characters, and again demotic in Greek letters, with the sounds not found in Greek preserving their original signs, which was in reality the Coptic alphabet. Coptic is the exclusive character of the Chris- tian Egyptian literature, and marks the last development or final decay of the Egyptian language, which became almost extinct during the last century, and made way for Arabic. (See COPTIC LANGUAGE.) To understand the varied use of the hieroglyphic signs which make up the language, it is necessary to in- quire how this system of writing came to be established. There are traces in Egyptian of a purely pictorial stage, when, as in the North American and Mexican graphic pictures, no attempt was made at recording particular words, but only ideas, which could be read in any language whatever. The great pictures on temple walls and the vignettes in the fune- ral rituals were probably the original text, ex- pounded subsequently by writing proper, and ultimately preserved as illustrations. After this period of ideographs, or picturing the thing itself instead of tracing signs to suggest the name of it, the Egyptians learned in very early times to use certain objects symbolically to represent abstract ideas, actions, and relations, like goodness and anger, to adore and to rule ; thus an irritated ape stood for anger, a lute for goodness, a man lifting his hands for adora- tion, and a whip for ruling. When no symbol could be found to convey an abstract idea, the discovery was probably made that the sound of its name might be depicted by an ob- ject of which the name was the same or near- ly the same in sound ; just as in English the verb " can " might be represented by a can. This system of suggesting an idea by the picture of a different idea which accidentally had the same sound for its name, became the source of great confusion ; and this led to the addition of deter- minative signs expressing the idea of the hie- roglyphs which denoted the sound ; and the subsequent desire of using consistently a se- lection of objects for representing names of other objects than themselves gave rise to the syllabics and alphabetics. Hieroglyphs are therefore either ideographs or phonetics. The ideographs (of which there are about 900) are used in various ways: 1, directly, or repre- senting the object itself intended to be ex- pressed ; 2, indirectly, or expressing the idea subjectively ; 3, tropically, intended to convey only the quality of the object represented ; 4, putting the cause for the effect, as a whip for to rule ; 6, putting the effect for the cause, as a fallen man for to kill ; 6, putting sacred ani- mals and other symbols for the deities to which they belonged. The determinatives are also a subdivision of ideographs, though some pho- netics are occasionally used as such, and form a class of about 200 hieroglyphs. They convey an idea either directly or indirectly connected with the sense of the word to which they are attached. The determinatives generally follow an ideograph, as >T^T., a lion, where the lion is followed by the hieroglyph of a skin, which is determinative of all animals, and here shows that the lion is to be read lion, not simply r. Certain words have two determina- tives, as young troops, where the boy expresses the special nature of the troops, and the three men the determinative conditions or kinds of men. When two deter- minatives were required, one sometimes prece- ded and the other followed the phonetic group, or occurred in the second place after a phone- tic ; and sometimes a phonetic was used as a de- terminative of a sound not afterward attached to it. Thus the determinative lion which is the phonetic for r or I is not sounded in X --~~* "** (shuty, to repulse. All groups, with the exception of the verb to be, pronouns, and prepositions, are followed by a determina- tive. Every hieroglyphic word in fact consists of two portions : one or more hieroglyphs ex- pressing its sound, and one hieroglyph express- ing its idea. All hieroglyphs used phonetically are sounded as the original name of the object which they represent. The so-called alpha- betics are single syllables composed of two vowels. The syllabic phonetics represent dis- sometimes written with syllables, as I its second vowel (u) ; (/), some- times written < - (fi); and trisyllables, each terminating with a vowel, as ^^S- <=> (mer}, composed of x^_ (raw), = %k V (mu), and <o m. (ru). Some phonetic hiero- glyphs are found in the place of others in groups expressing the same idea, and are called homophones. Some alphabetic and syllabic hieroglyphs have sometimes the hieroglyph nearest approaching to their sound placed before them. Phonetics are used to express entire words, principally of an abstract na- ture, as the verbs to be and to have, the pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, interjections, and other words often used, as "^o (neb), p, lord. They often express an entire word with only the aid of determinatives denoting the genus of the idea. Phonetics were also used to complete or indicate the meaning of certain ideographs and determinatives, and in this case are generally placed after them. In a few in- stances groups of ideographic hieroglyphs are used for phonetic purposes, and again some phonetics occur as determinatives of other pho- netics. Tbe form R or 1 , which sometimes