Yeah, Hieroglyphs have a sound in my head and that’s because Hieroglyphs have phonetic sounds. Each Hieroglyph you see has either a 1, 2, 3, or 4-consonantal value, though 4 is rare, which means that sign either reads with one sound, two sounds or three sounds.

So for instance there’s the group of 1-consonant signs

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The top line of letters is how we’d type them using a keyboard, the middle line is how they look typed with transliteration font (how we bridge the gap between Hieroglyphs and the target translation language), and the final line contains the corresponding Hieroglyphs. So, when I see the foot hieroglyph, my brain automatically converts that to a ‘b’ sound. This goes the same for 2/¾ consonant signs too. Here are some examples of 2-consonant signs and how I’d pronounce them in my head:

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You can see each of them utilises the same sounds as seen in the 1-consonant signs, but those signs aren’t visible. This is because the 1-consonant signs are the most basic phonemes, and the more complicated a grapheme becomes, then the less it will look like those original phonemes. A phoneme is the most basic unit of speech to distinguish one word from another, so the p in Tap is a phoneme that distinguishes 'tap’ from 'tag’ or 'tab’. A grapheme is a way of writing down a group of phonemes of two or more. But this doesn’t mean that 1-consonant signs are not read or used within the writing system. Here’s a sentence that most Egyptologists will recognise as being one they learn very early on:

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This sentence to me reads 'aHa.n dpt mwt’ or 'Then the boat died’ and is from a text known as The Shipwrecked Sailor. It contains a particle, a noun, and a verb. It also contains three 3-consonant signs, and seven 1-consonant signs. So, we’ll start from the beginning of the sentence with the first sign, which is a 3-consonant 'boat’s mast’ sign and reads aHa. The next sign is a 1-consonant outstretched arm sign that reads as 'a’, but we don’t read it in this sentence. This is a fun thing all stages of the Egyptian language do, which is to have what are known as 'phonetic complements’, or signs that appear to reinforce the last phoneme(s) of the 2 or 3 consonant sign that came before it. In this case, the sign before read as 'aHa’ so the 1 consonant 'a’ sign is reinforcing the ending of 'aHa’. This is actually a classic mistake a lot of early learners of Hieroglyphs do, which is to read all the phonetic complements as part of the translation and that causes them to get stuck! The next sign is the 1-consonant line of water sign 'n’, which clearly isn’t a complement to 'aHa’ so it must be read.

So here’s where you’d need a little bit more knowledge of how Middle Egyptian (the easiest stage of the language to learn) is constructed. In Middle Egyptian the 1-consonant water sign 'n’ can be read in a variety of ways: as a phonetic complement (as 'a’ was above), as the preposition 'n’ meaning 'of/to’, as the marker of the past tense where a ’.n’ is added to the end of a verb, or if negating the present tense adding ’.n’ to the verb. With the example above, aHa.n is a known particle of Middle Egyptian meaning 'then’, so we would know to a) write the 'n’ in transcription, and b) make it a ’.n’ because aHa.n is a particle that marks the narrative past, which is why it has the translation of 'then’.

The next group of signs is a hand sign (d) over the top of a rectangle shaped stool sign (p), and a semi circular loaf of bread sign (t), together reading 'dpt’ 'boat’. All these are 1-consonant signs, grouped together to form the grapheme 'dpt’, which, coincidentally is what the next sign also reads as. The 'boat on water’ sign also has the 3-consonantal value of 'dpt’ but it isn’t being read here. This is because the boat sign is functioning as what’s known as a 'determinative’, which in Hieroglyphs is a sign that isn’t read but sort of tells you what the word is about. For instance, the word cat is 'miw’ and has a cat determinative at the end of it that can also be read as 'miw’. Words that have something to do with things that come from the mouth will have a little determinative of a man with his hand to his mouth. They’re indicators of content, and don’t need to be read. If we really wanted to save space, because after all Egyptian Hieroglyphs are a writing system and an art form, we would eliminate the group of 1-consonant signs, and just leave the boat sign, and the meaning of the sentence wouldn’t change. It would still be 'dpt’ because the the boat means that too! It’s something you get to grips with when you’re learning to read hieroglyphs. Due to the fact that there are multiple different mediums for hieroglyphs to be written on, directions they can be written in, and spaces they can fill, you end up with a lot of variant writings for the same word. Here I can easily write out the full writing of 'dpt’ because I’m going horizontally left to right, but if I was going vertically, I’d remove the group of 1-consonant signs and simply use the boat to save space and make it look more aesthetically pleasing.

Finally, the last group of signs contains two 1-consonant signs, and one 3 consonant sign and reads 'mw.t’ 'died/death’. This one is a bit of a switch up from 'aHa.n’, but works on the same principle. The first sign is an 1-consonant owl sign reading ’m’, the middle sign is a 3-consonant is a hieratic variant of another sign that’s basically a man tilted to the side with an axe embedded into his head (here it’s just looks like a diagonal line with an inverted arrow head) that reads 'mwt’ and the final sign is the 1-consonant semi circle of bread (t) sign. So, because we know the middle sign is a 3 consonant sign reading 'mwt’ we know the other two signs are potentially phonetic complements. Since the first sign reads as ’m’ and so does 'mwt’ we know that the ’m’ at the front is merely reinforcing the idea we’re reading the ’m’ of 'mwt’, and the ’t’ at the end is basically doing the same. Unlike 'aHa.n’ where the complement only comes after the 3-consonant sign, in 'mwt’ they come before and after it. Again, like 'dpt’ I can remove the ’m’ and the ’t’ signs, and the sentence will continue to have the same meaning.

So, that was a breakdown of how you’d parse a sentence in Middle Egyptian. At least as a beginner. As you grow with experience, you stop having to think about 'do I need to read this sign?’ and just automatically do it, which is where I am right now. Sometimes, I’ll forget the meaning of a certain sign, and I’ll have to go and look it up so I can complete a transcription because there are 1000s of signs and you can’t remember every single one perfectly. Ask any Egyptologist, and they’ll tell you there’s one sign they always forget. Sometimes you know the transliteration for transcription, but you’ve forgotten, or simply don’t know, the translation of that word and you have to go and look it up in a dictionary. It depends on the sign, and it depends on the word…..and how much sleep I’ve had, the phase of the moon, if the wind is south westerly or not. Y'know, the whims of nature. Basically, when presented with a sign I will know what it’s transliteration/consonantal value is, and when presented with a group of signs that form a word I can read that too. It’s taken years of practice and application to get to this stage, though.