thatlittleegyptologist:

What are Hieroglyphs? - A Q&A from a Poll

I ran a poll last week to see what people most wanted to know about how Hieroglyphs and languages such as Old/Middle/Late Egyptian work. While certain responses had more of an interest, the most common tag/comment I was getting was ‘umm all of them?’. So, I’m going to do just that, but under a cut, because no one needs a post that’s going to be as long as this one is without choosing the colour of the sky. Trust me, this is colour of the sky long.

So, without further ado, these were the results of the poll (yeah it’s not finished yet, really, but the percentages haven’t moved in 4 days and the poll ends in about 12 hours so here we are):

Results for a tumblr poll that read as follows: What is it about Hieroglyphs that you want to know more about? How do you remember all the values for all the signs? 12% How do you know where a word stops and another one begins? 39% What do all the .'s, ='s, and brackets mean in transliteration? 20% How long does it take to translate? 5% How do you work out the grammar? 17% Why are the signs so specific? 6% None of these Dr Tumblr User thatlittleegyptologist, I'll tell you in the tags 1%ALT

I’ll start with 'least interest’ and move onto the bigger things, as some of these I can get out of the way pretty quickly. I’ll apologise to screen readers in advance, because you might imagine how difficult it is going to be describe hieroglyphs in a way that makes any meaningful sense, especially if they’re using different cultural concepts. So, here we go!

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