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adrian_btoday at 8:06 AM1 replyview on HN

Nit pick: the Egyptian writing system never had any symbols for syllables.

The phonetic symbols included in the Egyptian writing system represented 1 consonant or 2 consonants or 3 consonants, not syllables. Any syllables or short syllable sequences with the same consonants were written with the same symbol.

This makes the Egyptian writing system an exception, as all other writing systems that have developed completely independently, instead of being inspired by an existing system, have used phonetic symbols for syllables.

This is the very reason why the Egyptian writing system has generated the ancient Semitic alphabet with 29 consonannts, from which all later Semitic consonantic alphabets have been derived, then the Greek alphabet and other European alphabets, and the Indian writing systems and other Asian writing systems derived from them.

Since the beginning, the Egyptian writing system had two variants, depending on the writing instruments: hieroglyphic for inscriptions carved in stone and hieratic for texts written with a reed brush on papyrus. The latter is what you mean by "cursive". "Cursive" is not really appropriate, as hieratic was still a very complex script, difficult to write, even if it was simplified in comparison with hieroglyphic. Millennia later, a more cursive form of hieratic developed into the demotic script.


Replies

vkazanovtoday at 8:11 AM

That is correct, but my knowledge of middle egypytian is limited to a single introductory book, and didnt want to muddy the waters with details.

The point stands still: the writing was not as clean as modern alphabets but was capable of expressing abstract concepts, it is completly orthogonal to concepts expressed in writing.