Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian

In the field of Egyptology, transliteration is the process of converting (or mapping) texts written in the Egyptian language to alphabetic symbols representing uniliteral hieroglyphs or their hieratic and demotic counterparts. This process facilitates the publication of texts where the inclusion of photographs or drawings of an actual Egyptian document is impractical.

It should be emphasised that transliteration is not the same as transcription. Transcription seeks to reproduce the "pronunciation" of a text. For example, the name of the founder of the Twenty-second dynasty is transliterated as "ššnq" but transcribed "Shoshenq" in English, "Chéchanq" in French, "Sjesjonk" in Dutch, and "Scheschonq" in German.

Because the exact details regarding the phonetics of ancient Egyptian are not completely known, most transcriptions depend on Coptic for reconstruction or are theoretical in nature. Egyptologists, therefore, rely on transliteration in scientific publications.

tandards

As important as transliteration is to the field of Egyptology, there is no one single standard scheme in use for hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Some might even argue that there are as many systems of transliteration as there are Egyptologists. However, there are a few closely related systems that can be regarded as conventional. Many non-German-speaking Egyptologists use the system described in Gardiner 1954, whereas many German-speaking scholars tend to opt for that used in the "Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache" (Erman and Grapow 1926–1953), the standard dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language. However, there is a growing trend, even among English-speaking scholars, to adopt a modified version of the method used in the "Wörterbuch" (e.g., Allen 2000).

Although these conventional approaches to transliteration have been followed since most of the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day, there have been some attempts to adopt a modified system that seeks to utilise the International Phonetic Alphabet to a certain degree. The most successful of these is that developed by Wolfgang Schenkel (1990), and it is being used fairly widely in Germany and other German-speaking countries. More recent is a proposal by Thomas Schneider (2003) that is even closer to the IPA, but its usage is not presently common. The major criticism levelled against both of these systems is that they give an impression of being much more scientifically accurate with regard to the pronunciation of Egyptian. Unfortunately this perceived accuracy is debatable. Moreover, the systems reflect only the theoretical pronunciation of Middle Egyptian and not the older and later phases of the language, which are themselves to be transliterated with the same system.

Electronic transliteration

In 1984 a standard, ASCII-based transliteration system was proposed by an international group of Egyptologists at the first "Table ronde informatique et égyptologie" and published in 1988 (see Buurman, Grimal, "et al.", 1988). This has come to be known as the "Manuel de Codage" (or MdC) system, based on the title of the publication, "Inventaire des signes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique: Manuel de codage des textes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie sur ordinateur". It is widely used in e-mail discussion lists and internet forums catering to professional Egyptologists and the interested public.

Although the "Manuel de codage" system allows for simple "alphabetic" transliterations, it also specifies a complex method for electronically encoding complete ancient Egyptian texts, indicating features such as the placement, orientation, and even size of individual hieroglyphs. This system is used (though frequently with modifications) by various software packages developed for typesetting hieroglyphic texts (such as WinGlyph, MacScribe, InScribe, Glyphotext, , and others).

Unicode

With the introduction of the Latin Extended Additional range to Unicode version 1.1 (1992), it is possible to almost fully transliterate Egyptian texts using a Unicode typeface. The table of various transliteration schemes found below, for example, uses Unicode.

Alef, ayin and yodh

There are, however, two characters that are not yet included in the Unicode 5.0 specification. These are the so-called
*"Egyptian alef" (, two half-rings opening to the left, often represented by the numeral "3");
*"Egyptian ayin" (the same symbol used for transliterating Semitic ayin, represented here as <unicode|ˁ> Unicode U+02C1, the IPA symbol for pharyngealization).

"Egyptian yodh", an "i" with a half-ring opening to the left replacing the dot, can be expressed with a combining diacritic, "ı͗".

A Unicode-based transliteration system is adopted by the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale. It uses <unicode|ȝ> for "alef" (Unicode U+021D, properly Old and Middle English yogh), or <unicode|ỉ> (Unicode U+1EC9, properly marking the dipping-rising tone in the Vietnamese alphabet) for "yodh", and <unicode|ʿ> (Unicode U+02BF) for "ayin".

On Apr. 27th, 2007, however, a proposal to add these two letters to Unicode went to "Stage 6" in the adoption process [ [http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html Proposed New Characters - Pipeline Table ] ] . The following four characters will soon be added to the standard:

Gardiner [cite book|author=Gardiner, Sir Alan H.|year=1973|title=Egyptian Grammar, 3rd. Ed.|publisher=The Griffith Institute|id=ISBN 0-900416-35-1|pages=pg. 27] lists several variations:

ee also

*Demotic Egyptian
*Egyptian language
*Egyptian hieroglyph
*Hieratic
*Transliteration
*: "Manuel de Codage"-based system for entering hieroglyphic texts on Wikipedia

External links

* [http://www.catchpenny.org/codage/ Manuel de Codage] : technical details of electronic transliteration of Egyptian texts
* [http://www.ifao.egnet.net/c.php?f=/doc/Outils/Polices.php Unicode-based transliteration system adopted by the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale. Description and downloadable keyboard layouts.]
* [http://www.ifao.egnet.net/publications/outils/convertisseurs/ Online encoding converter] for converting ASCII-based transliterations into Unicode.

Notes

References

*Allen, James Paul. 2000. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Buurman, Jan, Nicolas-Christophe Grimal, Michael Hainsworth, Jochen Hallof, and Dirk van der Plas. 1988. Inventaire des signes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique: Manuel de codage des textes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie sur ordinateur. 3rd ed. Informatique et Égyptologie 2. Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres (Nouvelle Série) 8. Paris: Institut de France.
*Erman, Adolf, and Hermann Grapow, eds. 1926&ndash;1953. Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache im Auftrage der deutschen Akademien. 6 vols. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'schen Buchhandlungen. (Reprinted Berlin: Akademie-Verlag GmbH, 1971).
*Gardiner, Alan Henderson. 1957. Egyptian Grammar; Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. 3rd ed. Oxford: Griffith Institute.
*Hannig, Rainer. 1995. Großes Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch&ndash;Deutsch: die Sprache der Pharaonen (2800&ndash;950 v. Chr.). Kulturgeschichte der antiken Welt 64 (Hannig-Lexica 1). Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
*Schenkel, Wolfgang. 1990. Einführung in die altägyptische Sprachwissenschaft. Orientalistische Einführungen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
*Schneider, Thomas. 2003. "Etymologische Methode, die Historizität der Phoneme und das ägyptologische Transkriptionsalphabet." Lingua aegyptia: Journal of Egyptian Language Studies 11:187&ndash;199.