Transliteration
Representing Ancient Egyptian Sounds
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What is Transliteration?
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Transliteration vs. Translation
What is transliteration?
Transliteration is a linguistic writing system. The goal is to help you read a foreign language by giving you the letters you already know, as well as provide a way to read the letters you don't know.
The standard acedemic transliteration for ancient Egyptian converts hieroglyphs into Latin characters paired with specific diacritics to represent ancient Egyptian phonemes. For example, English only has one "h" sound. Egyptian has four distinct "h" sounds. Transliteration invents specialized letters with diacritics (like ḥ, ḫ, and ẖ) so we can represent those exact native Egyptian sounds without losing precision. These unique set of sounds and grammatical structures do not have direct equivalents in English.
Additionally, transliteration gives us the symbols (like dots and equal signs) to visually parse out the structures on a page (ancient Egyptian does not have grammatical marks like apostrophes, periods and question marks). German Egyptological System (Rainer Hannig’s Paradigm Shift [The Handwörterbuch] abandons the dots for gender and plurals):
In modern Egyptological transliteration, the equal sign (=) is a highly specialized punctuation mark with exactly one exclusive job: it glues a suffix pronoun to its host word. The equal sign is strictly reserved for this one specific class of pronouns. In ancient Egyptian, suffix pronouns were phonetically dependent enclitics—meaning they could never stand alone as independent words. They had to lean heavily on the word right in front of them, blending into it. This is done to visually demonstrate their tight grammatical bond, as they formed a single spoken word in the original language.
Note that in conventional transliteration, we attach the suffix pronoun to the noun using an equal sign (=) (a simplified way uses a hyphen [-] )
The hyphen is a simplified, beginner-friendly option. We use a hyphen ( - ) in our downloadable program as well as our book, Egyptian Hieroglyphs Made Easy. The reason for this is that the program was originally an educational tool marketed to young learners. However, we will also provide the widely used conventional Egyptological transliteration system alongside the beginner version.
Translation vs. Transliteration
Translation focuses on meaning: it changes words from one language into another so you can understand the ideas (e.g., changing the Egyptian word pr into the English word "house").
Transliteration focuses on sound: it changes characters from one alphabet into another so you can pronounce the letters (e.g., converting the hieroglyphs 𓉐 into the letters pr).
