Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/844

Rh 806 HIEROGLYPHICS the harder aspirate,/*, &amp;gt;K was rarely added exceptwith theintroduction of alone united with its ordinary expletive is. I for h is rare : we have only found it followed by consonants or the vowel u. The syllabic &amp;lt;, Jiu, much used for h, has for expletive. w i. These remarks are of much use when one desires to fill up lacuna; of small extent in Egyptian texts. They explain usages, on which one general remark may be added, that the vowel s, a, did not unite itself readily to a certain number of letters; hence the intro duction of an intermediate letter and the pleonastic forms &c., for pa, x, &c. (It must also be re membered that, on the one hand, the expletive vowel cannot in all cases have full weight in roots which are always monosyllabic, on the other, that we can scarcely deny it some force. Was it used to modify the consonant as when a local pronunciation of g in English is written by grammarians gv as g^arden ? In transcriptions the expletive vowel appears, but for philological purposes must be disregarded, and the same is sometimes true of the complementary vowel. In English q, our only syllabic, always requires u as its complementary vowel : conse quently when it is used for its ancestor the Semitic koph, as in qoran, an uneducated person would read and even write quoran. On applying these observations to the orthography of mdrkabuta for n5?~lp a| d kanaanaur for &quot;1133, it is immediately evident that the deviations from the Semitic are due to the Egyptian vowel-system. In the word miirkabuta, the u is the favourite complement of the b, and the final t requires a vowel. In kenaanaur the doubled n is resolved into two syllables : it could have been written with the dis junctive sign between the two &quot; n&quot;s and a final vowel. It has been shewn that the transcriptions of the scribes of the Ramessides from Semitic into Egyptian were very accurate so nu- as the consonants were concerned. It is equally evident that this was scarcely possible and practically was not the case with the Semitic vowel sounds. This remark should be borne in mind in all comparisons of Hebrew and Semitic.) THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS OMITTED. The vowels, particularly the complementary ones noticed above, were omitted at will in writing, and must often be added in transcription. This is easy when a definite fuller form of a word is known. But there are many words for which the variants give different vowels, and many others for which a vowelled variant has not yet been found. Most Egyptologists here use c for the absent vowel, which must only be regarded as a con ventional sign for a gap to be filled. (There are, however, cases in which a very common word is never vowelled : here we may safely assume a very short vowel best represented by e, as already noticed.) ABBREVIATIONS AND EXCEPTIONS. Abbreviations were rare ; ideographs and syllables rendered them needless. But there are cases in usual formul ae ; as ^, nuter a, i or j A , nuter atef, &quot; divine father,&quot; the title of an order of priests. In the formula -5- i (1 , un ufa scnb. &quot; life, balance, health,&quot; a kind of good wish added to king s names and rendered in the Rosetta Stone vyteia, Q is an%, | t a is an abbreviation, for we find the complete word Jl ,ufa,in the same formula; &s but the H for H n is of a more trenchant character. There are some vrords of whieh the writing is excep tional, due to causes which may sometimes be traced. Thus /wwsA which should according to rule be transcribed &amp;lt;= =* M senliti, was a variant of scti. The syllabic jT&quot;; set, received as hieratic abbreviation ^, the last line being exactly like the of that time : thus it resembles the hieratic group for the three letters ^ A/w ^, and the scribes took occasion to trace ^^ in hiero glyphics for set. This is an imitation of the cursive style taken into the monumental, of which there are a certain number of cases. SECRET WRITING. Intentionally accumulated exceptions in certain texts compose what Champollion has called the Secret Writing. The most ancient traces we have found are of the Eigh teenth Dynasty. In this system we remark (1) objects rare or unused in ordinary writing; (0) syllabic signs used as simple letters ; (3) phonetic values obtained by turning the signs from their ordinary ideographic values ; (4) variants between the values of neighbouring sounds. Thus every deviation was made from the usual principles of writing by which it was possible to produce exceptions. This is an enigmatic system intended to be unintelligible to the ordinary reader. The causes of this method are of interest, for from them originated the new values which strangely complicate the hieroglyphic writing of the time of the Greeks and Romans (the secret writing thus passing in a certain degree into the common writing). THE USE OF HIEROGLYPHICS IN GRAMMAR. Although, as already stated, an outline of ancient Egyptian grammar is not given in this article, it is necessary to explain how hieroglyphics were used for grammatical purposes. In expressing roots or derivatives, whether pronominal, verbal, or of particles, both phonetic and ideographic signs could be employed, either apart or in combination. There is, however, in all but verbal roots a marked preference for phonetic expression, with again a pre ferential use of alphabetic signs. The masculine and feminine of nouns are marked, especially when they were ideographically written, by | and ^ : the former was not pronounced ; it is doubtful whether the latter was, and if so in what cases (De Rouge&quot;, Chrestomathie, ii. 7, 8). The plural of nouns, pronouns, and the pronominal affixes which were also used to indicate the persons of verbs, is indicated by the abstract symbol, III, |. In the case of nouns it may be replaced by a phonetic ending or the trebling of the word when written ideographically or even phonetically. The principle of expressing the dual, which is proper to nouns, appears to have been the same, though as to this there are difficulties. The pronouns and cognate words, including the article, are mostly written alphabetically. The affixed personal pronouns, which aro identical in form with a very few exceptions, whether used as pos- sessives, as inflexional verbal suffixes, or as direct complements, or in other words, in their genitive, subjective, and objective uses, afford instructive instances of the different modes of writing. It may bo observed that in Egyptian these are the primitive forms of the personal pronouns. The following table is taken from M. de Rouge s Chrestomathie, ii. 42, with the omission of some late forms. AFFIXED PERSONAL PKONOUNS. Singular. I. u, a
 * A