How were hieroglyphs different from your alphabet?

Answer 1

Hieroglyphics are drawings, commonly referred to as pictographs, while the alphabet are letters.

Answer 2

Modern English uses the Roman alphabet which can be adapted or modified to write many different languages: Spanish, Italian, French, Swahili, Zulu, English, Gaelic and many more. Its usefulness is in each letter standing for a single sound, either a consonant or a vowel. Its failing is that it does not represent sounds found in many other languages around the world - the Japanese "r" is not the same sound as English "r" and many Middle eastern languages have special guttural consonants not found or represented in the Roman alphabet.

Hieroglyphs were designed only to write the ancient Egyptian language and no other, although by using certain signs it was possible to spell out foreign names such as Cleopatra and Ptolemy. Signs only represent consonants - no vowels were written, although both the writer and the reader knew exactly which vowels should be included when reading the texts. Some signs represent a single consonant, some a group of two, others a group of three; other signs indicate negatives or plural or dual words, others are without any sound at all and simply indicate the general meaning of a word (determinatives).

Because of the large number of signs in hieroglyphs it is possible to write the same word in many different ways, allowing scribes and artists to use a long or short version depending on the space available. Signs always fit into an invisible rectangle, keeping the writing neat and pleasing to the viewer. The same text can be written from right to left, left to right or vertically downwards, which also allows an artist to fit a text into an inscription around a picture. In that way the writing system is adaptable and flexible, but in its construction it is formulaic and strictly governed by tradition.

Answer 3

Ideally, each letter in an alphabet represents one and only one of the distinct sounds ("phonemes") of the language it is used to write. Although the fit between the Latin alphabet and the English language is far from perfect (which is the reason why English spelling is so notoriously hard to learn), it remains true that

1. all letters represent sounds (although some are silent in some situations)
2. the number of phonemes in English (roughly 45) is reasonably close to the number of letters in the alphabet (26)

Contrast this with the case of the ancient Egyptian language, which had about 25 consonant phonemes (vowels were not written), and yet was recorded with a writing system containing hundreds or even thousands of symbols. What accounts for the vastly larger number of hieroglyphs compared with modern alphabets?

First, some hieroglyphs represented entire words. This was the origin of the system; the word 'dog' would have been represented by the drawing of a dog, the word 'walk' by a drawing of a walking man, and so forth. Each new word represented in this way would require a new hieroglyph.

Second, although many hieroglyphs were used phonetically, to write sounds rather than whole words, there wasn't even close to a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds. A few hieroglyphs represented only a single consonant each (the so-called "hieroglyphic alphabet"), but many more represented sequences of two or three consonants. Many words could be written in several ways by grouping their consonants differently (and, often, by writing some consonants more than once).

Third, even phonetic hieroglyphs were sometimes restricted in their application to certain words or groups of words. For example, a picture of a hoopoe (a kind of bird) was used for the consonants 'Db', but only in the word Dbt "brick". The same consonant sequence appearing elsewhere was spelled differently.

Fourth, there were hieroglyphs that did not record either words or sounds, but were added to spellings to indicate the word's conceptual category. For example, words involving speaking or eating often included a picture of a man with his hand near his mouth, which was not pronounced but served to distinguish the word from other similar-sounding words.

For these and other reasons, the Egyptian writing system contained around 700 characters during its classical period (Middle Egyptian, 2000-1300 B.C.) and had swelled to over 5,000 towards the end of its life (first few centuries A.D.).

Answer 4

they used pictures instead of letters.