Imagination
Learning the Egyptian Alphabet
This is an article designed to demonstrate how in a few minutes with a little imagination and sillyness you can memorise something apparently very complicated. In this case the Egyptian Hieroglyphic alphabet.
It should be pointed out that the total system of Egyptian Hieroglyphics is much more complicated than a simple alphabet. It also has a long list of different sylabograms and logograms one would have to remember if you really wanted to read the language. However, all budding Egyptologists have to start somewhere so here we are.
Okay so how do we go about this. Well the most important thing is we have to think about each 'letter' in a more interesting way. The column representing titled transliteration is the column denoting the different sounds of each letter. The column titled say gives the closest English representation. It won't be perfect but that isn't the point, not here anyway. The point is to illustrate how to learn, just follow along.
The first glyph we have is something like a vulture.
The typical sound given for this is a glottal stop. Like the Cockney 'bo_le' in 'bottle'.
Imagine a greedy vulture trying to swallow a bottle and only able to make a glottal sound because of the bottle in it's mouth.