Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)

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106 pointsandrelaszlo40 comments

I think the author has forgotten to write about the most important part, namely, what each part of the hieroglyphics mean.

I found this article [1] for how the word "Welcome" is constructed, but how to understand the rest is beyond me.

[1] https://www.ancientegyptblog.com/?p=1458

I completely agree, that's what I wanted to see.

The goal of an HELLO WORLD is not to show it's printed, but the process of what everything is need to print HELLO WORLD. Every step, and every word and concept needs to be explained.

Therefore this article is not a proper HELLO WORLD exemple.

Yes, what OS did the Egyptians use?

If "hello world" is about the process to get to showing "hello world" then I guess some part of the OS/computer is stone and chisels.

OS is not part of an HELLO WORLD example.

Usually it goes something like this, for example HTML:

<!doctype html>

<html>

<body>HELLO WORLD</body>

</html>

Then you explain what a tag is, why they need closing or not, what the body is, etc. This is a basic HELLO WORLD example. If I dumped the above code and says done, that will be useless to anybody.

SunOS, clearly.

𓇳𓁉𓀃𓀀

RIGHT! I thought I missed a paragraph or something lol

Start drawing the owl... Finished!

Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw the meaning but they tend to have particular pronunciations, and the selection of glyphs will usually depend on both the sound and the meaning of the word.

I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some characters having the same sound), but you spell words using certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic association of components (radicals) within each character.

I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty sure there are exceptions in both cases).

This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0], showing correspondences between various scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ع sounds the same as the Arabic word for "eye" (ʿayn, عين) and the corresponding hieroglyph also looks like an eye.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-translatio...

You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name.

I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation:

  United States 美国 Měiguó Beautiful Country
  China 中国 Zhōngguó Middle Country
  Japan 日本 Rìběn Origin of the Sun
  Germany 德国 Déguó Virtuous Country
  India 印度 Yìndù India
  United Kingdom 英国 Yīngguó Heroic Country
  France 法国 Fǎguó Law Country
  Italy 意大利 Yìdàlì Italy
  Canada 加拿大 Jiānádà Canada
  South Korea 韩国 Hánguó Han Country

* Obviously CJK etc countries already had names

Most of those are just phonetic approximations using convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental about any of those names.

Indeed, that is what I wrote

Sure, but there are multiple characters nearly every sound in Mandarin, I’m sure it’s no accident they ended up with mostly flattering ones.

+1, it's no accident. The most obvious case is with corporate names, which sometimes get carefully analyzed in translation. Coca-Cola is famously translated as 可口可乐 (Ke3 kou3 ke3 le4, numbers indicate tones), with individual characters meaning "can taste can happy", and intuitively meaning something like "drinkable deliciousness"

According to Baxter & Sagart (2014), the name Hán 韓 *[g]ˤar is from Gaya language word kara.

(I'm not an egyptologist.) The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has a breakdown of 𓅓𓂋𓄋𓏏𓏝𓊹𓊵𓏏𓅓𓇾𓂋𓇦𓂋𓆑 / jm.j-rʾ-wpw.wt-ḥtp.w-nṯr-m-tꜣ-r-ḏr=f / "overseer of apportionments of the god's offering(s) in the entire land" https://tla.digital/lemma/850281 with 𓇾 / tꜣ / "land" and 𓂋𓇥𓂋 / r-ḏr / "entire".

So we have most of 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑 / jy.tj-tꜣ-r-ḏr-?? / "welcome land entire ??" except for the 𓈐𓆑 at the end where I have no idea whether it's phonetic ḥr=f or a determinative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.

I think the =f at the end is a possessive, because r ḏr=f is an idiomatic phrase literally meaning “to its limit”.

𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑

jy.tj t3 r ḏr=f

come [STATIVE] land [VOCATIVE] to limit its

“Welcome, entire land”

(I’m not an Egyptologist either.)

Did you forget about the 𓈐 or does it get merged into the preceding word?

I think 𓈐 is the end of the preceding word, ḏr. It is functioning as a logogram, not a phonogram:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative

What a time to be alive: my iPhone has enough Unicode coverage to display hieroglyphics… imagine thinking two decades ago that you could use disk space on a mobile device like that.

(It doesn’t have the glyph layout chops, though…)

A bit of a digression: the article has the hieroglyphics presented as pictures, not as Unicode, even though Unicode has the entire(?) hieroglyph block already. After some digging, I found that this was because there aren't many (or any) popular fonts which implement the proper combinations of glyphs.

(While Unicode has combining diacritics, this isn't sufficient to e.g. stack the glyphs as shown in the article.)

However, it turns out that Microsoft has developed a tool that can modify an existing font to allow this, representing the hieroglyphyics properly. I've written a brief tutorial that shows how to actually use it:

https://marzchipane.com/notes%20and%20essays/interesting_uni...

(You may need to press Shift+F5 to reload fully if they don't show properly)

EDIT: hieroglyphs, not hieroglyphics

This gives a pretty good explanation, although there is a slight difference from the translation in the original post: https://chatgpt.com/share/69136c44-94b0-8000-a564-ce55f92a14... Use it together with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner%27s_sign_list

A nitpick sixteen years too late: the idea behind five-digit years isn't bad, but there's no reason for time deltas to adhere to this rule! 5000 years ago, not 05000 years ago.

doesn't the same argument apply to ordinal dates? i see some people on hn also using longnow-style five-digit years, but i really can't see the point.

did the crossing of the rhine take place in 00406, 0406, or 406? what extra information do the two former styles convey?

also, what about the year 100000?

we are somehow doing just fine without leading zeroes for other quantities.

there is an argument to be made about e.g. iso8601 datetime formats that need to be lexicographically sortable; but i don't see any of the longnow fans using anything like those.

Funny I have a shirt that reads "Prince of Susa" to the three people (not me) who can read Linear Elam.

Edit: To see the sequence you can paste "" into the corpus search at https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#script=elam

Great video on how to read hieroglyphics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwZB0MsXCjQ

They can be pretty complex and a neat form of 2D-positional language!

Well I don't recognise many of these, but I did happily recognise the horned viper thanks to a lot of time spent watching Only Connect.

I don't know if that is enough to put me in the intersection of their Venn diagram though.

Off/On topic. Where can I find a study group, of motivated people who want to learn hieroglyphs?

For what it's worth, I'm interested. So far I've just bought a couple books on Middle Egyptian and read a basic intro that my library had, but between all the languages I'm already learning, couldn't really justify putting in the time.

A study group or study partner would probably be enough extra motivation to get basic proficiency at the least. So if you're willing let me know if you find/wish to create something.

Awesome. My email is in profile. (I Couldn't find yours ). I'll probably add a discord invite here too.

There are other languages like Linear A that could use attention as well!

They're hieroglyphs.

The script is hieroglyphic.

(2009)

What surprised me most is that there isn't a ton of publicly available information on translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that would make this reasonably easy, or even a website that would allow one to enter an English phrase and get back the hieroglyphic equivalent.

Oh, wait, there is: https://lingojam.com/HieroglyphicsTranslator except its translation of "Welcome, the entire land" looks very different from the symbols in the article.

It looks like this isn't an actual translator, it's just transcribing the consonants into uniliteral hieroglyphs.

> Oh, wait, there is:

As far as I can tell this is a transliterator, not a translator. It's just turning latin letters into hieroglyphs as you type them. I don't know how accurate the transliteration is.

It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.

> It would be like coming up with a sequence of Chinese characters that sounds like an English sentence when pronounced by a Mandarin speaker. Nothing really to do with translation.

Actually this does happen for some foreign terms/loan words, like the names of other countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...

Another great example is https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/mots01-unpetit.htm

Getting a native French speaker to recite these to native English speakers is hilarious! Especially when the French speaker is trying to work out why what they've said is seemingly so funny.

Sir say "tray bean". Mercy.

Representing the alphabetic orthography for Hello World is obviously impossible in a written script lacking letters, revealing the folly implicit in the exercise.

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