Talk Like an Egyptian
In High School I got a kick out of telling people "I speak Egyptian!" Back then people assumed I meant ancient Egyptian, not Arabic (though at the time I did not in fact speak the Egyptian dialect, only Modern Standard, but it was still fun to say), and we'd all have a good laugh. Ok, I'd have a good laugh, but then if it weren't for me laughing I'd be an extremely dour kinda guy. Jokes aside I've decided to learn ancient Egyptian, specifically Hieroglyphics, because they're just darn cool. Look deep inside yourself and tell me that when you saw Mummy (or Mummy Returns if you're a true man!) you did not think "Dang I wish I could read the book of life and find a cute archaeologist." Ya, I didn't think you could. So I've started learning, and man does the linguist in me love it.
As cool as it was learning Arabic script, this is way beyond it. Since I've never done Chinese this is my first pictograph language and its just cool to 'read' pictures. There's two ways to read the characters, you can read them straight, the picture for house being a house, the picture for fish being a fish, etc... Or you can read them as sounds, which is apparently more common. The picture for house represents the consonants 'pr', for instance, and could be used to spell out the word for something else. Its not as complicated as all that sounds, however, because there's clues in the writing to tell you. The words are arranged in blocks, fitting the shapes together into spaces as needed. Its really hard to write that without an image, but I don't have a good one on hand. You could take four characters that each represent one consonant, fit them so that they flow top to bottom and left to right, and there's your word. If you really want to get specific, you can add other glyphs to the end to get meaning across. Forget diacritics, the next time I diagram a sentence in Arabic I want a picture of running legs to represent a verb. Seriously its so cool. If you want to convey that this word has to do with daytime put a sun image at the end, if its an emotion you can put a certain type of person that stands for that as well. The more I read about the grammar (what interests me about languages most often) the more I'm blown away by the incredible diversity of languages on this planet.
Speaking of the grammar, theirs is a bit looser than ours in one regard that makes the creative side of me happy. Their script is not fixed left to right! If it happens that the words fit better right to left, you're perfectly allowed to right that direction. But clues are left in the picture to help the reader along. You know how you only see the sides of faces in Ancient Egyptian art? Not only is it due to lack of perspective, that's the direction you read from! Read into the person's face, so if they face left, you start over there. Also certain glyphs can key you into the direction, such as a foot pointing to the right would tell you to start on the right.
Why is that so cool? Because it lets you caption a picture and use the picture itself. An example I've come across is a phrase from an offering to one of their gods. The image depicts a man offering a cow leg to Senbi, and the text alongside is the (short) 'speech' given at the time. Well what's neat here is the cow leg the man is offering is also used in the sentence. The text and image flow flawlessly together and that's just neat. I'm not a designer, but I can appreciate good design when I see it.
I'm just beginning to dive into this language, and I've just got basic basic grammar down, but I can tell this is something I will pursue. I would encourage anyone with an interest in languages to do the same because I feel it is rather unique in its fame (how many movies make Cuneiform as mystical as Hieroglyphics?) and the how few people have any grasp of it. Trust me when I saw basic grammar is not hard, and you'll tear through any materials you have on it. Maybe you learn no vocab, maybe you can only read some if you pause the movie, grab a dictionary and try your hardest, but seriously, how many people can say "Talk like an Egyptian" and mean the Ancient Egyptians?
