Long ago, the ubiquitous spread of the Egyptian alphabet stopped and they were replaced by Greek letters. The reason for this is that the Greek alphabet is simpler, consisting of 24 different characters for vowels and consonants. The Egyptian alphabet, in turn, varies depending on the era and place of use and contains from 800 to 5000 different characters, denoting both one word or letter, and a full-fledged expression.
Egyptian writing
The Egyptian alphabet dominated ancient Egypt for a long period of time – about 3500 years. It combines elements of three different types of writing: ideographic (a letter looks like a picture expressing a certain idea), syllabic (one sign means a whole syllable), phonetic (one sign expresses a certain sound). Later, Egyptian hieroglyphs were divided into three types: hieroglyphics, hierartic and demotic. Each of the types corresponded to certain needs, so no one type of writing was replaced by another throughout the history of the use of the language. Linguistic Egyptology is the study.
According to ancient authors who described the etymology of Egyptian hieroglyphs, one sign could display a full-fledged word or philosophical concept, statement. Modern Egyptologists have proved that ancient authors exaggerated the importance of Egyptian writing. However, there was some truth in their words: one of the philosophers noticed that the Egyptians divided writing into “folk” and “sacred”. One type of hieroglyphs was used in everyday life, the other was used for sacred writings. According to other scientists, there are three such species.
Greek alphabet: features
Initially, Egyptian writing was iconic, after which it was transformed into an ideographic one with an admixture of phonetic signs, retaining the remnants of the old alphabet. It is based on about 500 different signs expressing various concepts. One and the same sign can express different words, but similar in meaning. Egyptian writing is read both from right to left and from left to right. Most often used boustrophedon – the principle of changing direction after each line. For a general decorative look of writing, the Egyptians could arrange it in the form of some geometric figure. Unlike the Egyptian Greek alphabet order was also always respected. At the end of its formation, Egyptian writing was a complex and intricate system, so it was soon abandoned.
Greek alphabet
From the moment of creation (approximately 11th century BC) and ending with the present, Greek writing is used. Greek writing is recognized as the world’s first alphabet, divided into vowels and consonants. The standard alphabet contains 24 different characters, some ancient dialects used six additional ones. The classic form uses the first three letters to write numbers.
The alphabet originated from the Phoenician and inherited from it the style of writing from left to right. There are two general types of pronunciation: Erasmus, used in the classical era, now used exclusively in teaching, and Reuchlin, considered the standard pronunciation of modern Greek. In addition, several different diphthongs are used in Greek. This is a combination of two vowels pronounced together and considered as one integral syllable.
Word order in Greek writing is not important and is considered free, but there are certain rules that apply mainly to pronouns. There are three standard genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and two numbers (plural and singular). In ancient Greek, the use of the third number – dual – was common to denote paired objects.
Advantages of Greek over Egyptian
The Greek alphabet is several times superior to the Egyptian in terms of ease of use and areola distribution. Learning Egyptian is almost impossible due to the large number of characters and dialects. Egyptian hieroglyphs do not have vowel sounds, which reduces the likelihood of its use in the modern world by several times. Also, the Egyptians did not use sentence separators, words: dots, commas, exclamation and question marks. Often the letter was arranged in the form of a square, circle or other figure, which made it difficult to read. In the homeland of the language, only a small percentage of the inhabitants who received an excellent education of that time owned it.
A letter written in Egyptian hieroglyphs could be understood in two ways. For example, the same sign expressed such words as “home” and “come”, “swallow” and “big”. It took a lot of time to write the text using Egyptian hieroglyphs, it required artistic skills and the skill of writing with ink on parchment. Inaccurate movement led to a general unreadability of the text. In the absence of proper artistic skills, the scribe could not depict a similar picture corresponding to the required word or sound.
The Greek alphabet did not require special skills and knowledge. It consists of a small number of signs, each of them denotes one specific sound. Signs that are simple in their reproduction make up words and sentences. From the letters of the Greek alphabet, you can compose any word that was not previously present in the language, while the Egyptian letter allows you to write down only established expressions and words.
In the Greek alphabet, there are word separators – dots and commas – as a result of which the text written on it is perceived as holistic and logical, has the necessary intonations. Greek writing maintains one direction of writing, while Egyptian can be located in unexpected directions.