Understanding Transliteration
How Egyptologists represent hieroglyphic sounds using the Latin alphabet.
Since we don't know exactly how ancient Egyptian was pronounced (vowels were not written), Egyptologists use a standardised set of Latin letters and special characters to represent the consonantal sounds. This is called transliteration.
The Uniliteral Signs
Egyptian has 24 single-consonant ("uniliteral") signs β roughly equivalent to an alphabet. These are the building blocks of the writing system:
| Transliteration | Approximate Sound | Example |
|---|---|---|
| κ£ (A) | glottal stop (like "uh-oh") | π |
| κ₯ (a) | voiced pharyngeal fricative | π |
| w | "w" as in "water" | π ± |
| b | "b" as in "bed" | π |
| p | "p" as in "pet" | πͺ |
| f | "f" as in "fox" | ππ² |
| m | "m" as in "man" | π |
| n | "n" as in "net" | π |
| r | "r" as in "run" | π |
| h | "h" as in "hat" | π |
| αΈ₯ (H) | emphatic "h" | π |
| αΈ« (x) | "ch" as in Scottish "loch" | π |
| s | "s" as in "sun" | π΄ |
| Ε‘ (S) | "sh" as in "ship" | π© |
| k | "k" as in "king" | π‘ |
| g | "g" as in "go" | πΌ |
| t | "t" as in "top" | π |
| d | "d" as in "dog" | π§ |
Transliteration Conventions
In PharaLex and Egyptological literature, you'll see two formats:
- Unicode transliteration β uses special characters: κ£, κ₯, αΈ₯, αΈ«, αΊ, Ε‘, αΉ―, αΈ
- ASCII (Manuel de Codage) β uses capital letters as substitutes: A, a, H, x, X, S, T, D
Both represent the same sounds. PharaLex displays Unicode transliteration by default and uses MdC encoding internally for glyph sequences.
Reading Transliteration
When you see a transliteration like nfr, it represents only the consonants. Egyptologists conventionally insert an "e" between consonants for pronunciation, giving "nefer" β but this is a modern convention, not the ancient pronunciation.