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1 The Ancient Egyptians used a writing system called hieroglyphs*. It is a very good system
of writing and was used in Egypt for almost four thousand years. (1)This means that
Unit 7
| 423 words / 中央大
- Language -
hieroglyphs were being read and written for longer than the Roman alphabet has been. Th.
only stopped being used when Egypt became a Christian country and its people stopper
5 worshipping the Egyptian gods.
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Centuries later, people were puzzled about how to read hieroglyphs. They thought that the
hieroglyphs must be pictures of ideas and things and not an alphabet. There were about 750
gyptian civilization.
hieroglyphic* symbols in use during most of the period of the ancient
This is far fewer than the 85,568 Chinese characters contained in the 1994 Zhonghua Zihai
10 Chinese dictionary. So, 750 hieroglyphs would seem to be too few to be pictures of all the things
that humans need to describe; but, at the same time, far too many to be an alphabet - English
only requires 26 letters to make all its words.
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The answer is that hieroglyphs are ( 2a ) an alphabet ( 2b ) a system of pictures. It is as if
Japanese hiragana and kanji were combined in one system. The basic Egyptian alphabet consists
15 of twenty-four letters. Vowels* were not written. If this is done in English, it looks like this:
(3)Ths hs n vwls'. This may seem difficult to read in a foreign language, but for native speakers,
it is fairly easy (most people who send text messages between mobile phones take out vowels to
make the words shorter).
In many ways, the Egyptian hieroglyphs are surprisingly similar to Japanese. Both systems
20 can be written in either vertical or horizontal lines and they can also be written either from right
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to left or left to right. With hieroglyphs, (4)it is easy to tell whether they should be read from the
right or left because many of them can be turned to face the direction they should be read from.
Hieroglyphs, like Japanese kanji, were a form of art. Also like kanji, there are no ( 5a ) between
the words - which are so helpful for understanding English. (5b)IfwemissoutthespacesinEnglish,
25 itisratherdifficulttoread! Some words were written using the alphabet, some with just one
hieroglyph. (6YSun', for example, was written with two circles, one inside the other. Aswith
Japanese, it also means 'day'.
[5 Hieroglyphs look to most people like an impossibly difficult system tounderstand. In
truth, they are one of the most practical and beautiful writing systems ever created, combining
30 the advantages of kanji with the advantages of an alphabet system.
hieroglyph:ヒエログリフ(古代エジブトの聖刻文字)
hieroglyphic: ヒエログリフの
vowel:母音
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