Still without peer, and still in print, is Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar. A new grammar of similar quality, with vocabulary, James E. Hoch's Middle Egyptian Grammar [ISBN 0-920168-12-4], although "not entirely finished" and provided only in spiral binding, has now become available, either from Benben Publications (1483 Carmen Drive, Mississauga, Ontario L5G 3Z2, Canada) or from James Hoch himself. I have also just obtained A Late Egyptian Grammar, produced postumously from the materials of the great Egyptologist Jaroslav Cernư by Sarah Israelit Groll and Christopher Eyre [Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, Roma, 1993]. This treatment looks grammatically thorough, exhaustive, and exhausting, but doesn't have a vocabulary list. A vast graphic type font set for Egyptian and the hieroglyphic text processing programs "Glyph for Windows" and "MacScribe" are available on line at The Extended Library. The font set itself, which uses the same classification system as Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, can be accessed at Hieroglyphica (Publications Interuniversitaires de Recherches Egyptologiques Informatisees, edited by Nicolas Grimal, Jochen Hallof, Dirk van der Plas, Utrecht, Paris 1993). The following table presents and discusses the alphabetic hieroglyphic signs in the order of phonetic type used by scholars. A number of the sounds do not exist in languages like English but still do exist in Arabic, which is distantly related to Egyptian: So Egyptians today can still vocalize sounds from the ancient language that otherwise would be unpronounceable in other modern languages. When I visited Egypt, Egyptian guides who could read hieroglyphics appeared to enjoy using the sounds that they could pronounce but that many European tourists had never heard before. Terms for the sounds are those used in the Phonetic Symbol Guide, by Geoffrey K. Pullum and Willian A. Ladusaw [University of Chicago Press, 1986]. The discussion of the glyphs is mainly based on Gardiner. A recent technical discussion of Egyptian phonology (and grammar) may be found in Ancient Egyptian, A linguistic introduction, by Antonio Loprieno [Cambridge University Press, 1995]. Note that audio files may take some time to load. Hieroglyphs! A guide and web directory to Egyptian hieroglyphs Index of Egyptian History Egyptian Royal Tombs of the New Kingdom Attributes of Mythic/Mythopoeic Thought Philosophy of History Home Page Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved