I have been reading for hours and hours about Middle Egyptian, the language used by the Egyptians during the Middle Kingdom between 2055 1650 BC, and I feel like I have gotten nowhere. So many my searches seem to be contradicting each other:

• Some say that only 700 of the 6000 hieroglyphs attest for Middle Egyptian (source).
• "Although over 6000 hieroglyphs have been documented, only about 700 are attested for Middle Egyptian"
• However, others say that Middle Egyptian was the most commonly used form
• "[Middle Egyptian] is usually the first and most used form" (source).
• While others say that The Middle Egyptian language wasn't hieroglyphics at all!!!
• "it is frequently (incorrectly) referred to simply as 'Hieroglyphics'" (source).

What am I supposed to believe?! I am feeling frustrated that I am finding so little knowledge of the written and oral aspects of this specific language. I obviously need to give some people credit in the fact that this was thousands of years ago, and perhaps I am misunderstanding my research, but man I wish that the history of this language was a little more clear! Also, it doesn't help that so many of these articles and books that I am attempting to read are referring to terms that are going completely over my head! I've tried looking these terms up, but gave up after a two hour Wikipedia scavenger hunt. Anyways, basically all that I have found is that Middle Egyptian was the "classical form," and the third out of the six stages existent in Egyptian history.

There is such a fine line differentiating between the oral and the written language. I mean, these languages were around thousands of years ago, so how are we supposed to know anything about the oral (which is completely abstract and theoretical) until we have the written--which came who knows how long afterwards?!  I guess what I am trying to say is, we don't know when these oral languages began to take place. We have no idea what they sounded like. We have no idea if their intonations changed the meaning of their words. We have no idea how complex or simple it was. Even through the written language came about and evolved through a series of changes in their hieroglyphics, we STILL do not know what their oral language was like. We can assume, but we just don't know!!! 

Phewf! That felt good. So, now that I have put in my ten cents about this, I will continue to elaborate on the transfer from the oral to the written language, which I feel is tightly knit, and here's why:

• The Egyptian hieroglyphics is written in two different classes of signs:
• Logograms - a symbol representing a word (not a letter)
• Phonograms - Putting logograms together to phonetically sound out a word.
• Example (for English): If you want to write the word "belief," then you would draw a picture of a bee and a leaf, and when you put together the sounds, it sounds like "belief."

(If I understand correctly, the Mayan did this as well)

• Also, 3 main categories of phonograms are:
• uniconsonantal hieroglyphs : 26 (including variants) - they represent a single consonant and are the most important group of phonograms ;
• biconsonantal hieroglyphs : a pair of successive consonants (ca. 100) ;
• triconsonantal hieroglyphs : three successive consonants (ca. 50)." 
  
  • Biconsonantal and Triconsonantal hieroglyphs "are often accompanied by uniconsonantal hieroglyphs which...repeat their phonemic value...to make sure that the complemented hieroglyph was indeed a phonogram and not a logogram and/or to have some extra calligraphic freedom in case a gap needed to be filled.." 
  • ***All this information above came from this source***

Interesting huh? In this way, the phonetic, thus the oral language greatly impacted the written language. If you knew what words these hieroglyphics represent sound like, perhaps you could uncover the mystery of what it sounded like orally--and maybe they already have. (I just haven't found any information on this yet). However, I just emailed an professor here at BYU who studies Egyptian, and am hoping he will be able to teach me more. (Because for me, oral teaching is usually MUCH more beneficial than trying to understand things when they are written).

 

The Rosetta Stone (something that I would like to 

speak more about, once I learn a little more about

Egyptian history)

Until next time... :)