Question inspired by the image (see attached)
There’s an entire code block for hieroglyphs in Unicode. https://symbl.cc/en/unicode/blocks/egyptian-hieroglyphs/
Amusingly penis features in a few of them. https://symbl.cc/en/130B8/
𓉘
𓉘 𓉛
𓉘 𓉝
𓉘 𓉐
Ah god damnit
Specifically in the “D parts of the human body” section?! Is there a “V parts…” section as well?
Here is a breast 𓂑
And here an anime titi 𓂒
Anyway, D its for the section, not everything are Ds
Hieroglyphs are actually not that simple, my ex gf was an Egyptologist, I went to quite a few lectures with her, that was a highly complex language, more akin to Japanese Kanji, with deep layered subtexts. Those desert dudes were crazy. If you have ever have a chance to visit a lecture about hieroglyphs, do it, it’ll blow your mind. Or how they calculated time, or even saw it, culturally and individually, wow. They were so unbelievably far ahead, I sometimes compare them to the octopus of human development, they should rule the world, but there was that one thing, that prevented it. (For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of seeing modern societies as more advanced. There’s no reason to think they weren’t just as intelligent and resourceful as we are today. They just lived a long time ago. If history can teach us one thing, it’s that nobody rules the world forever, as advanced a civilization can be.
Prior to collapsing, Rome achieved a sustained population in excess of a million people.
This did not occur again anywhere else until the mid 1800s.
(For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
Thank you for sending me down that rabbit hole, it was a really interesting read, and I learned something new today.
From an article on the subject…
Octopuses are serious cannibals, so a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.
They also can grow pretty much indefinitely, so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive, cranky, octopuses.
What held the Egyptians back?
Probably the bronze age collapse, quite a scary event that extinguished trade routes and literacy.
fuckin woke Egyptians were influenced by them aliens making the pyramids 🫃
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Meanwhile in China they never stopped using hieroglyphics (cries while loading up more 中文 Duolingo and Lingodeer)
🐟=🍆
👁️🐦🌊☀️
Eyebirdwavesun?
How dare you call me that.
Writing isn’t language, otherwise the thousands of unwritten languages wouldn’t be considered languages.
Idk. I think they can all fall under language, because they’re all a form of communication. Like sign language, or body language
That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Defining language as “a system of communication” is not very useful, since there are important defining characteristics most people, and especially most linguists, believe that language possesses that other more general forms of communication do not.
Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.
Sign language is language, since it has a systematic, unconscious mental grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.
Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).
I think its more like writing is language, but language isn’t necessarily writing.
Writing isn’t language at all, for reasons discussed in my comments below.
Which is part of what makes linguistics work on ancient languages so difficult - we’re having to use these imperfect symbols, which themselves aren’t language, to try to glean as many features about the actual grammars they’re intended to represent, which are language.
This is why we know much less about ancient languages than we do modern ones - because we have actual recordings of modern languages (the recordings themselves are also not language, of course; they just encode language much better than writing does), so we can get at many more features of the language in question.
Of course this isn’t comparable - hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.
But the post is funny and it hints at something important. Expressions to co vey emotion are incredibly important to human beings. It’s a language that our bodies are physically built for: our faces are far more changeable and expressive than other animals, and this supported the social bonds and cooperation that put us on top of the world. I’m not saying that across all cultures, one given facial expression means the same thing, but certainly all cultures have a vivid, silent language of facial expressions that is so deeply rooted, we barely think about it.
hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.
Emoji don’t only depict emotions…
Ok. Write the statement you just make using only Emojis.
💐🌹🥀🌺🌷🪷🌸💮🏵️⛰️🏔️🌀🌪️⚡🫧🦁🐯🐱🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌍🌎🌏🦖🐉🦎🦥🫏🐢🐃🐈🍓🍉🍑🍒🍊🫚🥕🍠🧅🥣🫕🥗🍲🥫🍛🧁🍭🍬🍩🍩🍪🥧🍼🍾🛑⚓🚧🛟🧭⛽🛢️🛴🚦🦽🩼🚲🚗🚓🛻🚋🚞🛳️🛬🛩️🛝🎠🗿🗽⚽🥎🥇🥈🥉🥋🎮🪀🕹️🀄🎰💿📀💾💷💵💶💴💳🛒👔👘🎽🥻🥼⛑️👑💎🌂💄👡🦯👢🧪💊🧰🗜️🔩🪚⛏️📄📂📋📑📓📉📇📦✂️🕕🕦📆⚔️🛡️🔏🔑🔐🚬⚰️🪦🚯📵📳
