Hieroglyphics convertor

[der_kluge]

Saw this today, and thought some people might enjoy it, or use it for their game:

http://media.kids.discovery.com/fan...active/hierogenerator.html?ct=5015.6382734804

It converts words into hieroglyphs.

 

[ghettognome]

I found this earlier today linked off of MSN, it amused me for a long while.

 

[Asmor]

I find it annoying that all it's really doing is applying a wing dings font to the text you type in. I mean, granted, I'm no Egyptologist (probably not a word, but it should be), but I seriously doubt that not only did they have a system of 26 pictograms that correspond exactly with our alphabet, but they even spelled the words the same as we do.

 

[Samothdm]

I find it annoying that all it's really doing is applying a wing dings font to the text you type in. I mean, granted, I'm no Egyptologist (probably not a word, but it should be), but I seriously doubt that not only did they have a system of 26 pictograms that correspond exactly with our alphabet, but they even spelled the words the same as we do.

Exactly. I mean, it's fun to have all the symbols and such, but it's not really translating it into actual ancient Egyptian. A few years ago, my mom gave me this thing that she ordered that claimed to translate a name into Egyptian hieroglyphics (I used to be a huge Egypt geek ever since I saw this program back in the 1970s about King Tut). Anyway, she gave it to me and told me what it was. I had assumed that they had taken the actual translation of my name (which loosely translates are "warrior") and then used the hieroglyphic representation for that word. Instead, it did exactly what the Discovery Kids site is doing.

If you want to use hieroglyphics in your game, there are bunch of good books on the topic. But, sense your players will never know the difference, it's probably just easier to use a site like the one above.

 

[der_kluge]

I didn't realize that that's what it was doing.

It would be just as easy to turn on wing-dings and just type what you wanted into Word if that were the case. How silly.

Yes, Egyptologist is a real word.

Ancient Hieroglyphics are based on phonetic sounds. It's why on some Egyptology programs, they'll often mention that the way we pronounce the names of pharoahs and locations may not be the correct way since the ancient language didn't include vowel sounds. So, my name is Curtis, but it would be written as CRTS, and they leave it to the imagination to figure out how to pronounce it. So, something like Imhotep would be written like MHTP (essentially), so we kind of have to guess.

But these consonant sounds are based on symbols like the above has. So, they have to read the symbol, translate it into a phonetical sound, and then guess as to the actual vowels in-between.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Exactly. I mean, it's fun to have all the symbols and such, but it's not really translating it into actual ancient Egyptian. A few years ago, my mom gave me this thing that she ordered that claimed to translate a name into Egyptian hieroglyphics (I used to be a huge Egypt geek every sense I saw this program back in the 1970s about King Tut). Anyway, she gave it to me and told me what it was. I had assumed that they had taken the actual translation of my name (which loosely translates are "warrior") and then used the hieroglyphic representation for that word. Instead, it did exactly what the Discovery Kids site is doing.

If you want to use hieroglyphics in your game, there are bunch of good books on the topic. But, sense your players will never know the difference, it's probably just easier to use a site like the one above.

But its a nice little thing to use...especially if PCs aren't Egyptologists!

 

[Aaron2]

If you want to use hieroglyphics in your game, there are bunch of good books on the topic. But, sense your players will never know the difference, it's probably just easier to use a site like the one above.

You know of any good hieroglyphics fonts? I couldn't extract one from that web page (my web-fu is poor).


Aaron

 

[Samothdm]

You know of any good hieroglyphics fonts? I couldn't extract one from that web page (my web-fu is poor).


Aaron

Unfortunately, no. I haven't actually ever looked for hieroglyph fonts before.

I have a pretty cool book at home called "Reading Egyptian Art" (I think that's what it's called) that delves into how Egyptian art was very related to their hieroglyphs and walks you through how to "read" an Egyptian artwork based on the symbols included. It's really interesting.