As part of the system of Egyptian hieroglyphs, some hieroglyphs served as phonograms representing one, two, or three consonants, used purely for their consonantal values. This use as phonograms contrasts with use as logograms, where hieroglyphs represent an entire word depicted by the image of the hieroglyph itself that may also have the same one, two, or three consonants.[1][2]
The following is a list of hieroglyphs used as phonographs with triconsonantal phonetic values. These forms and their values are from Allen (2014), unless otherwise indicated.[A]
Triliteral signs could be used by themselves to indicate the consonant sequence they represent, or they could more often be written along with phonetic complements, that is, they could appear with uniliteral signs that represent part of their value.[2][39] Some examples of triliterals with phonetic complementation appear in the table below.
Examples of phonetic complementation with triliterals[40]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.