c o l u m b i n a

"by her keen and active wit, she [ is ] able to hold her own in every situation and emerge with ease and dignity from the most involved intrigues." ~ Duchartre

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

beware of the vile word generator

Now I realize that understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics is a bit of a job, especially if you've never been instructed in it (and for that matter, EVEN if you're instructed in it). I don't admit to being a super-epigrapher, but I have, you know, actually translated things and know the limited version of the Egyptian alphabet. Owing to the ancient's lack of vowels, not to mention their lack and over-abundance of certain consonants, no doubt it is hard to create something that generates words from English, which is in no way a Semetic language, in a matter of seconds. Yet, they try, don't they?

Do not go to this site expecting an accurate rendering of your name or whatever word you'd like to see written in glyphs. For example, I entered "chris" which should have been easy. (Break it down phoentically- kris- the k sound is a small basket, the r is an open mouth symbol, the i loosely interpreted is the single reed leaf, and the "tall s" sign which is a folded bolt of cloth.) Instead of that, I received a hodge-podge of glyphs which would be pronouced: senedge-hirepes.

From what I can tell, they've mis-appropriated the "p" glyph as the way to show the vowel "i" since they swapped the reed leaf to portray "e", are using only the bolt "s", and somehow have replaced the real "r" glyph with the eye. Such utter crap.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home