Dr. Ilona Regulski

Yes.

So the trick is, was and still is, to understand that it's not an alphabetic script.

So this was for the scholars of the early 18th and 19th century texts.

even though they had a Rosetta Stone, they were mostly familiar with Arabic scripts.

Even scholars that were experts in oriental languages, those oriental languages were usually alphabetic.

So the idea that you have a writing system that is partly alphabetic, it has a few alphabetic signs, but it has all these other signs, and it has signs that you should read and you should not read, this was really difficult to discover.

So basically we prefer to speak about one letter signs rather than alphabetic signs because you also have two and three letter signs.

You have signs that are entire words and you have signs that you should not read but they indicate the meaning of something.

We call them classifiers or determinatives.

So, for example, the words for book or the verb to write or the person who writes, they all have the same root.

And there is the classifier that will tell you whether you should read it as book or scribe or writing.

So it's a hybrid system.

It's a mix of many different kinds of signs.

At the peak of classical literature, we have about 650 signs.

Yes.

Yes, so the cartouche is basically an oval.

It's an elongated shen ring.

So it's a ring that is an eternal ring.

It's shen also, the word means it's a circular movement that continues.

It's the idea of the continuation of something.