3. eli5: I don't understand why hieroglyphics a lost language. Egypt was the bigges...

eli5: I don't understand why hieroglyphics a lost language. Egypt was the biggest civilization of its time and there is no translation other than the Rosetta stone? Why?

oh that's interesting from a linguistic side of things and I think about this often. Hieroglyphics don't represent a phonetic alphabet.

Even within existing languages you have very complex differences in meaning regarding adjectives and object of the sentence.. Not to mention idioms and colloquial expressions. Hieroglyphics is/was totally antithetical to modern verbiage. It wasn't really meant for everyone to understand nuance. It was meant for a limited number in the elite who (by word of mouth) new exactly what it meant and for people who could gather the gist of it to be distributed publicly.

Closer to a royal wax seal on an envelope than a carefully penned letter

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