General Info

Introduction

I wrote this HieroflashCard application to aid those who are studying Middle Egyptian.
I myself became interested in this ancient language through my fascination with the history of the ancient East, and of Egypt in particular.
The application has two functions, one to help students memorize the uniliteral signs, and the other for consulting and searching the biliteral signs during study and translation.
Most signs, (though not all) have an accompanying audio file with the conventional pronunciation for the sign.
My thought was that people who are studying Middle Egyptian with only a textbook, outside of an academic setting, and without an instructor to guide them, would especially value the audio component of the program.
Learning to pronounce the signs from only a textbook can be difficult, even more so if one considers that most textbooks are written in English, and for non-English speakers it is not always easy to understand and apply English instructions for pronuciation.
The audio files are courtesy of Stephen Quirke at UCL, (University College London) who has generously consented to their use here, and aim to to reproduce conventional academic pronunciation, and not to recreate the ancient Egyptian pronunciation of the consonants.
For the purposes of memorization, it is helpful to associate a sound with the transliterated consonants, and the audio files are intended for this purpose.
I really enjoyed writing this program, and it has helped me in my studies, and so I hope it will also help others, who like me, have decided to engage this ancient language.

"Once the hieroglyphic duck bites, it doesn't let go."
---Egyptologist, Emmanuel de Rouge (1811-72)

Michele Moglia

The program is coded in C language for a GNU/Linux system with GNOME2 desktop suite , it requires fonts for hieroglyph signs and transliterated consonants. The program sources, binary package, fonts and everything necessary are available in the download section.

This program is distributed under GNU General Public License
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.

This program was written as my contribution to AEL's Middle Egyptian Study Group and its subsidiary GlyphStudy Group, so I want to thanks the coordinator of the study group Karen McCollam for her initiative, Mark Wilson, the moderator of AEL for his wonderful list, and all the members of the lists AEL and GlyphStudy for their willingness to answer all our questions, even the most basic.

AEL Ancient Egyptian Language Discussion List
AEL's Middle Egyptian Study Group subsidiary list GlyphStudy

I want to thank Stephen Quirke webmaster of Digital Egypt for Universities site, for letting me use and insert their audio files in this program.

Digital Egypt for Universities
A learning and teaching resource developed in University College London
at Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)
for Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
founded by Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)