Asked by Anonymous:
“this topic is pretty interesting. so there's no way to build new words in ancient egyptian?”
No there isn’t.
You can’t force culturally inappropriate words into a dead language. It’s dead. There are no new words to be had because there are no speakers of the language left. Hieroglyphs don’t work by just throwing random 1-consonant signs you think sound right together. Especially since 2, 3, and 4 consonant signs exist. We haven’t even got to the stage of determinatives and what they represent in a word; metaphorically or otherwise. Beyond that, Egyptian names actually mean something in Egyptian. Each group of signs that form a word in Egyptian were carefully selected in order to convey the right meaning. If you’re shoehorning in a modern name into a language that cannot comprehend it then you’re just going to get meaningless drivel that is incomprehensible in either language. In this sense it wouldn’t be written in hieroglyphs, just random signs.
You’d have to know the meaning of a modern name (Mark means warlike ferinstance), which would then have to be translated into Egyptian. The common modern ‘cartouche’ thing - “Your name in hieroglyphics!” - is silly. 1st of all, “hieroglyphIC” means “similar to or pertaining to Egyptian hieroglyphs.” “Hieroglyphics” are signs from a real or fictional language which involve images, making them similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs only in a very shallow sense. 2nd, simply spelling your name using a small group of hieroglyphs is meaningless. Spelling Mark using hieroglyphs which approximate our letters M, A, R, and K is nonsense compared to using the real language to learn how to write “warlike” or “warlike man,” and creating something which could make sense as an Egyptian name. A PITA example is the name Christine. How the hell could you translate “Christ-like” into a language which existed long before Christ?! [Ed. Note: B.C.E. stands for Before (the) Common Era, not Before Christ Existed XD] 3rd, only royal names (and those of a few deities) were written using cartouches, so if you ain’t royalty nor a deity, you look like a douche w/yr name in a cartouche. XD