People keep commenting along the lines of 'why does a penis hieroglyph even need to exist?' and I'm gonna tell you now...it crops up a lot:
No, really, it crops up a lot:
These are only a small selection of words it can turn up in. Hieroglyphs aren't emojis. They have consonantal (sound) values, so if that sound is needed, or the sign is the correct visual metaphor, then the sign will be used. This is why the dick hieroglyph will show up in the word dick, and also in the word for 'to be correct'.
Okay, so... what sound does the penis make??
The sign known as D52, in Gardiner's sign list, has the consonantal value that transliterates (the code we use to translate Hieroglyphs) as 'mt', which is why most of the words above contain 'mt' in some shape or form. The one's where it doesn't is where it's implying 'male' or in the case of donkey...well if you've been around horses and donkeys you'll know. Thing is, with Ancient Egyptian, we can't really fully reconstruct how it sounded because it's a dead language. So we have to piece together varying bits of information. I can say 'oh it's pronounced 'met'' but it's not fully accurate. That's just how Egyptologists verbalise this particular set of consonants.
Is there any way I can retweet @ebonykain's reply without context?
But more delightfully, this means…
sorry but i just cant get over the fact that the words for "semen" and "gift" are... the same word......
They're not, really. Hieroglyphs, like Hebrew letters, only represent consonants. These words have the same root (which sort of makes some sense if you view pregnancy as a gift from the gods), but at a minimum they have different vowels. And for all we know, Ancient Egyptian might have been a tonal language like Chinese.
No, they are. The Egyptians use words like these in puns a hell of a lot, which means not only do they look the same but they also must sound pretty similar. It's like donkey (aA) and great (aA) which are also used as puns.
For everyone else: It's also not semen and gift, it's semen and poison. The original dictionary is in German and google translate screws you over with translating the German for poison as gift because they're related words.
Reposted from
merelygifted