日本語訳を! 4-(2)
お願いします。
At first the pictures stood for the real thing. A picture of the sun meant "the sun." As you can imagine, being able to write about only objects is limiting. How would you write the word "hot"? There is no object named "hot." So the pictures began to stand for ideas related to the object. A picture of the sun might mean light, or day, or―hot. It wasn't long before this was limiting, too. How would you write the word "belief"? What object could you draw that is related to the word belief? But if the objects could also represent a sound, then you could write "belief" as a picture of a bee followed by the picture of a leaf and the reader would be able to figure it out. (This example is an English word. The word for belief in Egyptian would be different, of course.)
It wasn't long before there were hundreds of symbols. Reading them was as complicated as writing them because Egyptian writers, called scribes, sometimes wrote right to left, sometimes left to right, and sometimes top to bottom (but never bottom to top). The only clue to which direction you should be reading the inscription was the way the animals and people faced. You read toward the faces.
There was no punctuation. There were no periods or question marks so that the reader would know where one sentence ended and the next began. Not even a space between words helped to make the meaning clear. And if that doesn't complicate things enough, the fact that vowels were not used does. Imagine not being able to write a vowel, or should we write mgnntbngllwdtwrtvwl, or worse yet, lwvtrwtdwllgnbtnngm?
