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It should be emphasised that Transliteration is not the same as Transcription . Transcription seeks to reproduce the ''pronunciation'' of a text. For example, the name of the founder of the Twenty-second Dynasty is transliterated as ''ššnq'' but transcribed '' Shoshenq '' in English, ''Chéchanq'' in French, ''Sjesjonk'' in Dutch, and ''Scheschonq'' in German. Because the exact details regarding the Phonetics of ancient Egyptian are not completely known, most transcriptions are only theoretical in nature. Egyptologists , therefore, rely on transliteration in scientific publications. STANDARDS As important as transliteration is to the field of Egyptology , there is no one single standard scheme in use for hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Some might even argue that there are as many systems of transliteration as there are Egyptologists. However, there are a few closely related systems that can be regarded as conventional. Many non-German-speaking Egyptologists use the system described in Gardiner 1954, whereas many German-speaking scholars tend to opt for that used in the ''Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache'' (Erman and Grapow 1926–1953), the standard dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language. However, there is a growing trend, even among English-speaking scholars, to adopt a modified version of the method used in the ''Wörterbuch'' (e.g., Allen 2000). Although these conventional approaches to transliteration have been followed since most of the second half of the Nineteenth century to the present day, there have been some attempts to adopt a modified system that seeks to utilise the International Phonetic Alphabet to a certain degree. The most successful of these is that developed by Wolfgang Schenkel (1990), and it is being used fairly widely in Germany and other German-speaking countries. More recent is a proposal by Thomas Schneider (2003) that is even closer to the IPA, but its usage is not presently common. The major criticism levelled against both of these systems is that they give an impression of being much more scientifically accurate with regard to the pronunciation of Egyptian. Unfortunately this perceived accuracy is debatable. Moreover, the systems reflect only the theoretical pronunciation of Middle Egyptian and not the older and later phases of the language, which are themselves to be transliterated with the same system. ELECTRONIC TRANSLITERATION In 1984 a standard, ASCII -based transliteration system was proposed by an international group of Egyptologists at the first ''Table ronde informatique et égyptologie'' and published in 1988 (see Buurman, Grimal, ''et al.'', 1988). This has come to be known as the ''Manuel de codage'' (or MdC) system, based on the title of the publication, ''Inventaire des signes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie informatique: Manuel de codage des textes hiéroglyphiques en vue de leur saisie sur ordinateur''. It is widely used in e-mail discussion lists and internet forums catering to professional Egyptologists and the interested public. Although the ''Manuel de codage'' system allows for simple "alphabetic" transliterations, it also specifies a complex method for electronically encoding complete ancient Egyptian texts, indicating features such as the placement, orientation, and even size of individual hieroglyphs. This system is used (though frequently with modifications) by various software packages developed for typesetting hieroglyphic texts (such as WinGlyph, MacScribe, InScribe, Glyphotext, , and others). Unicode Advances in the Unicode standard have made it possible to almost fully transliterate Egyptian texts completely using a relatively complete Unicode Font , without having to revert to a special transliteration font (as was often done in the past). The table of various transliteration schemes found below, for example, uses Unicode. There are, however, three characters that are not included in the Unicode 4.0 specification, but have been proposed for Unicode 4.1. These are the so-called Egyptian ''alef'' (represented here as <3>), ''yodh'' (represented here as <ỉ> Unicode U+1EC9), and ''ayin'' (represented here as <ˁ> Unicode U+02C1). DEMOTIC As the latest stage of pre- Coptic Egyptian , Demotic texts have long been transliterated using the same system(s) used for hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. However in 1980, Demotist s adopted a single, uniform, international standard based on the traditional system used for hieroglyphic, but with the addition of some extra symbols for vowels (which ''are'' frequently indicated in Demotic) and other letters that were written in the Demotic script. The ''Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago'' (or CDD ) utilises this method. As this system is likely only of interest to specialists, for details see the references below.
TABLE OF CONVENTIONAL TRANSLITERATION SCHEMES SAMPLES OF VARIOUS TRANSLITERATION SCHEMES The following text (rendered using ) is transliterated below in some of the more common schemes.
(This text is conventionally translated into English as "an offering that the king gives; and Osiris , Foremost of Westerners the Dead , the Great God, Lord of Abydos ; and Wepwawet , Lord of the Sacred Land the Necropolis ." It can also be translated "a royal offering of Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, the Great God, Lord of Abydos; and of Wepwawet, Lord of the Sacred Land" 2000:§24.10 .) Erman & Grapow 1926–1953
Gardiner 1953
Buurman, Grimal, ''et al.'' 1988
A fully encoded, machine-readable version of the same text is:
Schenkel 1991
Allen 2000
Schneider 2003
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