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by goodlifeodyssey
1591 days ago
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I agree, any connection between the Egyptian "foot" hieroglyph and the lower case "b" seems irrelevant, but it seems that the Phoenician letter bet looks kind of like the Egyptian "foot" too, so perhaps that's where the connection lies. The Wikipedia article for "b" seems to list both the "foot" and the "house" hieroglyphs in the development on the sidebar... not that Wikipedia is always correct. I think the professor in that video is quite well known and has written several books on Egyptology, so I doubt he would be completely off base on something so basic. In any event, you're absolutely right that there the house hieroglyphs is related. I was wrong to question that. But it seems that the "foot" hieroglyph maybe has some relation too. If you find anything more about this, I'd be curious to hear what it is. |
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"The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨ Leg glyph ⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨ Bet ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ Per ⟩ meaning "house"."
It doesn't seem from this that they are claiming that B comes from the leg glyph. so it's very strange they put it in the side-bar, if it's etymologically unrelated.
Also, if you look at the Aleph article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph, they have a sub-section with some Hieroglyphs that are pronounced as aleph, without mentioning any historical connection, which seems very strange. The rest of the article talks about letters that are historically related, so why bring up the vulture glyph? In the article for a they don't show the vulture though, only the ox.
I think part of the reason people say things like this is that they are so strongly inclined to see writing systems as alphabets, so they just have to find "the letter b in Egyptian", even though that makes no sense at all. Egyptian didn't have a letter b, they had a number of glyphs that represented 1, 2 or 3 consonants.
Btw I'm sure the professor knows his Egyptology, so the preceding wasn't referring to him, but maybe he didn't study the origin of the Semitic writing systems. That's not really Egyptology.