The Ancient Egyptian language has always been considered to be a branch of the African-Asiatic family of languages (speak ancient Egyptian) called Afro-Asiatic which spans Africa and Western Asia.

It should also be pointed out that the Ancient Egyptians rarely wrote words using only uniliteral signs. This is the reason why the unilateral signs cannot be considered as an alphabet, for the word “alphabet” implies that each sign represents either one consonant or one vowel and that words are written using only these signs.

The Egyptians used a mixture of signs to get their meanings across in writing. They did not just use an alphabet like we do, but they used signs that were combinations of sounds.

The Egyptians used:

Unilateral (alphabetic) signs of one consonant (r )

Bilateral signs of two continents (m+n )

Trilateral signs of three consonants (n+f+r )

Gardiner gives the Ancient Egyptian word for ‘be healthy’ as Snb. Sir Alan relates this word to the Arabic word Salima, which contains the skeletal consonants Slm and uses this word as the equivalent word for the Ancient Egyptian word.

The noun hatua means, time, moment or a period of time. It is interesting to observe that the Kiswahili-Bantu word hatua matches the Ancient Egyptian word in sound and meaning, Ancient Egyptian: hat moment, time.

Since vowels were not usually written, two signs could be pronounced in a range of different ways. For example, (ws) could sound like was Wes, Eews, Awsa, etc. The way that is normally used (according to the ‘Egyptian Grammar’ book), is to use an e, except where the glottal stop () and the guttural sound () occur; these translate to a.

But remember – it is unknown how the words were actually said – we don’t know where the vowels were placed!

Bilateral and triliteral words are written, except for when they are near similarly pronounced unilateral. For instance, is consonantal y-mn, not consonantal y-mn-n.

However, it is difficult to learn how to speak ancient Egyptian. First of all, this language has been dead for some 1500 years already. Secondly, the Ancient Egyptians did not write any vowels, just consonants, so we do not know what their language sounded like. In addition, their language is bound to have evolved a lot in its more than 3000 years long recorded history.

It is unlikely that an Egyptian from 3000 BC would have understood an Egyptian from 300 BC. There are also bound to have been regional differences in the pronunciation, a bit like dialects. An ancient Egyptian living in Memphis might have had a hard time trying to talk to someone coming from Elephantine.