A probabilistic model of Ancient Egyptian writing

This article offers a formalization of how signs form words in Ancient Egyptian writing, for either hieroglyphic or hieratic texts. The formalization is in terms of a sequence of sign functions, which concurrently produce a sequence of signs and a sequence of phonemes. By involving a class of probabilistic automata, we can define the most likely sequence of sign functions that relates a given sequence of signs to a given sequence of phonemes. Experiments with two texts are discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

OCR of handwritten transcriptions of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text *

Abstract Encoding hieroglyphic texts is time-consuming. If a text already exists as hand-written transcription, there is an alternative, namely OCR. Off-the-shelf OCR systems seem difficult to adapt to the peculiarities of Ancient Egyptian. Presented is a proof-of-concept tool that was designed to digitize texts of Urkunden IV in the hand-writing of Kurt Sethe. It automatically recognizes signs and produces a normalized encoding, suitable for storage in a database, or for printing on a screen or on paper, requiring little manual correction. The encoding of hieroglyphic text is RES (Revised Encoding Scheme) rather than (common dialects of) MdC (Manuel de Codage). Earlier papers argued against MdC and in favour of RES for corpus development. Arguments in favour of RES include longevity of the encoding, as its semantics are font-independent. The present study provides evidence that RES is also much preferable to MdC in the context of OCR. With a well-understood parsing technique, relative positioning of scanned signs can be straightforwardly mapped to suitable primitives of the encoding

The Functions and Toposyntax of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

L’objectif de cet article est de fournir une description sémiotiquement informée des fonctions et de la syntaxe des hiéroglyphes égyptiens. Une première partie est consacrée à une présentation des principes généraux du système d’écriture hiéroglyphique (Section 1). Dans la deuxième section, la variété des fonctions glossiques remplies par les graphèmes de cette écriture est examinée, et une attention particulière est portée à la relation entre signe graphémique et signe visuel. La toposyntaxe des inscriptions monumentales est étudiée dans les parties suivantes, ce qui comprend : l’organisation spatiale des graphèmes au sein de la ligne d’écriture (Section 3) et l’orientation linéaire des hiéroglyphes (Section 4). La dernière partie est consacrée à des suggestions pratiques en ce qui concerne l’encodage des hiéroglyphes égyptiens dans Unicode (Section 5).The goal of this paper is to provide a semiotically-informed description of the functions and syntax of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Section 1 provides background information about the hieroglyphic writing system. The variety of functions fulfilled by its graphemes is discussed in Section 2, with a special attention to the relationships between graphemic and visual signs. In the next sections, the principles that underlie the syntagmatic organization of the hieroglyphs in monumental inscriptions are investigated, which includes both the spatial arrangements of the signs within a line (Section 3), and the orientations of the texts (Section 4). Based on this semiotic account, practical suggestions regarding the encoding of hieroglyphs in Unicode are made (Section 5)

A probabilistic model of Ancient Egyptian writing

This article investigates a probabilistic model to describe how signs form words in Ancient Egyptian writing. This applies to both hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. The model uses an intermediate layer of sign functions. Experiments are concerned with finding the most likely sequence of sign functions that relates a given sequence of signs and a given sequence of phonemes.Postprin