NOTES ON ANCIENT EGYPTIAN:
- It's phonetic.
- It's closer to a semitic language, so the phonemes (and
alphabet) don't match English sometimes. The translation is as
close as possible and consistent - but necessarily an
interpretation.
- There are mostly uniliterals, plus some biliterals (one symbol
representing multiple sounds/letters).
- As far as references go, there are many on the web -- and
often they conflict with each other and are almost always
incomplete. Different references also use different English
letters to represent the hieroglyph sounds. Unfortunately, a site
that many go to first, omniglot,
is not one of the better ones, in fact, it's pretty bad in my
opinion. It's incomplete, unclear, and has terrible
representations (pictures) of both the glyphs and the IPA phonemes
they represent.
- Books are better references. I recommend "Illustrated
Hieroglyphics Handbook" by Ruth Schumann-Antelme and Stephane
Rossini.
SOLUTION:
Find the governors of the 50 states in the US.
Single circled letters are the remainders.
SOLUTION GRID NOTES:
Notes on the notation in the puzzle solution grid. Since Egyptian
has many more letters than English, and not all the same ones, I
reused some letters Egyptian doesn't use for other sounds, and used
some symbols where needed. What follow is some notes on what each
symbol represents.
- Governor Wise appears as 'wiz' in the solution, rather than
'uiz'. It was corrected in the puzzle before release.
- 'u' is used for "u/w" (and "v")
- 'y' is used for "ee" ⇒ I used for final "ee" sounds
- 'e' is also the "ee" sound ⇒ I used in non-final "ee" sounds
- 'i' is long "i"
- 'o' is the "ua" biliteral,which is what is used for the "o"
sound. (On the rosetta stone even.)
- I found 'official' pronunciations of governor names wherever
possible. "Blagojevich" notably isn't pronounced like you first
suspect (it's blah-GOY'-uh-vich.)
- k = 'k' soft k
- j = 'dj' and 'j'
- c = 'tch' or 'ch'
- x = 'sh'
- ? = 'pa'
- @ = 'aa or ah' a more glottal, longer "a" sound
- & = 'kh' like swiss/german "ich"
- % = 'kh' like spanish "j" or scottish "loch"
- ^ = 'ab'
- * = 'sk'
- [ = 'mn'
FINAL SOLUTION:
The last step is to take the remaining letters
GREKNAMOFONORIUNU
or
Greek name of On or Iunu