General Comments
This site provides reference material and interactive tools and quizzes designed to assist students learning the Middle Egyptian language.
The primary textbook that it supports is Middle Egyptian by James Hoch so much of the vocabulary and grammar is based on the content and structure of Hoch's text.
I have found that, with the exception of Hieroglyphic Egyptian: A Practical Grammar of Middle Egyptian by Obsomer and Favre-Briant, textbooks do not reference actual Gardiner Codes so I have undoubtedly entered some of these incorrectly - particularly for 'bird' glyphs.
If you see any errors, please let me know via an email to chris.driscoll@mail.utoronto.ca. Many thanks.
I am also interested in any thoughts on how the site could be improved.Lauren Fay Rosenberg's Middle Egyptian Dictionary
I am particularly pleased to be able to include a link to Lauren Fay Rosenberg's Online Middle Egyptian Dictionary. This project took about two years to complete and integrates three of the main Egyptian-English dictionaries under a single interface.
Lauren was a student in NML240Y1(Introduction to Middle Egyptian) at the University of Toronto several years ago, and combined her interests in Egyptology and Computer Science to produce a powerful tool. You can find out more about her dictionary project on the dictionary website. Additionally, she has a Middle Egyptian Dataset github page that provides much more technical detail on the project. Finally, she has a separate github page that describes her work on Machine Translation of Middle Egyptian Texts. Here is her main github page
User Information and Cookies
The system stores a cookie to preserve system information across pages. The Flashcard pages now allow you to use a basic form of spaced repetition. The information needed for this (when a given word is due, its current interval) is also tied to a user cookie so that everyone has their own private set of data. No user information is stored with this cookie.
Main Components of this site
- Vocabulary: Online Dictionary and word lists, Flashcards
- Morphology: Declensions and Conjugations (Under Construction)
- Syntax: Sentence building patterns and tools (Under Construction)
- Exercises: Extended exercises using the above to work a variety of skills. (Planned)
- Technical Hieroglyphic Topics: UNICODE & Hieroglyphics, entering hieroglyphic text, Egyptian numbers
Some Technical Details about this site
- The web pages are coded in raw HTML and CSS.
- Server side code is written in Python and uses the Django application framework.
- Client side code is written in Javascript, and uses the jQuery toolkit.
- The Database Server is Postgresql
- The Web(http) Server is Nginx, supported by the Gunicorn WSGI server.
- The application runs under Ubuntu Linux and is hosted on linode.com
- Text to Speech(TTS) for vocabulary pronunciation: Amazon Web Services Polly
- Pronunciations were entered in X-SAMPA format, converted to IPA, and fed to AWS Polly, which produced .mp3 audio files.
- Hieroglyphics:
- Almost all of the hieroglyphics were produced using the RES system from the University of St. Andrews. It is very easy to use, powerful, and dynamically produces web quality hieroglyphic images without the need to actually store and manage image files on the server.
- In a few cases, like the cartouches of Khufu and Tutankhamun displayed at the top of each page, I needed a scalable, high resolution image. In these cases, I used JSesh to generate SVG images.
- I have a further discussion of this topic on the Entering high Volumes of hieroglyphic text page.