Terme de Glossaire

phonogram

In hieroglyphic writing, the phonogram is a figurative character that no longer has any semantic value. It is the arbitrary transmission of the phoneme. Its value is only phonetic and it serves only to transmit oral speech. For example, take a hieroglyphic sign that represents a house; if it is employed as a phonogram, it will be uniquely attached to the phonetic value /pr/ and it will be present in a word that does not at all suggest the idea of a house. Thus a restricted list of uniliteral phonograms would have allowed Egyptian civilization to come up with an alphabetic system, if the need or desire for such a system had been great enough.

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