Translating Peter Rabbit (hieroglyph edition)
Skip ahead to the translation here.
I’ve added some notes about this to my Posterous
I’ve been learning Egyptian hierogylphs for nearly a year now at the Egypt Exploration Society in London. So far I’ve only translated texts provided by my course tutor that have been either texts from monuments or specially written texts to practice things we have learned.
The other week I was at the British Museum and saw the book, ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit (hieroglyph edition)’, and thought it would be fun to transliterate it, then translate it back into English.
As I’ve only been learning hieroglyphs for a year, I’m bound to make some a lot of mistakes.
The books I am using to help me with translating are:
1. ‘How To Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs’ by Mark Collier and Bill Manley- this is a good starting point to learn heiroglyphs. It doesn’t have a complete sign list, but I use it for the odd thing like pronoun lists or verb forms.
2. ‘A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian’ by Raymond O. Faulkner – You can’t do without this if you’re doing hieroglyphs.
3. ‘Egyptian Grammar’ by Alan H. Gardiner- again, this is a requirement for doing hieroglyphs.
Another good book to have to learn hieroglyphs, but one I am not using to translate, is ‘Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs’ by James P. Allen.
Before I get to translating the book, I will very, very basically explain just a little bit about how hieroglyphs are translated.
Ancient Egyptians used hundreds of different hieroglyphs during the Middle Egyptian period (this went up to thousands later on). There are three different roles that hieroglyphs have. The first is as a phonetic representation of the sounds of 1-, 2- or 3-consonants (Egyptians didn’t write vowels) in order to make up words; the second is as an ideogram, so the hieroglyph of a face with a line under it 
The first thing one needs to do is transliterate the hieroglyphs into alphabetic symbols representing the different sounds. The ‘alphabet’ used for this is as follows:
3 – English sound ‘ah’
ı͗ – English sound ‘ee’
y – English sound ‘ee’
ˤ – English sound ‘ah’
w – English sound ‘oo’
b – English sound ‘b’
p – English sound ‘p’
f – English sound ‘f’
m – English sound ‘m’
n – English sound ‘n’
r – English sound ‘r’
h – English sound ‘h’
ḥ – English sound ‘h’
ḫ – English sound ‘kh’
ẖ – English sound ‘kh’ (like the German ‘ich’
s – English sound ‘s’
š – English sound ‘sh’
ḳ – English sound ‘k’
k – English sound ‘k’
g – English sound ‘g’
t – English sound ‘t’
ṯ – English sound ‘ch’
d – English sound ‘d’
ḏ – English sound ‘dj’
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