About one hundred and thirty of the hieroglyphs are phonetic
(sound-conveying); i. e., represent words (which are nothing but sound
with a meaning attached thereto) of which the first letter is to be
taken as an alphabetic sign, and thus phonetic hieroglyphs answer the
same end as our letters of the alphabet. For example: in ideographic
writing, a bird, a mason, a nest, mean “birds build nests;” in phonetic
hieroglyphic the figures of a _b_ull, _i_mp, _r_ope, _d_oor and _s_hip
would give the word “birds,” and the words “build” and “nests” would be
expressed in the same round-about and clumsy fashion.