About eight-hundred hieroglyphic symbols comprise the ancient Egyptian Language. About 600 of hieroglyphic symbols represent things and ideas. These Ideograms are sometimes called the common signs.These signs are similar to the Chinese written language.

Unlike Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphics has symbols for sounds; these are called Phonograms. About 200 of them, represent sounds, like letters in most modern Western languages: There are 25 uniliteral (representing 1 letter) symbols. In addition to his basic alphabet there are phonograms which represent letter combinations (like the symbol æ in English). In hieroglyphs there are about 100 biliteral (representing 2 letters) and approximately 75 triliteral (representing 3 letters) phonograms.

Hieroglyphic words are all written together, that is with no spaces between words:

somethinglikethefirstcoupleofpagesofjamesjoyces finniganswakeandlikethewayearlylatinandgreekwerewritten
There were not any dictionaries in ancient Egypt, to set a standard for spelling; so the scribes would write words from memory, or they would create their own spelling from the pronunciation of a word. Punctuation in Egyptian hieroglyphics does not exist. 
 

Phonogram: symbol representing a phonetic sound. Ideogram:  symbol giving the reader the idea of the word. Determinative: symbol that determines a word's meaning.

	hrw=day

 
Aesthetics in hieroglyphic writing is very important.  The most important aesthetic aspect is the space that words occupy.  A rectangle or square is considered the desired shape.  Often, dashes, abbreviated spellings, extra letters, determinatives and ideograms are added or subtracted to balance the form of the word and the line.

The way that hieroglyphs are combined to form words or phrases and the way spelling is sometimes altered can be found in the following example of an English hieroglyphics sentence, Assume English has a few ideograms and determinatives. The sentence "I LOVE MY DOG" could then be written in many ways. An English speaking reader will be familiar with the pronunciation of these English phonograms. The meaning of the ideograms, and the most common spelling variations of the phrase are:

Phonograms: I, L, O, V, E, M, Y, D, O, G, U, and 
Ideograms:  meaning heart or love
           and  meaning dog
Determinative:  meaning animal

In order to understand this sentence, it is necessary to know that the English pronunciation of -"eye" sounds like "I" and "Y" in the word "MY", "LUV" is a shortened post-20th century slang spelling of "LOVE". "LOV" is not a normally found spelling of "LOVE" but neither the pronunciation or the meaning of the sentence has changed. The symbol,  , when proceeded by "I", is used to mean "LOVE" not "HEART".    The reason why  is a determinative for the word "DOG" is because the word can have other meanings, for example: dog can mean the act of following. 

When reading Egyptian hieroglyphics a reader must be familiar with most of the common symbols, know the pronunciation of the phonetic ones, and be familiar with the most common spelling variations. So it takes some effort to master the Egyptian language.

Since there is such variety in ways of expressing something, Egyptian hieroglyphic provides a flexible basis for a rich literature. But it also requires more effort to learn to read and write than do modern Western Languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are still easier to learn than modern Chinese, and the phonetic element allows the representation of spoken language.