A probabilistic model of Ancient Egyptian writing

Abstract

This article offers a formalization of how signs form words in Ancient Egyptian writing, for either hieroglyphic or hieratic texts.  The formalization is in terms of a sequence of sign functions, which concurrently produce a sequence of signs and a sequence of phonemes. By involving a class of probabilistic automata, we can define the most likely sequence of sign functions that relates a given sequence of signs to a given sequence of phonemes. Experiments with two texts are discussed.