This is the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet, with transliterations which are used by Egyptologists, and the approximate sounds in English. These signs are essentially all consonants (even the ah’s and ee’s). The vowels were not written (see below), and are normally just said as “eh” (rarely “o”, in some words), nowadays.
Egyptian signs were of two types, phonetic signs, like these (along with many signs which were combinations of two or three sounds), and determinatives, signs which gave a clue to the meaning of the word. Most words were made up of phonetic signs, followed by one determinative. A few had two or three determinatives. Some very common words had no determinative. And, some other common words were written as just the determinative, with no phonetic signs. And there are common abbreviations, in which one or two signs stand for an entire word or phrase.
In this table, the alternative signs in parentheses were mainly used in later times.
Vowels: Above, I said that the vowels were not written. But, a few of these alphabetic signs are obviously vowels (pronounced “ah” or “ee”) in most modern languages. And signs with an “oo” or “w” sound were also used to represent a foreign (Greek, and other languages) “o” sound. These were not considered vowels, and sometimes had some guttural aspect. They are vowels in English, but not in Egyptian. So we write the a, i, o, u sounds, as these are Egyptian consonants.
If your name is David, then you could write it with five Egyptian signs (all consonants), “Dafid” (sorry there is no “v” sound). But if your name is Ben, I would write it “Bn,” in Egyptian. And I would not write other silent letters.
Actually the two “ah” signs in my list were not pronounced “ah.” The first one, the Egyptian vulture, was a guttural sound not found in English. It was followed by an unwritten vowel, often an “ah” sound. And so it often sounded very much like “ah,” even though it was a consonant. The second “ah,” the arm and hand, was a glottal stop, a short hesitation between vowel sounds, like in Cockney “bottle,” which sounds like “bah-uhl.” This sign too often sounded like “ah,” not because it was a vowel, but because it was followed by an unwritten vowel sound.
Other letters: Also, the lion which represented the “r” sound, was often used for the foreign “L” sound. The “q” sound is apparently slightly different from the “k” sound.
