Lettre à M. Dacier, ... relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques

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should not be surprised by this synonymy use of different signs for one sound and this multiplicity of signs to express the same sound among a people whose writing is essentially ideographic representing ideas or objects directly.

Indeed, one cannot consider the phonetic writing of the Egyptians, whether hieroglyphic or demotic, as a system as fixed and as invariable as our alphabets. The Egyptians were accustomed to representing their ideas directly; the expression of sounds was, in their ideographic writing, only an auxiliary means; and when the occasion to use it presented itself more frequently, they certainly thought of extending their means of expressing sounds, but did not for all that renounce their ideographic scripts, consecrated by religion and by their continuous use during a great many centuries. They proceeded then as the Chinese did in absolutely similar circumstances; the Chinese, to write a word foreign to their language, simply adopted the ideographic signs whose pronunciation seems to them to offer the most analogy with each syllable or element of the foreign word to be transcribed. One can therefore conceive that the Egyptians, wishing to express either a vowel, a consonant, or a syllable of a foreign word, used a hieroglyphic sign expressing or representing any object whose name, in the spoken language, contained either in its entirety, or in its first part, the sound of the vowel, the consonant, or the syllable to be written.