(Speak) Ancient Egyptian language?

[Dustin Kesselberg]

I was wondering...If the roseta stone is the only way we know how to read ancient egyptian...How is it that we know how to pronounce the names of people and places and words?

Such as hotep,nefer,Anubis,Ra...ect...ect

I also often hear egyptologists reading egyptian hieroglyphics off of the walls and speaking in some strange language. What is this? Is this Ancient Egyptian? How do they know how to prounce any of the words?

[Darat]

Originally posted by Dustin
I was wondering...If the roseta stone is the only way we know how to read ancient egyptian...How is it that we know how to pronounce the names of people and places and words?

Such as hotep,nefer,Anubis,Ra...ect...ect

I also often hear egyptologists reading egyptian hieroglyphics off of the walls and speaking in some strange language. What is this? Is this Ancient Egyptian? How do they know how to prounce any of the words?

Simple answer is that we don't, like quite a few ancient written languages they didn't use vowels and if memory serves me right they also used constants not in our alphabet.

It means that apart from having no idea how they were pronounced many of the spellings using the English alphabet are more convention then anything else.

[geni]

Originally posted by Dustin
I was wondering...If the roseta stone is the only way we know how to read ancient egyptian...How is it that we know how to pronounce the names of people and places and words?

Such as hotep,nefer,Anubis,Ra...ect...ect

I also often hear egyptologists reading egyptian hieroglyphics off of the walls and speaking in some strange language. What is this? Is this Ancient Egyptian? How do they know how to prounce any of the words?


Relgion. The copic church continues to use a form of spoken egyption in it's sevices.

[Chaos]

Originally posted by Darat
Simple answer is that we don't, like quite a few ancient written languages they didn't use vowels and if memory serves me right they also used constants not in our alphabet.

It means that apart from having no idea how they were pronounced many of the spellings using the English alphabet are more convention then anything else.

Not to mention that these spellings sometimes vary from modern language to modern language, especially the more complicated names.

[LW]

Originally posted by Dustin
I was wondering...If the roseta stone is the only way we know how to read ancient egyptian...How is it that we know how to pronounce the names of people and places and words?

We don't.

The Egyptologists use a kind of standard pronounciation where all unknown vowels are replaced by 'e' but apart from very few exceptions we don't have any idea on how the Egyptians themselves pronounced the words.

The exceptions are those names who occur in foreign correspondence of Pharaohs, since those letters were written in Akkadian and the names were spelled phonetically. (Though, this then rises the question on how can we know how Akkadian was pronounced, and here again the answer is that we can't be exactly certain but they at least wrote the vowel sounds so we can make educated guesses).

So, for example, the King Neferkheprure (better known with his personal name Anhkaten) was transcribed as "Niffuria" and his father King Nebmaatre (Amenhotep III) was "Nimmuria".

[LW]

Originally posted by geni
Relgion. The copic church continues to use a form of spoken egyption in it's sevices.

There is no reason to suppose that the pronounciation of the language didn't change during the millennia that separate us from the classical period of Egyptian writing.

[geni]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by LW
[B...snip... in names like Ramesses was an important breakthrough (in that case sun= ra).

You mean Ramses, Ramses or Remeses... ;)

[LW]

Originally posted by geni


You seem to have accidentally mangled your post, but I managed to read it before the accident.

There are very good reasons to suppose that the Egyptian pronounciation changed between the time when Middle Egyptian came into use (roughly 2000 BC) and when Coptic ceased to be living language (14th century).

For example, the Egyptians deviced three new forms of writing during that time (New Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic), each one using slightly different grammars and different vocabulary.

For the whole time when New Egyptic or Demotic were used in administrative documents, most of the monumental inscriptions were made using Middle Egyptian, so most of the hieroglyphic texts that we have are in that language. New Egyptian arose around the end of the 18th dynasty, which is evidence that Middle Egyptian had died as a spoken language by that time.

That means that there is a time gap of at least 3000 years separating the last Middle Egyptian speakers from deciphering of Hieroglyphs. For most of that time Egyptian was a living language and living languages evolve during time. In all languages that I'm aware of, most of the changes in pronounciation happen in vowels. And those are just the sounds that the Egyptians didn't write. Consider Arabic, for example. The Arabic dialects of Morocco and Iraq are very different, but almost all differences are in vowels and native speakers of both dialects can understand written Arabic without troubles because only consonants are written.

So, we can be quite certain of the consonants that occur in Egyptian texts. But for the vast majority of words, we don't have a slightest idea what their vowels were.

And what comes for the religion keeping the pronounciation fixed, well that didn't happen with Latin. Middle-Age "Monk Latin" is pronounced differently from Classical Latin.

[Piscivore]

Geez, we know how it is pronounced because the slaves they rescued from Ra on Abbydos taught Dr. Jackson.

Duh!



:)