Sound Reconstruction

[Penamoun]

There had been many trials to reconstruct the Egyptian tongue , but every of them seem to proceed in a diffrent direction , i took a view to rely on coptic to pronounce Egyptian language , i wanted to know , the coptic we pronounce today , how old this pronounciation dates ; according to my theory , that i applied on too many words , i rather that consonant that refers to a vowel like Aleph and W ,and Y , etc.. in heiroglyphs when written after a word free from these that means it to be used in this word forexample The God Hor is named Hrw , so according to the theory its pronounced Hwr closely to Coptic Boh/Sahidic : Hor and the word that contain no letters is to be pronounced with E like in sahidic we put a small line on a letter to mean that its preceeded with an e , Like pr which in coptic is Per how far this theory is right and how old is today's pronounciation ,Thanks.

[Anaksunamun]

Technically speaking you'd be recunstructing a Pre-Coptic/Late-Demotic reconstruction, in other words Egyptian that would have been spoken right before the turn of the century. For example:

Horus was probably originally pronounced: Haraaw with "w" barely pronounced. And probably at some time in the New Kingdom, in fast speech or colloquial speech there was, what I call vocalic metathesis, where Horus was then more infamously pronounced Haar which would then eventually turn into Coptic Hoor due to the vowel shift a<o in a stressed syllable. A similar approach happened to haráaw which meant day except that the "r" fell away in response to the plural formation, which would technically be haréw (I'd suggest an original "haráwu" in the plural) with vowel reduction in the first syllable and a reduction of the original final -aw syllable.

[bashandy]

Ancient Egyptian (AE) language spanned over thousands of years, and had phases of development and change this applied not only to written scriptures, but also to vocabulary, semantics, phoentics and phonology. Needless to say that AE was written in predominantly consonants, so vowels are a matter of guessing. Sahidic dialect followed this to some extent with its supralinear strokes. Also, Coptic language had lots of phases of development and change in between the 3-4th Century BC to its death around the 17th Century.

To give an example, in Middle Egyptian man is rmt, beautiful is nfr would you use the Bohairic to reconstruct the words or Sahidic? and these are easy words that still exist however, there are hundreds of words that do not have a coptic equivalent.
The topic is immensly difficult most living languages cannot ascertain how anything was exactly pronounced 500 years ago.

[Anaksunamun]

To give an example, in Middle Egyptian man is rmt, nfr is beautiful would you use the Bohairic to reconstruct the words or Sahidic?

If I'm not mistaken Middle Egyptian is mainly a Sahidic type dialect because the capital at the time was Thebes so the Southern dialect was prominent. But you can still suplement the vowels using either dialect for Middle Egyptian, in my own opinion. You cross reference Cuneiform renditions of Egyptian words or Hebrew renditions of Egyptian words and Coptic and you can work backwards a little bit.

We know that Horus was pronounced something like "har(a)" in the middle kingdom because the word is used in Akkadian writing. Nfr was pronounced "naf(e)". You cross reference back to Coptic and you can pretty much "guestimate" a reconstruction.

The change of a>o in the Canaanite vowel shift is pretty much based on Cuneiform and their transcriptions of words of foreign languages where there used to be an "a" and now there's an "o". This is the same in Hebrew as well and as can be seen Arabic did not go through this change.

It will still always be an estimate or a guess, but I wouldn't say that it would be that far off from the genuine pronounced word.

[bashandy]

I agree with you. It would be an interesting experiment; bearing in mind that it is a 'guestimate' which is applying the vocabulary of the derivative of the same language after thousands of years. The next difficulty is reconstructing 'stresses', intonation, letters that do not have a clear equivalent in Coptic e.g. the voiced pharyngeal derivative (Aiyn in Arabic), and the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (haa in arabic), in addition to the quality of the trill sound. It would be very interesting to hear an audio sample.

[Anaksunamun]

I agree with you. It would be an interesting experiment; bearing in mind that it is a 'guestimate' which is applying the vocabulary of the derivative of the same language after thousands of years. The next difficulty is reconstructing 'stresses', intonation, letters that do not have a clear equivalent in Coptic e.g. the voiced pharyngeal derivative (Aiyn in Arabic), and the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (haa in arabic), in addition to the quality of the trill sound. It would be very interesting to hear an audio sample.

It would be very interesting!! The Egyptian guttural R, in my own opinion, probably sounded like a French or Modern day Hebrew R. This type of sound is not too strong and trends to fall away easily at the end of a syllable which explains it's disappearance or its conversion to an /i/.

The vowels interest me a lot bc they're so erratic in both Cuneiform and in Coptic that it's a bit difficult to work backwards especially with Cuneiform which shows a /u/ where neither Coptic or Egyptian hieroglyphs show any indication of /u/ which tells me that the Akkadians heard a schwa/indescriminate vowel sound.