Re: Egyptian Vowels (Was Re: Phonological terminology question)

Eamon wrote:
>This has probably been asked before on the list, but here goes...
>
>Tristan wrote:
>
> > How can we know (or even suspect) that Egyptian had pharyngeal
> > consonants yet we can't guess at the vowels and pretend they're /e/ or
> > null, when it's descendant doesn't have pharyngeals but does have
> > vowels? (or at least, I'm hoping it does ;) )
>
>Has any linguist done a reconstruction of the old Egyptian vowels?
>Is it possible?  I'm certainly not a specialist in Egyptian but I
>would imagine that if we can come up with vowels for Proto-languages
>we should be able to come up with vowels for Egpytian.  Sure, it
>would still be an educated guess, but it would be better than, as
>Tristan says, pretending they're /e/ or null.  If there were
>loanwords from ancient Egyptian in to near-by languages could that
>help as well?
>
>Has anyone worked on a conlang based on Egpytian or reconstructing
>the vowels?  I seem to recall someone saying a while back that they
>wanted to work on something like that.  If I had some better
>resources for Egyptian and Coptic (and Afrasian in general) I'd be
>tempted to give it a try... I think that'd be interesting.
Various projects for reconstructing Ancient Egyptian vowels, based on
Coptic, loans in other languages and Egyptian names and words written in
Akkadian, Hettite, Hebrew and similar sources. I don't really know how
successful they've been, or how accepted reconstructions has become, but a
popular book I recently read apparently asserted that "Ekhnaton" was
pronounced [?axenjati]*. If that's true, one's got to wonder where they got
that final "n" from.

* They actually wrote "Achenjati", the book originally being written in
German.


        Andreas

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