Egyptian Vowels (Was Re: Phonological terminology question)

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.

Cheers,
Eamon

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