Re: Restored Egyptian

I've worked on something like this.  My idea was "what if there are REAL
'gypsies'?"  I immediately realized that, of course, there are.  They're
not well known at all, but just as a group of middle Indo-Aryan speakers
wandered west and got stuck with the label of "Egyptians", there was a
small group of Late Egyptian speakers who wandered east (into China) and
got stuck with the label "Indians".  It was only in the 1950s that
researchers from Minzu Xueyuan realized that their language was actually a
descendant of Egyptian, and not Sanskrit.

I have vague notes but nothing too specific.  I was unhappy about how the
phonology kept coming out looking too much like Coptic, and Late Egyptian
verb morphology and syntax is so complicated and unclear to me I couldn't
figure out how to "evolve" it forward.

I'd check out Antonio Loprieno's recent book (_Ancient Egyptian_?), which
is a good description of the various stages of the language, if you
haven't already.

Keep us posted on how this goes!  I'd be interested in hearing more, and
someday I'd like to get back to my own "Anti-Gypsy" conlang.

Kenji

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Terrence Donnelly wrote:

> I've recently gotten very interested in Ancient Egyptian.
> You can see the results of my interest at my
> Webpage at http://www.geocities.com/weseb_2000
>
> I'm thinking of trying to put together a functional
> spoken version of Egyptian, based on the best guesses
> of experts about the ancient pronunciation.  Given
> the speculative nature of much of their work, I'm
> thinking I'll just present my version as a conlang,
> and not as the "real" thing.
>
> Has anyone attempted anything similar?  I understand
> the language used in the movie Stargate was supposed
> to be something like this, but I can't find any
> detailed information on it.
>
> -- Terry
>
> http://www.geocities.com/teresh_2000
>