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Pronunciation of Egyptian Words

© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy

See Egyptian Hieroglyphic Alphabet which gives a rough idea of the sounds of each sign of the Egyptian alphabet (and of the transliteration characters that you will find in dictionaries and other books). Although the sounds of the alphabet are fairly clear (q is the same as k, in my opinion), most vowels were not written. So we do not know how to pronounce most words. And so, Egyptologists normally use a simplified pronunciation, in which a short "eh" sound is added where needed to make a word pronouncable.

The vowels "a" (ah), "i" (ee), and "u" (oo) were written and were evidently considered soft consonants. But just pronounce them as vowels. The "u" (oo) sound is now normally written as "w", although it normally has a w sound only at the beginning of some words ("wat" or "wi"). A short eh sound is normally added to make words pronouncable: "nfr" becomes "nefer", "Imn" becomes "Amen" or "Amun" (an i at the beginning of a word was often pronounced a), "tn" is "ten", "pt" is "pet", "htp" is "hetep". When you don't need the eh sound, then leave it off, as in "ankh", "rnpt" is "renpet" (not "renepet"), "tw" is pronouced "too".

Of course, some of the above is not the way ancient Egyptians pronounced words. "Imnhtp" was pronounced "Amenhotep". But "htp" was not always pronounced "hotep", sometimes it was pronounced differently. The feminine "t" ending was apparently pronounced "aht", which may have varied in some grammatical situations.

This situation, of being unsure of the pronunciation, probably makes Egyptian hard to learn, as most of us need to say a word or phrase in order to remember it.


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