I just heard Dr. Zahi Hawass pronounce Amun-Ra as ‘Amun-Ray’. AFAIK, ‘Ra’ is pronounced ‘Rah’. Is this a quirk where he is saying an Egyptian word with a supposed English pronunciation?
Not our good Dr. Z, I’m sure.
This is not a very GQ response, for which I apologize, but I worked with Zahi while in Egypt and while the man is many things (MANY things 
) he is neither ignorant nor prone to modifying his behavior to satisfy a perceived foreign preference.
Therefore, I’d say he either misspoke one one occasion, or he is correct.
FWIW, in Egypt we (a bunch of foreigners so you are free to ignore us) always pronounced it more or less like Amun-Rai, which is pretty close to the what the Big Z said.
Rai, as in closer to ‘ray’ than to ‘rye’? If that’s the case, then that’s probably what he said and I interpreted it as ‘ray’ because I was typing something at the time and not listening closely.
Re is a variant of Ra.
(Not being flip: Amun-Re=Amun-Ra)
Yup. But none of us were Egyptologists (and only a chosen few ever spoke to Zahi personally; the rest of us were favored with his irate letters and had the privilege of communicating with his dogsbody) so while I might trust us slightly more than I would a random person plucked off the street in any country, the operative word here is “slightly.”
This makes sense. If I were to read ‘Amun-Re’, I would pronounce it similar to ‘ray’.
Helping:
Ancient Egyptian was written without vowels, so the convention is to insert an “e” sound between consonants when the actual vowel is unclear. (Coptic, a late form of the language, was written in the Greek alphabet and does have vowels, which is one of the ways we can tell how some of the words were pronounced.)
Amun-Ra, Amun-Re, Amon-Ra…you’ll find many variants, all referring to the same god (actually a conflation of two gods…at least).