I know we can read it thanks to the Rosetta stone, thank you ancestors, a language like that would seem like a bitch to translate but do we know how some words were pronounced?
Not really an answer, but for the film The Mummy they brought an Egyptologist on board to help with correct pronunciation of the ancient language scenes. So I guess they do have a way of knowing.
We know modern day Copticis linguistically speaking, the direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian. So while I’m sure they are not identical (think of how much English has changed between modern day and the time of Shakespear), that is as close as we are going to get to the language of the Hieroglyphics.
The Egyptian language evolved as time goes on. The earlier versions of it didn’t write the vowels, so we’re completely screwed with knowing how some words were pronounced. As Egyptians converted to Christianity, they began writing in Greek, and since we do know how to pronounce the Greek letters, we can easily pronounce Egyptian words written in Greek letters from this period. So basically, we have a pronunciation guide for the last age of ancient Egyptian writing, which is called Coptic.
That’s a lot like having a pronunciation guide to modern English and trying to figure out how words were pronounced in Shakespeare’s time though.
(On preview I see that griffin1977 scooped me a bit - that’s what I get for getting a cup of coffee before finishing my typing)
I’m a linguist, but I’ve never studied ancient Egyptian, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Here is a page that explains the situation, but I can’t attest to how accurate it is.
More broadly speaking, how can you figure out how any ancient language was pronounced? Here are some of the ways.
(1) Articulatory phonetics: The anatomy of the human vocal tract constrains how sounds can be pronounced. We also have documentary evidence of a few thousand modern spoken languages, which give us an idea of which of the possible sounds are extremely frequent and common and which are fairly rare.
(2) Phonological structure: Again, we have documentary evidence of the sound structures of a few thousand modern languages, which gives us a good feel for what consonants and vowel systems languages are likely to have, and which strings of consonants and vowels are likely (or not) to actually occur.
(3) Statements about pronunciation made by native speakers of the language: These range from extremely good (for instance, ancient India more or less invented the science of articulatory phonetics, and so we can reconstruct Sanskrit pronunciation with great precision from grammars written at the time) to difficult to interpret or even wrong.
(4) Meter: Poetic meters refer to rules about the sound structure of a language. For instance, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit have metrical rules that refer to long and short syllables, and so we can get a good understanding of syllable structure and pronunciation from studying Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit poetic verse.
(5) Rhymes and puns: They can give you an idea of what was pronounced the same, or similarly.
(6) Spelling variation: If the way words were spelled starts to diverge from the way speakers think that words could (or ought) to be spelled given the spoken language, you start to see spelling variation.
(7) Animal sounds: These often aren’t all that helpful. But, for instance, in ancient Greek, sheep say “βῆ βῆ.” In Modern Greek, this would be pronounced [vi vi] or “vee vee,” and there is no way a sheep could actually say that. The vowel was something more like a long “a” in “cat” or long “ey.”
(8) Loanwords and such: If one language borrows words or names from another language, it can give you some information on how those words were pronounced in the first language, even though they will be distorted some by speakers of the second language. You can find similar evidence, if you have it, from the speaker of one language writing down words spoken in another language.
It’s not a direct answer to your question, but at least background on what sources of evidence linguists can use to look at the problem.
^^^^^^That has to be the best username/post combo ever.
As a musician, these are the two I would use if attempting to sing, say, a madrigal or songs from Medieval and Renaissance England. I don’t think we can say emphatically how they spoke their/our language 500 years ago, even with knowledge of rhyming schemes and the great vowel shift in the English language.
The problem I suspect becomes compounded when looking at something another what? 1500, 2000 years in the past?
When I was a kid, I figured everyone went around saying stuff like “Bird, eye, scarab?” “Ankh vase bull squiggly line!”
Yeah, not at all helpful. But thought I’d share.
Of course. We could never hope to reconstruct the pronunciation of a language well enough to fool a native speaker, if you will; what we would like is to reconstruct the pronunciation well enough that a native speaker could understand what we were saying without difficulty, even if they could recognize that we had an accent.
So we would like to identify basic things like vowel length, height, backness, rounding, and nasalization, place of articulation, voicing, aspiration, and glottalization for consonants, and accent. We would like to have an understanding of allophonic variation. What we could never hope to recover are, say, the exact duration of short versus long vowels or voice onset time in consonants.
Some ancient languages are relatively well understood in this respect-- I would cite Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. W. Sidney Allen’s books Vox Latina and Vox Graeca are great if you are interested in reading more. For an example of an ancient language that is not so well understood, take Hittite, where many words are written out with ideograms, which give us no idea whatsoever with regard to how the word was pronounced. Or Cuneiform Luvian, where the writing system is phonetic but has so much ambiguity that we couldn’t hope to say that we could pronounce words accurately, even to the standards I gave above.
May I suggest that you read a book called The Keys of Egypt by Lesley and Roy Adkins. It’s about Jean-François Champollion and how he eventually managed to decipher hieroglyphs. I found it very interesting.
My recollection (from The Code Book, I think) is that a lot of hieroglyphics were like a rebus – where a picture of a short word (the sun) was used to represent a syllable sounding like the short word. So, since the word for sun in Coptic is “ra”, the name Rameses was written with a sun hieroglyph followed by signs for the syllables ‘me’ and ‘se’.
Given that, don’t we have some more clues to how ancient Coptic was pronounced than some other languages? (This is I suppose a subset of the “Rhymes and Puns” element listed by Mr. Pu-du-he-pa-as)
My understanding is that there were some names on the Rosetta Stone, so that we have both the Greek and the hieroglyph and can assume pronunciation was similar. That is, if we have the name “Zeus” and we know the hieroglyph symbols for Zeus are squiggle-eagle-snake, we can assume that squiggle = z-sound, eagle = ooo sound, snake = s-sound. There are several names, and that would give a good start to a pronunciation guide.
Not to pick your professional brain, but this is one I’ve always been curious about. Again, from my music pedigree, I’ve done many a Gregorian chant, and have been belabored about the difference in pronouncing “Classical” versus “Medieval” Latin. The ‘v’ in “Salve Regina,” immediately comes to mind. What nuances in writing do we have that tell us the Romans pronounced such a thing as x as opposed to y?
Sure. What sounds in particular are you curious about?
Again, I don’t know-- I haven’t studied Egyptian at all. (Also, it’s Ms. Pu-du-he-pa-as! That’s what the F. on the front indicates).
I know in the original “Stargate” movie, they hired experts to make an educated guess, based on how Greek and Arabic pronunciation has changed. Even threw in a joke on how bad E.A. Wallis Budge’s translations are.
What I get from Ms. Pu-du-he-pa-as’s site is that we know practically everything about Hieratic because
- we have a lot of greek names, translations etc.
- they had a brand new writing for it which was more logical, as all writings are initially before people start to bend words in wanna-be-cool ways
- it’s only two millenia away from modern Coptic.
In contrast, we can read old Egyptian but don’t know much about pronunciation
- because the writing is more pictographs and no wovels
- no correspondence etc. with other writing systems/languages
- it’s actually old, not a relatively modern language like Hieratic
Back to the question of Egyptian. I asked one of my linguist friends who studies Egyptian, and took his dictation: