Does anybody know how ancient Egyptian words sounded?
If they left out the vowels in their writing, how do we know such names as Osiris, Isis, Queen Tiy, Thuya and Yuya?
Did the Greeks later put the O and the i’s in Osiris?
Is there agreement among Egyptologists how to pronounce Tiy,
Khenti-amentiu, Ptah, Ra (is it REE or RAY?) and lots of words with iu or iw or iy in them?
The Rosetta (actually, Rasjid, I think) Stone had translations. That provides the best clues. Most of the names that we’re familiar with (Osiris, Anubis, etc) are actually the Greek forms of the names. In fact, the city of Memphis is Greek. It’s actually a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name for. . . city!
Since the original language was consonantal, a lot of the vowels supplied in the Egyptian versions are educated guesses, I believe. As I browse thru my copy of the “Book of the Dead,” I see Horus as Heru, Osiris as Ausar, Hathor as Hethert, Isis as Auset. The former are the Greek names; the latter are the “best” translations of the Egyptian.
My guess is that most of the words and names survived in one form or another into the Coptic language (the direct descendant of Old Egyptian). Coptic was quite widely commonly spoken in Egypt until about the 15th century C.E. and was written in the Greek alphabet, vowels and all. Coptic is now used only in the liturgy of the Coptic Christian church, which is itself nearly extinct.
Oh, good, so Metropolis isn’t the only one. 
You are slightly mistaken. Coptic refers to the written language only, which was a creation of Egyptian Christian scholars and flourished from the 3rd century to the 5th century CE. Masterpieces of Coptic literature include the Bohairic Life of Pachomius and the biography of Shenoute. It is not written using the Greek alphabet, though they are similar enough that most papyrologists with Hellenistic training can read them with only a little bit more effort. The vocabulary of Coptic is about 25% Greek. The language itself, however, is entirely Egyptian.
MR
A friend of mine, who majored in anthropology at UCSB, told me that the Ik tribe, who live (or lived) somewhere south of Egypt, spoke a language virtually identical to that of ancient Egypt. However, he lent me a book about the tribe, called “The Mountain People”, and it had nothing to say about their language. Instead, it was all about the brutality of this tribe’s life and culture. It seems they lived in a drought stricken area, were starving, and could no longer maintain any pretense of community, morality, or family. Children were kicked out to fend for themselves almost as soon as they could walk; sharing and altruism were practically nonexistent.
Your understanding of the info about the Ik language was garbled. What your friend no doubt meatn to say was not that the Ik speak ancient Egyptian, but that their language is distantly related to Egyptian.
It is a southern Cushitic language, in the same family as Maasai and Iraqw. (Not to be confused with Iraq, where they speak Arabic of course.) Somali is another Cushitic language. The Cushitic languages form one branch of the large Afro-Asiatic language family. Egyptian is another branch of Afro-Asiatic. Besides Cushitic and Egyptian, the other branches of Afro-Asiatic include: Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic), Berber (e.g. Tashelhait, Tamazight, Shluh), Omotic (e.g. Oromo), and Chadic (e.g. Hausa).
You could just as well say that Ik is related to Hebrew as well as Egyptian.
So has anyone grabbed the movie rights for those yet, or do I still have a chance on being the first one? 
Oddly enough, I have a great link for this…
Ok, so that obviously didn’t work but you can still copy and paste the address if you don’t mind the low tech approach…
Phil,
That is a fabulous link! Where did you run across it?
The alphabet descends from an old style of the greek alphabet (IIRC, the same or similar one that spawned Cyrillic). Most of the letters are derived from the Greek alphabet (at a time before the lowercase cursive style you see in modern Greek was developed). However, some of the characters (the glyph for “ti”, and others), are derived from demotic characters.
The liturgical language of the Christian Greeks is essentially modern Egyptian. However, since the egyptian alphabet was a consonantal alphabet (represented only consonants), scholars dont know what the vowel system was like for old Egyptian. Much of the system is just a convention for making pronunciation easy (ra is also called re sometimes).
that Egyptian site is pretty neat, although I hurt my throat trying to pronounce m39t.
Anyone have a line on linear A?
i dont know much about egypt, its history or traditions, but it has always bothered me how could their civilization forget their written language, i mean how does that happen?
All you need is a lot of time, which Egyptian civilization has had more of than most.
To follow up what others have stated:
Some idea about how ancient Egyptian sounded can be gleaned from Coptic writing, as well as from comparasion with related languages. But for the most part it is guesswork.
On how the old writing system died out, it is not really hard to understand. First, start with an understanding the old writing system was only used by a narrow elite of literate scribes. Then note that from the Ptolemaic conquest (named after Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s general whose descendants ruled until Roman conquest) forward through Roman and Byzantine times Greek was an important langauge in Egypt --the language of the ruling classes in large part. Then comes Christianization, which in that part of the world was heavily Greek. You see a shift to using the Coptic alphabet, displacing the demotic Egyptian script. The comes Islamic conquest…
It is not really in the end a question of “a civilization” losing its writing, as the literate elites opting for different writing systems, and eventually another language (Arabic).
One other note: it seems a bit strong to say Copts (Coptic Christians of Egypt, who speak Arabic by the way) are in danger of dying out (or nearly extinct). They make up about the same percentage of the modern Egyptian population as do blacks in the United States.
Thanks for the clarification. I had not idea they were still as numerous as they are. It depends on which source you believe, but it appears that they make up about 5 to 7 percent of the population of Egypt.
English has been so bastardized by waves of foreign influence (Scandinavian, French (especially), Latin, etc., etc.,) that we’ve forgotten an incredible amount of the basic language, and that’s only over the last 1000 years. It’s the only language I know of that has what are called ‘defective verbs’. Defective verbs are those that don’t exist for all the normal tenses. For instance, “can”/“could”: You can’t say “I will can”, or “I have canned”, you have to say “be able to” or “been able to”, which is based on a Latin borrowing (or possibly French, I’m not sure).
I doubt that English is the only language with defective verbs. Lots of or maybe all languages have suppletion, whch means a completely different word than the root word for various tenses et. al. For instance in English am,is,are,was,were,be,been,being are the same word but in various persons and tenses, wheras kick, kicks, kicked, to kick, kicking, has only five different forms, AND none of which is devoid of the root KICK. There are examples of this in French, and in Latin we have sum, esse, fui, futurus, es, est, summus, estis, sunt, all with the root meaning of to be and of various different forms, except fui is a little like futurus, and summus and estis are like sum and est with endings… There are other examples of suppletion in have, has, had, to have, having, having had, which might be considered only semi-suppletive because at least they all begin with ha, but in any case they don’t behave like regular verbs such as kick. Good, better, and best are the same word but in different degrees of comparison. And so forth. However, you might mean something else by defective verbs, and I would like other examples. 2) Among the things that are unique about English is not that it has been “bastardized,” because all languages have been bastardized. Unique to English are said to be things like The Great Vowel Shift, which didn’t happen to Continental languages (or any others); the possession of both of the two main ways of making new words: a) the Germanic method of putting old words together in COMPOUNDS such as fahrsprekkenapparat or however it is spelled, meaning telephone (although now I think German just uses telephone), Gesellshaft, Geisteswissenschaft, etc., as in the English words notebook, crossword (puzzle) showboat, Christmas, and antidisestablishmentarianism; and b) taking new words from other languages and leaving them as is or compounding them (the anti and the dis above are from Latin or Greek, compounded with English roots, supposedly, and other example are telephone, television; c) which leads to the fact as far as I know that English has more words in it than any other language, found with origins in the Oxford English Dictionary, which makes the French dictionary look like a magazine in comparison. To say English is a bastardize language would be to say the same for French,Italian, Portugese,Catalan, Spanish, and Romanian, which are what happened to Latin after awhile in their respective countries.
Using bastardization to divide languages like English from languages like Latin is specious. Latin is a “bastard” language, incorporating numerous elements of Greek, Etruscan, and a host of other now-undecipherable native Italian languages. Even pure Attic Greek is a blend of old Doric and Ionian forms, not to mention more than a little Persian.
MR