How do we know how they pronounced their names? Where do we get “Tutankhamen” or “Ramses” from the writings they left?
Well, since they did not write down the vowels, we do not know for sure, do we? Whence different spellings like Tutankhamun, Tutankhamen. However, there seem to be ways to reconstruct the vowel and consonant shifts to some extent, even though the exact phonetics remain unknown.
This link mentions some vowels known from the names written in texts in languages like Akkadian and Greek and of course Coptic.
I should say, as an introduction to how we can read any of that stuff in the first place, it was famously deciphered in modern times, aided by helpful parallel texts like on the famous Rosetta Stone (which includes some famous names).
Reading it is one thing, reading it out loud is something else.
Yes, I hope that point was clear. Champollion knew the name “Ramses” from Greek sources, for instance, and that actually helped him decipher it in Egyptian in the first place. But if you, today, encountered a completely new name, I am not sure you could say with complete certainty what the pronunciation was, though you could make a pretty good guess. E.g. Ramses = rˁ-ms-sw, but you would have to fill in the rest. Roughly like, try pronouncing Hebrew or Arabic words by reading them if you know the alphabet but are not fluent in the language.
How do we know how anything we haven’t actually heard is pronounced. Even the Greek on the Rosetta Stone is a millennium removed from classical Greek.
Do you know that the name Marjoriebanks is pronounced Marchbanks? Or that Fetherstonhaugh is pronounced Fanshaw?
All you can really do is speculate, knowing that no one will be able to refute it.
Throatwobbler Mangrove sure had a pretty sarcophagus.
He’s my favorite honky!
Poetry is one clue, especially poetry based on rhymes or meter.
That can tell you that words are pronounced similarly, but it can’t tell you about the other if you don’t know how one of them is prounced
Yep. Until the invention of audio recordings, knowledge of all historical pronunciations are based on interlocking inferences of this sounds like that which sound like these but not those, eventually ending with “today this person says it like this”.
Aren’t Cheops and Khufu the same person?
Yes. Khufu was a short version of his Egyptian name. Cheops was the version used by the Greeks.
And according to ancient Egyptian theology, by discussing his name today we are helping to preserve his soul, 4,500 years on.
Japanese borrowed written characters from China and adapted the pronunciation for compound words while keeping the native pronunciation as well.
Over the centuries, new combinations of characters were adopted, and the pronunciations of some of the characters had changed. Japanese added the new pronunciations, allowing a character to have several readings.
I’ve read that this gives hints to scholars on how ancient Chinese pronunciation had changed over time.
I thought he was buried at sea. From a luxury yacht.
A significant variation in the name over the years?
Well, the Greeks didn’t come along until about 2,000 years after his death …,
Yeah, one of my favorite facts is that Cleopatra is closer in time to us than she was too Cheops.