The Pronunciation of

Ancient Egyptian



The issue of the pronunciation of the Ancient Egyptian language has recently become confused by popular presentations that ignore some of the essential and undoubted characteristics of Egyptian hieroglyphics, most importantly that Egyptian, just as today is usually the case with Arabic and Hebrew, did not write vowels -- except in late transcriptions of foreign (mainly Greek) words. For a time French (vowels) and German (no vowels) scholars hotly debated this, but the matter was settled more than a century ago. This is typically not explained to people who are told that their names can be written in such and such a way in hieroglyphics, or who are simply told that the name of the Egyptian sun god is "Ra" -- the pronunciation we find in the entertaining and fun but silly and historically absurd movies Stargate (1994) and The Mummy (1999). Well, "ra" may be Tahitian for "sun," but it is not Ancient Egyptian. However, we may know what the Egyptian pronunciation was, as discussed below.

As it happens, the Egyptian dialogue in those movies, reconstructed by Stuart Tyson Smith, avoids that mistake, for anyone who listens carefully; but the misconception is perpetuated by the English dialogue, despite Dr. Smith's advice. Indeed, although the Egyptians did not write vowels in Egyptian words, there is evidence about what the vowels were in many cases. But the evidence is for different stages of the Egyptian language. For most of Egyptian history the language written in actual hieroglyphics or in its cursive counterpart, hieratic, was the literary language initiated in the XII Dynasty (1991-1786) of the Middle Kingdom. That is called "Middle Egyptian," and it became the Classical language of Ancient Egypt. In hieroglyphics or hieratic, therefore, one is only likely to encounter either Middle Egyptian or the earlier literary form of the language, Old Egyptian, the language spoken in the Archaic Period (I & II Dynasties, c. 3100-2680) and the Old Kingdom (III-VI Dynasties, 2680-2159).

While Sir Alan Gardiner, in his great and indispensable Egyptian Grammar [Oxford University Press, 1927, 1964], says that Middle Egyptian was "possibly the vernacular of Dynasties IX-XI," Stephen Fryer has brought to my attention recent research to the effect that the literary language of the XII Dynasty was in some measure an artificial attempt to return to the forms of Old Egyptian. Since the political project of Egyptian Kings was always to restore things "as they were in the beginning," this is not surprising. Middle Egyptian, therefore, may have something like the status of Classical Sanskrit, which restored and fixed the forms of the language of the Vedas but could not undo all the changes that had already occurred in the spoken language, and was also tempted to regularize some things previously irregular. This makes Sanskrit grammar extremely regular, which students of Greek would appreciate, were it not for other difficulties with the language.

Although Middle Egyptian became the literary and written language, the spoken language continued to change. The language of the New Kingdom (XVIII-XX Dynasties, 1575-1087) and much of the Third Intermediate Period (XXI-XXIV Dynasties, 1087-715) is then called "New" or "Late Egyptian." By the Ramessid Period (Dynasties XIX & XX), most hieratic documents are in Late Egyptian. The best evidence of the pronunciation of Late Egyptian, however, is from the documents found in the diplomatic archives of Amenhotep III and Akhenaton at Amarna, for these documents were kept in Akkadian, not in Egyptian. Akkadian was the diplomatic language of the day, essentially the same language as its two daughter languages, Babylonian and Assyrian; and its system of writing, cuneiform, represented vowels. Late Egyptian grammar also begins to be revealed by hieroglyphic inscriptions during the reign of Akhenaton, when the spoken language briefly replaced Middle Egyptian. Thus, while Old and Middle Egyptian did not have a definite article ("the"), Late Egyptian does, p3 (pꜣ), later pronounced "pi" or "pe" in Coptic -- though now it appears that this change had already begun in the actual spoken language of the XII Dynasty.

Following Late Egyptian are two stages of the spoken language, Demotic (c. 715 BC-470 AD) and Coptic (c. 400 AD-c. 1600). Egyptian words borrowed into early Greek probably reflect Demotic (Greek demotikos = "popular") pronunciation. Demotic was written in its own cursive script, so this form of the written language is also called "Demotic." While the last hieroglyphic inscription was made at Philae in 394 AD, not long after the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I (379-395) ordered the closure of pagan temples, the last Demotic text is from 470.

Demotic writing disappeared only because, as the Egyptians themselves converted to Christianity, they ceased to use the old script. Instead, they began to write in the Greek alphabet, with the addition of seven letters borrowed from Demotic to write sounds that didn't exist in Greek. Since vowels did exist in Greek, we suddenly have the complete vocalization of the last stage of the Egyptian language, which is then called "Coptic," from the Arabic term for Egyptian Christians, the Copts, , al-Qubṭ (or Qibṭ). That word was from, via Coptic, the Greek name for Egypt, Αἴγυπτος , Aigyptos, which was derived from an Egyptian name for Memphis, , Ḥwtk3ptḥ (or 8wtk3pt8 [Ḥwtkꜣptḥ], see below for the use of the numbers), the "House of the Soul, , of Ptah." Ptah was the patron god of Memphis. The name Memphis itself apparently comes from Mnnfr, originally the name of the pyramid of King Pepi I of the VI Dynasty, "Enduring Beauty," or, with the name of the King understood, "The Goodness of Pepi Endures". Coptic slowly died out as Egyptians converted to Islam and Arabic became the spoken language.

Although it ceased to be a spoken language by the 17th century, Coptic remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Church, to which 6% [or 10%?] of Egyptians still belong, and thus is as well remembered and used in that context as Latin is in the Catholic Church or classical Arabic is in Islam. So even now Coptic is not a "dead" language the way Babylonian is (whose last cuneiform inscription was in 75 AD). It is a "passive" Classical language, in the terms of Jean-Noël Robert ["Hieroglossia," Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture, Bulletin 30, 2006], which means, of course, that it is read, but is not otherwise used for communication and does not generate any new literature. Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) learned Coptic because he suspected it was the same language written in the hiergylyphics of the Rosetta Stone. He was right, and was thus aided in his epic decipherment.

The Copts themselves recently achieved international prominence when one of their number, Butros Butros-Ghali, (1922-2016), served as Secretary General of the United Nations (1992-1996). There is also now a large Coptic immigrant community in the United States, swollen by people fleeing terrorist attacks and other assaults by Islamic radicals in Egypt. The American Coptic community includes Hoda Kotb, , now anchor of the NBC Today show, who, however, was born in the United States in 1964, prior to recent troubles in Egypt [note].



There are different kinds of signs used in Ancient Egyptian writing. "Ideograms" represent whole words, usually with a two or three consonant root, as in Arabic or Hebrew. Thus the glyph is the word "good" or "beautiful," or "be good," "beautiful," "happy," although it is a picture, according to Sir Alan Gardiner, of the heart and windpipe (it looks like a banjo to me). An ideogram that is an image of its object is a "pictogram," like the glyph for the scarab or dung-beetle, , or like that for the sun, . However, if the consonant root of the ideogram or pictogram occurs in other words, it can be transferred to use as a "phonogram," simply representing the sounds. Thus the glyph , a picture of a gaming board, is used as a "biliteral" phonogram in many words, e.g. mn "remain," mn kh "efficient," mnt "thigh," in the common name of the god Amon, etc. The glyph can be used as a "triliteral" phonogram to mean "become" or can occur in kh pr sh , a certain blue crown worn by the king. This could be confusing, so words are often also written with "generic determinatives," glyphs that were not pronounced but indicated what kind of thing a word was, e.g. which shows that a word is the name of a god, or which shows that a word has something to do with writing. This device was also used in cuneiform.

Besides phonograms that stand for two or three consonants, there are also 24 (or 25) signs that represented single ("uniliteral") sounds, the Egyptian "alphabet." These were originally ideograms also, and some continued to stand for common words. For instance, is the picture of a mouth, is used to mean "mouth," "language," etc., and is a uniliteral sign. These alphabetic signs were frequently written with ideograms or pictograms as "phonetic complements," both to provide reminders about pronunciation and to distinguish meanings, as when grammatical endings differentiate between nouns and verbs, or between singular and plural. For us, the alphabetic signs can conveniently be used to represent and discuss Egyptian phonology.

Note that Egyptian glyphs have a front and a back. All the images above and below face to the left, e.g. the alphabetic sign , which indicates that the text is to be read from left to right. This is conformable with the usage of English and other European languages. However, although this would be familiar and agreeable to the Egyptians, Egyptian usage was ordinarily to write from right to left, as today is done in Hebrew and Arabic. They indicated this direction by having all the glyphs face to the right instead of to the left, which transforms the sign for d above to . Much the same thing was done with the Greek alphabet, whose left to right form consisted of mirror images of the original Phoenician letters that had been adopted and that were at first written, like Phoenician, right to left. The Egyptians also often wrote from top to bottom in narrow columns, so Egyptian text could even be easily integrated into Chinese and Japanese books.

Resources on ancient languages are sparse and uneven today. For a long time the only Coptic grammar I had seen, some years ago in the UCLA Research Library, was in French, for Catholic missionaries to Egypt (I think this was A. Mallon's Grammaire Copte [Imprimerie catholique, Beirut, 1956]). Now, one kind of thing that seems to be easily obtainable are reprints of older, even much older grammars. Thus, British American Books (Willits, California), has reprinted Henry Tattam's Coptic Grammar of 1830. The print is clear and it looks to be a fairly complete grammar (for its day and age), but it lacks a vocabulary list. Similarly, a reprint of William B. MacDonald's Sketch of Coptic Grammar of 1856 is available from the same publisher, but its usefulness is compromised by its being a hand written text. I have just obtained, however, a good modern grammar, although it is intended as a textbook more than a scientific description of the language: Introduction to Sahidic Coptic, by Thomas O. Lambdin [Mercer University Press, Macon, GA, 1988]. Although set up in courier, which makes the whole thing look like typescript, the book has a clear Coptic typeface. It also has a 150 page Coptic-English glossary.

For Egyptian itself, there are more reprints. Many books by E.A. Wallis Budge are available from Dover, but they are grotesquely out of date and perhaps had better be avoided -- a generation or more of readers may be hopelessly confused by Budge's use of vowels. Better is Egyptian Hieroglyphic Grammar: With Vocabularies, Exercises, Chrestomathy (A First-Reader), Sign-List & Glossary by S.A. Mercer, reprinted from 1926 by Ares Publishers (Chicago).

Still without peer, and still in print, is Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar. A new grammar of similar quality, with vocabulary, James E. Hoch's Middle Egyptian Grammar [ISBN 0-920168-12-4], although "not entirely finished" and provided only in spiral binding, has now become available. However, my previous links to the publisher have gone off line. An address is available on the Web: Dr. James E. Hoch, Department of Near Eastern Studies, 4 Bancroft Ave., University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1, Canada; but I no longer find pages about James Hoch himself, and I cannot verify that he is still at the University of Toronto or that his book is still available.

I have also just obtained A Late Egyptian Grammar, produced posthumously from the materials of the great Egyptologist Jaroslav Cerný by Sarah Israelit Groll and Christopher Eyre [Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, Roma, 1993]. This treatment looks grammatically thorough, exhaustive, and exhausting, but doesn't have a vocabulary list.

We now have an entirely new grammar from James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian, An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs [Cambridge, Second Edition, 2010]. This a very full and modern treatment, with a sign list and vocabulary as in Gardiner. At the end of the book, in "Theory" (pp.416-420), Allen even gets into the intriguing controversy about the multiple moods, aspects, and even voices that the loss of vowels has concealed in the same basic s d m.f Egyptian verb form. The difficulty of discerning these forms has been a matter of inference, speculation, and dispute for most of the last century. This is a salutary lesson in the difficulties that are faced when only a fragment of the spoken language is preserved in the writing system.

Since obtaining Allen's book, several valuable sources have snuck up on me, all by Bill Petty, Ph.D., namely the Egyptian Glyphary, A Sign List Based Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Middle Egyptian [Museum Tours Press, Littleton, Colorado, 2012], the Hieroglyphic Dictionary, A Middle Egyptian Vocabulary [Museum Tours Press, Littleton, Colorado, 2012], and the English to Middle Egyptian Dictionary, A Reverse Hieroglyphic Vocabulary [Museum Tours Press, Littleton, Colorado, 2016]. These are very fine and useful books, nicely produced. Petty has produced a fourth book, with Kevin L. Johnson, Ph.D., The Names of the Kings of Egypt, The Serekhs and Cartouches of Egypt's Pharaohs, along with selected Queens [Museum Tours Press, Littleton, Colorado, 2011, 2012]. I have been actively using this book, along with the dictionaries, to help with the presentation of Egyptian history in these pages.

There is a curious annoyance from which James Allen seems to suffer. Speaking of the terminology that is derived from the word "hieroglyph" ( ἱερογλυφή , a word that, as such, does not seem to be attested in Greek, although γλυφή , "glyph," is, just meaning "carving"), Allen says, "Each sign in this system is a hieroglyph, and the system as a whole is called hieroglyphic (not 'hieroglyphics')" [p.2]. Indeed, I do not see Gardiner using the word "hieroglyphics," but he does not make an issue of it.

For myself, I do not see the harm, or the point. If in Greek we would say, τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα , tà hieroglyphikà grámmata, "the hieroglyphic letters" (attested usage), the word hieroglyphiká is a neuter plural which, just as φυσικά , physiká, is traditionally rendered as "physics" (or Athênai as "Athens," Vlaanderen as "Flanders"), could naturally be expressed as "hieroglyphics" -- in fact just what we see in common usage, and as I have previously done on this page.

This usage did not come out of nowhere. While "physic" and "physics" can both be nouns in English, with different meanings, "hieroglyphic" and "hieroglyphics" look more like the adjective ( ἱερογλυφικός ) and the noun, respectively; but there is no reason why they should not both be nouns, with the former used by the informed and the latter by the ignorant -- which seems to be what Allen is saying.

But this is not a matter of edifying dispute or reasonable insistence, and Allen is the first scholar I have noticed who seems to be bothered by it, without, however, explaining where such erroneous usage would come from. This may be right up there with snobbery about the millennium, and we might assume some snobbery ourselves, if this means that Allen doesn't know his Greek. Also, since the word "hierogylphics" obviously has been used by many, I would ask Allen, "What is the proper use of it?" In other words, is he saying that the word "hieroglyphics" ( ἱερογλυφικά ) doesn't exist, has no meaning, and consequently has no use? How about "physics"? "ethics"?

Or, if Allen knows his Greek, he may just be thinking of an expression like ἡ ἱερογλυφικὴ γλῶσσα , "the hieroglypic language." This would get us "hieroglyphic" for the whole system. But if that is what he meant, he should have explained it.

A vast graphic type font set for Egyptian and the hieroglyphic text processing programs "Glyph for Windows" and "MacScribe" used to be available on line at The Extended Library, but the site no longer seems to exist. The font set itself, which uses the same classification system as Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, was accessible at a French site, Hieroglyphica ("Hieroglyphics"?!); but the page has now gone dead. I do not know where the original Publications Interuniversitaires de Recherches Egyptologiques Informatisees [edited by Nicolas Grimal, Jochen Hallof, Dirk van der Plas, Utrecht, Paris 1993] has moved. This is one problem with the Internet, where things seem to just disappear -- unlike this page, which has had the same URL since it was first posted in 1997.

The following table presents and discusses the alphabetic hieroglyphic signs in the order of phonetic type used by scholars. A number of the sounds do not exist in languages like English but still do exist in Arabic, which is distantly related to Egyptian: So Egyptians today can still vocalize sounds from the ancient language that otherwise would be unpronounceable in other modern languages. When I visited Egypt, Egyptian guides who could read hieroglyphics appeared to enjoy using the sounds that they could pronounce but that many European tourists had never heard before. Terms for the sounds are those used in the Phonetic Symbol Guide, by Geoffrey K. Pullum and Willian A. Ladusaw [University of Chicago Press, 1986]. The discussion of the glyphs is mainly based on Gardiner. A recent technical discussion of Egyptian phonology (and grammar) may be found in Ancient Egyptian, A linguistic introduction, by Antonio Loprieno [Cambridge University Press, 1995].

The use of numbers for some of the sounds below comes from the manuals of spoken Lebanese Arabic that I encountered when I arrived in Lebanon in 1969. Otherwise, I have not seen this device used for Egyptian, despite its convenience -- although now I see that sometimes Canadian "First Nation" languages use numbers for their sounds. Otherwise, since I first put this page together, I have found that many sounds can be represented with Unicode symbols. Indeed, there is a Unicode Block (the "Latin Extended-D, U+A720") that contains symbols specific for Ancient Egyptian. However, computers and smart phones do not always contain the fonts to support these symbols. Where the symbol cannot be displayed, the browsers will show a little square containing the four digit hex code for the symbol, or a little rectangle with an "x" in it. In time, everyone's fonts will hopefully be updated.

Note that audio files are large and, with slow connections, may take some time to load.

The picture of a vulture, this represents the sound of a "glottal stop" (or "glottal plosive"), which is a brief closing of the wind pipe, like a little cough. This is the Hebrew aleph, the Arabic hamza, or the English Cockney pronunciation of "t" in "bottle." A special symbol is used for this in transcription type fonts for Egyptian. In ASCII text, I use the number "3." This can also be represented by the glottal stop IPA symbol ʔ. The traditional Egyptological symbol, which looks a bit like a "3," now is the Unicode symbol ꜣ. Loprieno (p. 31) points out that 3 corresponds to an r in Semitic languages and so, for an uncertain period of Egyptian history, may have been some version of an r ("a uvular trill") in Egyptian. Now Hoch emphatically denies that 3 was ever a glottal stop (p. 9) but gives no reference. The picture of a flowering reed, this was originally a "y" (palatal glide) and could still be written that way (or the German version of a "y", j). The special symbol often used for this sound, however, is the letter "i" with an apostrophe instead of the dot. The "y" in Egyptian was so weak that it was rarely pronounced. Words beginning with "y," like the name of the god Amon, simply begin with vowels in the evidence of vocalization that we have. How this contrasts with 3 is a good question -- Hoch simply says that's what it can be; but some languages, like Hawaiian, make a real distinction between words or syllables beginning with a glottal stop and words or syllables beginning with vowels. We don't have enough evidence about Ancient Egyptian to know if that was the case there. In ASCII, it will be necessary to use "y," a question mark, "?," which is used for a glottal stop in some systems for Arabic, or perhaps the number "7." The question mark is based on the IPA symbol ʔ. For the Egyptian "i" with the apostrophe, it can be made with Unicode combining form, "i͗," or there is now a Unicode symbol ꞽ, which is new and not supported by many fonts. The Egyptians wrote the previous letter twice in certain contexts. Since this was usually at the end of a word, it has been argued that this is the same usage as in Hebrew or Arabic ( ) and that it actually represents the vowel of a long "i." It is hard to argue with this. Where "yy" is usually written inside words, as in the Demotic word for "Greek," Wynn, which is clearly from "Ionian," there is little doubt that a long "i" is meant. In transcription, "yy" is usually written "y" (in contrast to the "i" + apostrophe for "y") -- or "jj" if "j" is used for the undoubled sound. These are noncommital on the issue of the letter being a vowel. The picture of a forearm, this represents a strongly guttural consonant, the

ʿayn in Arabic. The throat contracts but does not close (a voiced pharyngeal fricative). Egyptians today have no trouble with this, but it is a sound that does not occur in Indo-European languages (unless the Caucasus-Indo-European hypothesis is correct, and ʿayn is one of the famous lost laryngeals) and has disappeared from other Semitic languages, as it did from Coptic. Transcription type fonts represent this with a large apostrophe that is concave to the right, like a pried open "c." This can be represented with the IPA symbol ʕ, and there is now a Unicode symbol, ꜥ, for the traditional Egyptological symbol. As in some systems for Arabic, we can use the number "9." The picture of a quail chick, this is simply a "w" (labial glide). However, like "y," the "w" has become very weak and sometimes disappears. While it is tempting and sometimes compelling to read it in some contexts as a vowel, as in the name of the builder of the Great Pyramid, kh wfw, "Khufu," we usually don't have any evidence about that. "W" is written "ou" in Coptic, but this is because there is no "w" in Greek and "ou" can make do. When it is followed by a vowel, there is not much ambiguity. Thus, , w sh b, "answer" in Egyptian, is ouô sh eb or wô sh eb, , in Coptic. Similarly, , "The One" (female, for a goddess) in Egyptian, is in Coptic. The picture of a foot, this is a "b" (voiced bilabial stop/plosive). B's in Egyptian often correspond to m's in Hebrew or Arabic. Thus the root , slm in Arabic or , sh lm in Hebrew, "peace," "to be healthy," etc., is



in Egyptian. Similarly, b's in such Semitic languages can turn up as m's in Egyptian: Rmnn for Lbnn, "Lebanon." The picture of a stool, this is a "p" (unvoiced bilabial stop). Note that p doesn't exist in Classical Arabic, which means that words from Coptic like "pa" ("the") turn up as "ba" in Arabic. The picture of a horned viper, this an an "f" (voiceless labiodental or bilabial fricative). The picture of an owl, this is an "m" (bilabial nasal resonant). The picture of water, this is an "n" (alveolar nasal resonant). The picture of a mouth, this is an "r" (a resonant whose varieties can no longer be determined for ancient Egyptian). Note that there is no l in Egyptian. Usually Egyptians just pronounced foreign l's as r's. When Greek names, like "Ptolemaios" or "Kleopatra," were later transcribed, the biliteral sign rw was used for "l." Loprieno (p. 31), however, advances the opinion that the contrast between r and l may not have been lost in all dialects of Egyptian, since independent l's emerge in Coptic and also seem to have been indicated by an nr "grapheme" in Late Egyptian texts that reflect the spoken language. The picture of a reed shelter in fields, this is a simple "h" (a voiceless glottal fricative). The picture of a wick of twisted flax, this represents another strongly guttural consonant, an h which, like 9 above, occurs with a strong contraction of the throat, but without voicing (a voiceless pharyngeal fricative). This is the letter ḥa in Arabic, another sound that Egyptians today can still pronounce without difficulty. It is not like the "ch" in "Channakah" in Ashkenazi Hebrew. This sound presents special difficult for ASCII representation. Some typescript systems for Arabic use a capital "H." Here I have continued with the use of numbers, and considering its similarity to the original glyph, the number 8 might be good. However, most fonts now support the common Unicode symbol for the Arabic letter, the "h" with underdot, ḥ. This is a picture that may be a placenta, because it is used to write "placenta," but it is hard to see how it is pictographic. It represents the sound kh which occurs in Hebrew and Arabic, in the German pronunciation of Nacht, or in the Scottish pronunciation of "Loch" (a voiceless velar fricative). The Greek letter χ can also be used for this. Kh is an adequate transcription, though underlined to emphasize that it is a digraph. On the other hand, the Unicode symbol ḫ fits right in with traditional Egyptological usage. The picture of "an animal's belly with teats," this represents a softer form of kh (a voiceless palatal instead of a velar fricative), as in the German pronunciation of ich (not German dialect pronunciations as ish). The Egyptians didn't always distinguish this from kh themselves. Ch could be used to transcribe it, if this weren't easily confused with tsh below. Basic HTML even allows us to duplicate the traditional Egyptological symbol, which is an " h " underlined. Now Hoch says that this simply has "an unknown value," but suggests it may have been like a Welsh ll -- where the tongue is placed to sound an l but then we try an English th [θ] instead -- it is sometimes written "fl" in English transcriptions of Welsh names, such as "Floyd" for "Lloyd." This is interesting, since the Welsh ll had also been suggested as the original pronunciation of the Arabic ḍâd -- a sound anciently identified as unique to and within Arabic, making Arabs the "sons of ḍâd," but now little different in articulation from several other Arabic phonemes. The picture of a piece of folded cloth, this is an "s" (voiceless alveolar fricative). In Old Egyptian this was contrasted with "z," and is in that context transcribed with an acute mark on top. Thus it was written as an "s" with a sort of accent, as "ś," a symbol we also see with Sanskrit, although not for the same value. In Middle Egyptian, however, both "s" and "z" were used to write "s's." The picture of a bolt, this was a "z" in Old Egyptian (voiced alveolar fricative). In Middle Egyptian, however, z came to be used to write s's. The picture of a pool, this was an "sh" just like in English, Hebrew, and Arabic (voiceless palato-alveolar fricative). The traditional Egyptological symbol, "š," is "s" with the familiar and beloved haček from Czech. The picture of a hill-slope, this was like the qaf in classical Arabic (voiceless uvular stop/plosive). That is a "k" that is pronounced at the soft palate, at the back of the mouth, rather than on the hard palate, further forward, as a "k" normally is. This is no longer pronounced different from a "k" in Hebrew, but most Arabs can pronounce it properly, even though there are dialect variations in spoken Arabic: Sometimes it is replaced by a glottal stop (in Lebanon and Egypt itself); and in the Gulf it is voiced (a voiced uvular plosive), like a "g" pronounced on the soft palate, as it is in Persian (initial position only), which borrowed it from Arabic. In Coptic it became a "k." Despite the easy availability and appropriateness of "q," the traditional Egyptological symbol is a "ḳ" with an underdot. The picture of a basket with handle, this is a regular "k" (voiceless velar stop/plosive). The picture of a stand for a jar, this is a "g," pronounced as a stop, like the English "g" in "gun" (voiced velar stop/plosive), not like the palatal affricative English "g" in "ginger, which is like the "j" in "jump" (a "dj" or "dzh"). The picture of a loaf, this is a "t" (voiceless dental or alveolar stop/plosive). The picture of a tethering rope, this is simple a "t" in Coptic, and has turned into a "t" in many Middle Egyptian words, but is thought to have been pronounced like the "ch" in English "church" earlier (voiceless palato-aveolar affricative). tsh would be good for transcription, but the traditional symbol is an underlined " t ." The picture of a hand, this is a "d" (voiced dental or alveolar stop/plosive). The picture of a snake, this has become a "d" or a "t" in Coptic, but is thought to have been a "j" as in the English "jump" earlier (voiced palato-aveolar affricative). The traditional transcription is an underlined " d ." The sound can correspond to a "j" (jîm) in Arabic. Thus, for the Arabic root mlj, "to suck" or "suckle," we find , "breast," in Old Egyptian. This had already become simply mnd in Middle Egyptian.

Since not everyone studying Egyptian, or even reading it professionally, wants to tangle with the problems of restoring its pronunciation, two convenient devices have been adopted:

Add "e's" where necessary. Thus, kh pr gets pronounced as kh eper, and nfr gets pronounced as nefer. Since few non-Arabists have occasion to learn to pronounce 3 and 9, just pretend they are the vowel "a." So r9, the sun or the sun god, Rê, gets pronounced ra. In context, this is unobjectionable, but as people have gradually gotten the idea that r9 was really pronounced ra, Alan Gardiner's own warning might be repeated (his italics): But it must never be forgotten that the vocalizations thus provided are purely artificial makeshifts and bear little or no relation, so far as the vowels are concerned, to the unknown original pronunciations as heard and spoken by the Egyptians themselves. [p. 28] This caution is never mentioned in public discourse, not even in documentaries about Egypt on cable televison, a few of which are good, but most of which are terrible, even shameful. Viewers should be able to easily recognize the breathless, "gee whiz" narration of the bad shows. It is annoying enough in its own right.