About of this research
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
(cf. Nom en hieroglyphes), or who are simply told that the name of the
Egyptian sun god is "Ra" -- the pronunciation we find in the recent
entertaining but historically absurd movies Stargate (1994) and The
Mummy (1999). Well, "ra" may be Tahitian for
"sun," but it is not Ancient Egyptian.