Phonemes and Transliteration

Phonemes

A spoken language consists of phonemes, which are units of sound that the speakers or listeners of that language hear as meaningfully different. In English, /b/ and /p/ are two distinct phonemes, because there are pairs of words that differ only by “b”/”p”, like “bat/pat”, “bin/pin”, “bane/pane”, and so on. All spoken languages (including Egyptian) have phonemes, but every language has a different set of them. Not every language has “th” as English does, for example.

Pronunciation

There’s one huge problem with pronouncing Egyptian: They did not write the vowels, only the consonants. A few of the symbols we call “consonants” probably indicated the presence of a vowel, but not which vowel it was.

Therefore, we can’t be certain what Egyptian sounded like. But Egyptologists and linguists have some pretty good ideas, thanks to reconstructions from two main sources:

1. The biggest source is Coptic, which is the last form of spoken Egyptian. This language is still used today by Coptic Orthodox Christians as a liturgical language (like Latin was traditionally used by Roman Catholic Christians). And fortunately, when Egyptian reached the Coptic stage, it was being written using an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet, which does include the vowels.
2. Another source consists of Egyptian names, when we find them written in other languages. For example, the Hittites’ script included vowels, and the Hittites had a lot of diplomatic dealings with the Egyptians. So we can find the names of some important Egyptians (mainly pharaohs) in Hittite archives. When we compare those to the Egyptian form of the names, we then have a clue as to how the vowels sounded.

My explanations of the sounds in the phoneme table below are somewhat simplified for the beginner. More accurate details can be found in Allen 2014 and Allen 2019.

Whenever I write the reconstructed pronunciation of an Egyptian word or phrase, I will follow a convention used by linguists and put an asterisk in front of it, like *saḏamnaf. This is to remind the reader that it’s only a reconstruction and not definite.

Transliteration

Since Egyptian was “deciphered” in 1822, different Egyptologists have used different choices of symbols to represent the phonemes of Egyptian. So the same piece of Egyptian might be transliterated jw=f ḥnꜥ nṯr.t jqr.t ꜥꜣ.t by one Egyptologist and ꞽw.f ḥnꜥ nṯrt ꞽḳrt ꜥꜣt by another. I use the system used in Allen 2014.

Conventional sounds

Since we can’t accurately recreate the original pronunciation, Egyptologists will use a sort of conventional pronunciation for the different phonemes, as described in the table below, adding the vowel “e” between consonants when necessary. For example, sḏm would usually be pronounced “sedjem”; ꜥnḫ as “ankh”, and jw as “yew”.

Punctuation

The Egyptians did not write spaces between words, and they did not include any symbols to separate a word root from its suffixes. But in transliteration, we use spaces and punctuation to help understand the words and parts of the words. Different transliteration schemes use dots, hyphens, or equals signs to break up parts of words or names. A string of text which is transliterated jw.f m ḥw.t could have been transliterated jwfmḥwt and it would, technically, be more accurate, but harder for Egyptologists to process.

Use of punctuation in these lessons

Until Leiden Unified Transliteration’s recommendations for punctuation are published and adopted, this is the scheme we will use on this site:

1. A dot appears whenever a suffix pronoun is used, or a suffix component is used on a verb, for example sḏm.ḫr.f or mjwt.s. This is a fairly standard practice and follows that of Allen 2014. In these lessons, those dots will appear all the time, even if that particular lesson is not about that feature.
2. When two words are conceptually bound together so closely that honorific transposition occurs, they will have a hyphen, for example ḥm-nṯr or ḥtp-dj-nsw. This will also be used in personal names even if honorific transposition does not occur: jmn-ḥtp, nsj-ḫnsw.
3. Some Egyptologists (e.g. the producers of Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae) consistently use dots to separate a noun’s root from its endings: ḥfꜣ.w, ḫft.j. Some (e.g. Allen) consistently do not: ḥfꜣw, ḫftj. I will use the dots when specifically focusing on nouns and their endings, but not in other lessons.

A new system called the Leiden Unified Transliteration was announced in August 2023 by the International Association of Egyptologists, but as of October 2024, some details of the system have either not been decided, or not published in any location I’ve been able to find.

According to the announcement, those details include “the use of diacritics (brackets and dots), the possible abandonment of capital letters, the possible systematic inclusion of the final weak radical of verbs, and other matters”. Once those details are available, I will review them and perhaps be updating these pages to conform with them.