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How is the ancient Egyptian name Merit / Meryt / Mery pronounced?
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From what I understand, nobody knows exactly how Ancient Egyptians pronounced their vowels, so it's impossible to know the "correct" pronunciation. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language).
That being said, in English the transliteration of name should probably be pronounced phonetically: [meh-reet].
That being said, in English the transliteration of name should probably be pronounced phonetically: [meh-reet].
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Thanks for the link. Doing some more digging, I found more links:
http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm
http://www3.telus.net/public/sjfryer/Egypt/pronunciation1.html
Here's what I've learned
Egytologists have an "easy" way of transliterating names, inserting vowels or assuming certain glyphs are vowels, whether or not they actually are. So pronouncing Merit as "MER-eet" comes from this method. But this method rarely produces authentic pronunciations, and Egyptologists know this. They actually know a lot more about the actual pronunciations than that.
mrit, mryt, and mry would have been the respective direct transliterations of Merit, Meryt, and Mery, I think. As far as I can tell, their pronunciations in Old Egyptian would actually have been something close to MAR-yat, MAR-reet, and MAR-ree respectively, using the pronunciation key of this site.
Edited the pronunciations, I was interpreting the IPA symbols wrong. (ma:r-yat, ma:r-ri:t, ma:r-ri:)
PS: "-t" seems to be a feminine suffix, which implies that mrit/mryt would be used in feminine names, and mry would be used in masculine names.
http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm
http://www3.telus.net/public/sjfryer/Egypt/pronunciation1.html
Here's what I've learned
Egytologists have an "easy" way of transliterating names, inserting vowels or assuming certain glyphs are vowels, whether or not they actually are. So pronouncing Merit as "MER-eet" comes from this method. But this method rarely produces authentic pronunciations, and Egyptologists know this. They actually know a lot more about the actual pronunciations than that.
mrit, mryt, and mry would have been the respective direct transliterations of Merit, Meryt, and Mery, I think. As far as I can tell, their pronunciations in Old Egyptian would actually have been something close to MAR-yat, MAR-reet, and MAR-ree respectively, using the pronunciation key of this site.
Edited the pronunciations, I was interpreting the IPA symbols wrong. (ma:r-yat, ma:r-ri:t, ma:r-ri:)
PS: "-t" seems to be a feminine suffix, which implies that mrit/mryt would be used in feminine names, and mry would be used in masculine names.
This message was edited 6/6/2016, 10:29 AM
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