Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Maspero on
Egyptian
phonetics.
and
Ixii Introduction.
break off in the process of printing ; but I have retained a
for , a for D, h for and t for es* ; three of these, a, h and t,
1
A
are familiar to every student of Oriental languages. I have
rejected \ and I and '
;
and letters with lines or a semi-circle under
them, i.e., h, h, t, d, and s with an accent (s), I have eschewed
entirely for the reasons given in the following paragraphs.
Maspero with infinite pains collected in his Introduction
a V Etude de la Phonetique gyptienne, Paris, 1917, a number of
examples illustrating the various vowel sounds which the
Egyptians themselves gave to the signs %, ,
-irSs1
(]
1
and D. And
from his conclusions it is clear that even though we transliterate
*g\ by A, the A will not represent
all the various modified sounds
_CESS
which the human mouth can give to that letter 1
j and this is also
the case with fl and a. According to him the primitive phonetic
value of the sign (j
in Pyramid times was " un A moyen " like
the French A in patte, cage, that is to say, an A, or an open A
which borders on fi as in the popular pronunciation Montp^Lnasse
for MontpA.rnasse ; ">\ A is A grave bordering on O, as in the
popular Parisian pronunciations g(V for gAre, or in the English
All, wOs for
ze>As|
y = c, but does not correspond to it exactly and turns sometimes
D is A guttural which recalls the sound of
to the A aigu, and sometimes to the A grave. In fact, we see
that in archaic Egyptian " les phonemes varies de la langue
posterieure ne s'etaient pas produits encore, et qu'il n'y avait
sous chacun d'eux, ainsi que sous chacun des signes reconnus
pour consonnes par tous les savants J, a, *^, ^=^, rn> etc.,
qu'un phoneme unique, ou, si Ton veut, les groupes de nuances
vocaliques que nous avons 1'habitude de designer par un signe
unique." Accepting these conclusions heartily
it has seemed to
me quite unnecessary to use any other signs to represent Q
and o than a, a and a respectively.
1 " Si done nous disons que le signe A anglais figure une voyelle, il n'y a
pas de raison pour que les signes Ij, j^,
"
ne figurent pas des voyelles. Bien
entendu, je n'ai pas la prevention d'affirmer que, si ^^ par exemple sonnait A, il
n'y avait sous ce signe qu'un seul des A possibles. Comme chaque modification
de forme dans la bouche humaine produit une voyelle ou une nuance de voyelle
aussi
differente, le nombre des voyelles et de leurs nuances est tres considerable ;
les signes que nous appelons signes-voyelles communement A, E, I, etc., repr6-
sentent en r^alite" des groupes de nuances vocaliques differant tres legerement
1'une de 1'autre et Ton considerera les signes qui representent chacun d'eux,
,
(], ^^, en Egyptien comme couvrant chacun de ces groupes "
(p. 119).