Hey, as usual when I finally get to my journal I'm too tired and in a hurry to give a full account, but...

Please direct your browsers to this link. Note especially, but not exclusively, the entry titled "The Medinet-Hubbu Cippus."

Wait... pleading!? That's not what happened!

I've submitted (with their permission) a corrected version due to some minor typos, but they haven't put it up yet. Still, if you spot any mistakes, it's fair game to mention them here.

And bonus points if you can explain the pun in the title.

I have no idea what this is, but the hieroglyphic text says:

Wn-pw sx^c.t nds.t
"Once upon a time there was a little rabbit..."

These happen to be the opening words of Peter Rabbit. Of course, there are four little rabbits, but they cut off the Egyptian text before the numeral, so I guess you only take one small rabbit or something.

I still don't get it.

!!!!!.

(thanks to poldy)

Reconstructing the pronunciation of a dead language is always tricky, and this is especially true in the case of Egyptian. Egyptian was written without vowels, and we do not have a continuous reading tradition (as we do with Biblical Hebrew and Classical Arabic) to enlighten us. Furthermore, the later in history we go the less accurately the written forms of the words represent even the consonantal structure of the language, as writing tended to represent the language as it was pronounced a millennium or two previously. We do have ways of surmounting these problems (e.g. Coptic, transcriptions of Egyptian in other languages, etc.), but few people, even among Egyptologists, seem to be seriously interested in this. As a result, Egyptian words are usually pronounced using an ad hoc system that basically boils down to inserting an e between each consonant: xpr => kheper, nfr => nefer and so on.

A while back, Languagehat asked me to recommend a book on the pronunciation of Egyptian and I told him I would post a short bibliography in my journal. I've finally gotten around to that now. Since this is meant more as a resource than a journal entry, I plan on updating it as I learn more. Obviously this list is nowhere near complete, so if you know about this subject, feel free to suggest sources I don't have listed (or to make more general comments and criticisms).

Since most of my readers are neither Egyptologists nor linguists, the bibliography itself is behind an ( lj-cut )