Comments by "Kasumi Rina" (@KasumiRINA) on "What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like - and how we know" video.

  1.  @gavinbkr10  it's also why there's a problem translating names, Lili would be リリ (Riri) in Japanese. They also don't have a "v" sound, and the only consonant words can end is n. so Lina Inverse would be リナ・インバース (Rina Inbasu). "U" is often silent'ISH, so you have words ending with consonants having it added all the time. But at least using katakana script you can be sure how to read and transliterate foreign names, each character for a syllable. In Chinese the problem is they don't HAVE any phonetic writing system. They have to use actual characters that have meaning to translate words and they often don't match real sounds too. America is 美国 (Meiguo - beautiful country), Ukraine is 乌克兰 (Wu Ke Lan - darkness vanquishing orchid), getting the R/L swap but using the words sounding close-ish for name, instead of by meaning. Though I think does have "Er" and "Ri" sounds used in some cases... 日本(Ri Ben - Japan isn't translated but just read with Chinese rules)... AND then again, Chinese isn't really one language but multiple different pronunciations like Mandarin, Cantonese etc.; one of them actually pronounced the sound spelled by "R" in pinyin closer to J or Cyrillic Ж, so L is closer than THEIR version of R. It's headache inducing!
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  2. Hieroglyphs are similar to consonant-only languages like Hebrew or Arabic, where you don't REALLY know how to read half of the words, because that character standing for W might mean Oo, might be Ee and might be silent. It depends on context in a lot of times.
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  3. I mean, you have at least... three... four... accents for London alone? Working class Cockney, the BBCTV-approved received pronounciation, and Posh used by wankers... I also heard about Estuary dialect? And this is ONE CITY. Assuming that Upper, Lower and Middle Egypt had the same pronunciations throughout 1000s of years of Old or New Kingdom would be a Nile-long stretch. I bet Luxor would have very different speech from Faiyum, from Cairo, from Sinai.
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  4. ​ @katherineler5884  I think we can use related languages as a base. At least Afro-Asiatic consonant-only systems like Hebrew and Arabic. We know that some of their consonants often stand it for a vowel, and others almost never do.
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