Module talk:egy-pron-Egyptological

A few improvements

@Vorziblix, this is a cool module you've made, and I hope you don't mind my playing around with it. I had some suggestions/questions for you, if that's alright:

• Will/can you going to add more automatic pronunciation? If so, I think you should just rename this to Mod:egy-pron.
• Do you think we can realistically provide syllabification for these words? It seems doable.
• Are there accentuation conventions we can add in?
• Could you create an appendix describing the anglicization process to which we can link?

Thanks! —*i̯óh₁nC^[5] 22:53, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

@JohnC5: I don’t mind you changing it at all; this is pretty much my first foray into Lua, so it’s rather clumsily done and I’m sure it could be greatly improved. Regarding your questions:

• I doubt any more automatic pronunciation can be added as far as Egyptian goes; the reconstructed pronunciations definitely need manual input.
• Syllabification should theoretically be possible. However, syllabification rules are apparently not consistent throughout the Egyptological community; in particular, Schenkel in his Tübinger Einführung in die klassisch-ägyptische Sprache und Schrift specifically says that in Germany German syllabification rules play a role in determining which /uː/s and /i(ː)/s become /w/s and /j/s when adjacent to other vowels. In this module I’ve just left them as /uː/s and /i(ː)/s, as it’s meant to represent a more international standard, as the choice between uː/w and i(ː)/j seems to vary a lot by individual Egyptologist (even in Germany they’re often pronounced indiscriminately as vowels), and as I don’t really know what the rules for German syllabification are in any case.
  Ignoring the issue of uː/w and i(ː)/j, syllabification is easy: each vowel gets a syllable, a preceding consonant is assigned to the vowel immediately following, and then the remaining consonants are assigned to the vowel immediately preceding; that is, all syllables are V, CV, VC, or CVC, with a preference for CV over VC or CVC. (The exception is the word ꜥnḫ, which forms a VCC syllable /ɑːnx/.)
• Stress is unfortunately not automatically predictable. It’s usually on the first syllable, but if there’s a prefix s- the stress falls on the first syllable after the prefix, and if the word is a verb with an inflectional suffix the stress often instead shifts to the first syllable of the suffix. But some words normally have second-syllable stress, and some inflections with suffixes tend to not change the stress. There’s also a large amount of variation between individual Egyptologists, making it difficult to pin down any universal rules (according to Carsten Peust, about half of the Egyptologists he surveyed pronounce sšt with stress on the first syllable, and half on the second; likewise with mswt; etc.).
• I’ll begin work on an appendix.

Thanks for helping to improve this! — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:27, 4 January 2018 (UTC)