Talk:jsqꜣrwnj

Transliteration

@Vorziblix: Shouldn't the lion be read as l here rather than as rw? --WikiTiki89 20:25, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

@Wikitiki89: The lion would most likely represent underlying /l/ here. However, that phoneme wasn’t consistently represented in writing but was variously rendered by rw, n, r, ꜣ, nr, etc., so that for many words there’s no way to tell if /l/ was meant or not. (There’s also dialectal variation to deal with; some dialects probably had no /l/, while some others (Fayyumic) pronounced every r as /l/.) For that reason the most common Egyptological convention is just to transliterate according to the writing in all such cases rather than using an l in transliteration, even when we know there was probably an /l/ there. So, for example, ns (“tongue”) rather than *ls, ꜣꜥꜥ (“to gibber”) rather than *lꜥꜥ.

This is all complicated by the fact that foreign loanwords weren’t really written the same way as native words. In native words, only the consonants were represented; in loanwords, a special system called ‘group writing’ was used, which attempted to represent full syllables, including vowels, with specific combinations of consonantal signs. Some authors do transliterate the lion as l in the context of group writing, since it often represents foreign /l/ with a following back vowel. (On the other hand, it also often represents /r/ + back vowel, and Hoch transliterates it as ru₂ in his Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period.) On Wiktionary we’ve so far just treated group writing the same as native writing for the purpose of transliteration, which would give us jsqꜣrwnj. We could always change this if we decide to develop/adopt a separate standard for group writing (Hoch’s system, for example, would give us ʾas-qa-ru₂-ni). — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 21:43, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for the explanation. --WikiTiki89 21:47, 22 August 2017 (UTC)