Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/30

 were set, sat, seta, sota, etc., or este, usot, etc., since there is absolutely nothing to suggest the true pronunciation "street." A great part of the Egyptian vocabulary is known only in this way, and in many instances we must make the words pronounceable by arbitrarily assigning vowel sounds, etc., to them. Accordingly I have thought it better to follow popular mispronunciations like Nut than to try Newet, Neyewet, and other unsafe attempts, and even elsewhere I have sacrificed correctness to simplicity where difficulty might be experienced by a reader unfamiliar with some Oriental systems of writing. It should be borne in mind that Sekhauit and Uzoit, for example, might more correctly be written S(e)kh}ewyet, Wezoyet, and that e is often used as a mere filler where the true vowel is quite unknown.

Sometimes we can prove that the later Egyptians themselves misread the imperfect hieroglyphs, but for the most part we must retain these mispronunciations, even though we are conscious of their slight value. All this will explain why any two Egyptologists so rarely agree in their transcriptions. Returning in despair to old-fashioned methods of conventionalizing transcription, I have sought to escape these difficulties rather than to solve them.

In the transliteration kh has the value of the Scottish or German ch; h is a voiceless laryngeal spirant—a rough, wheezing, guttural sound; q is an emphatic k, formed deep in the throat (Hebrew ); ‘ is a strange, voiced laryngeal explosive (Hebrew ); ț is an assibilated t (German z); z is used here as a rather inexact substitute for the peculiar Egyptian pronunciation of the emphatic Semitic ṣ (Hebrew, in Egyptian sounding like ṭṣ, for which no single type can be made).

For those who may be unfamiliar with the history of Egypt it will here be sufficient to say that its principal divisions (disregarding the intermediate periods) are: the Old Empire (First to Sixth Dynasties), about 3400 to 2500 ; the Middle Empire (Eleventh to Thirteenth Dynasties), about 2200 to