Prounouncing Egyptian Names

Featured Post, History, Ramose | Posted by Carole on Monday 16 July 2007

I had an enquiry recently about how the names in my Ramose series should be pronounced. Amanda from black dog books thought it would be good to have a pronunciation guide like the one at the back of Dragonkeeper.

It’s not as easy as that though. No one knows what the language of the ancient Egyptians sounded like. The language is only known from written sources (which no one knew how to read until 18th century, but that’s another story). Also, when they wrote, the ancient Egyptians tended to leave out the vowels (a, e, i, o, u). So Ramose would have been written “rms”. The way we pronounce these ancient words today has come about through some clever guesswork.

I think the name most people have trouble with is Hatshepsut. They read it as they would read an English word, and think that the “tsh” should be pronounced together. It is in fact three separate syllables Hat-shep-sut. Easy.

Ramose should be pronounced Ra-mos-a, but lots of people tend to treat the “e” as a silent e.

I’m no expert on the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian words, so I could be saying them wrong too, but my advice is to split them up into syllables. So Tutankhamun is Tut-ankh-amun, Mutnofret is Mut-no-fret. I hope that helps.

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Han Dynasty Dragon

Dragonkeeper Trilogy, Featured Post, Writing | Posted by Carole on Wednesday 4 July 2007

A while back Jenny emailed me asking how I imagined the dragons in my Dragonkeeper books would look. I told her that I had been inspired by a Han dynasty painting of a dragon. I thought other readers might be interested to see it. It is quite different to the usual images of Chinese dragons that we see.

This dragon looks a lot friendlier, I think. Almost like it’s smiling. And most importantly, it’s got wings. Normally Chinese dragons don’t have wings. I didn’t imagine that Danzi was as skinny as this dragon.

This image is a section of a painting on silk found in a Han dynasty tomb. It’s more than 2000 years old.

(Image from Zhongguo kao gu da fa xian by Gong Liang, Shandong hua bao chu ban she, 1999)

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New children’s art added

Website | Posted by Webmaster on Tuesday 3 July 2007

New artwork from Moreton Bay College in Queensland has been added to the art page.

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