News & Blog
Storylines Festival
News, Ramose | Posted by Carole on Wednesday 18 June 2008
I have just returned home after a hectic week or so in New Zealand at the Storylines Festival. I appeared at free Family Days in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, along with well-known UK author and illustrator Babette Cole and many NZ authors and illustrators including Margaret Mahy, Joy Cowley, Gavin Bishop and Kyle Mewburn.
The Family Days had a full program of authors talking about their books, book readings, illustrators creating. There were activities for kids to take part in, and theatre performances by some school groups, based on visiting authors’ books. Students from Auckland Normal Intermediate and Heaton Intermediate School did terrific performances from my book Ramose: Prince in Exile.
Here are some photos I took.
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- Babette Cole and I
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- Students from St Albans School Bicultural Group performing Kapa Haka
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- Olivia, Liam, Sam and Jack. Students from Heaton Intermediate School performing excerts from Ramose:Prince in Exile
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- Ramose in Auckland Normal Intermediate School's Ramose: Prince in Exile performance.
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- Schoolroom scene from Ramose performance.
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- Me with the cast of Auckland Normal Intermediate's Ramose performance.
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- Ramose, Hatshepsut and me.
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- Dragon's eye view of the South Island.
Comments (7)
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.