applicable to Archaic, Old, Middle, and New stages of the language but with a preference for first two

motivation

Important as transliteration is for Egyptology, there is no one standard scheme in use for hieroglyphic and hieratic texts.¹

a romanization is not a transliteration or transcription scheme, but it is important to point out that transcription in Egyptology is a nightmare

In transcription, ⟨a⟩, ⟨i⟩, and ⟨u⟩ all represent consonants.¹

aside from using vowel letters to represent consonants, many transliteration schemes use diacritics (like ṯ) for sounds that definitely have unused Latin alphabet counterparts and at the same time use a smattering of Demotic characters (like ꜣ)

i am sure this may have very nearly made sense at some point but it ceased to make sense over a century ago and has only gotten worse since then

the standard Egyptological pronunciation of these are themselves horrifically and knowingly incorrect, and in some cases diverge radically from even the well known later stages of the language

Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience, which is an artificial pronunciation and should not be mistaken for how Egyptian was ever pronounced at any time.¹

consonants

i am referring to my romanization system simply as "Local", as in localhost, meaning the one that i have made²

Erman Grapow is also known as Wörterbuch and variations on it are among the most common transcription systems in use internationally, the other two systems are ones i thought were useful

_{* Yes the glyph 𓊪 is just a small rectangle, it is not broken or missing (probably).}

the consonant values of Old Egyptian listed above are a composite from various sources, the exact realization is not essential to a transliteration scheme but do act as a guideline

yes there are three /j/ entries, again something that made sense a century ago, basically these are just the most common glyphs in Middle Egyptian called the Unilteral Signs and Egyptian dictionaries split signs up by these 26 categories, so it is important to list all of them in this order

vowels

vowels were not written for Egyptian until the advent of the Greek-derived Coptic scripts, however they have been reconstructed from the aforementioned as well as quotes and loanwords in other contemporary non-Egyptian scripts and should be used in the romanization

if you do not like the look of the doubled letters, you can leave them out - after all, the Egyptians did!

if at any point the vowels cannot be found in any reference material, it is permissible to use the traditional stand-in e

it is important to realize that /e/ was not present in Old Egyptian and may not have appeared until Late Egyptian thousands of years later

this system has a preference for Archaic, Early, and Middle Egyptian and by the time of Late Egyptian a lot of sounds had changed, so the above vowel table needs some tweaks in order to be used for romanizing newer words and pronunciations

the vowel systems are based on Loprrieno (1995), and he just calls them "earlier" and "later", and from the surrounding text it seems he is lumping Archaic/Early/Middle roughly into the former category and Late/Demotic into the latter

of course we know the vowels in the Coptic stage of Egyptian not just because they are written but because people still speak Coptic

design and guidelines

how

the primary goal is to have a system which is reasonably representative of Egyptian pronunciation that is typeable using commonly available keyboards without using a compose key or custom keyboard map

• ASCII-only
• no vowels for consonants (y and w notwithstanding)
• all 24 sounds of Old/Middle Egyptian must be distinct
• digraphs are allowed but not preferred
• minimum novelty - try to use the best from available systems

why

the transcription scheme which i have seen which most closely matches my criteria is the Manuel de Codage scheme developed in 1988 for use with computer transcriptions

the second scheme i found useful was from Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge from 1910 from which i borrowed some digraphs

there are only 4 unique innovations in my romanization, and one of them is very small:

• using y for the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʔ/ represented by 𓂝 instead of ꜥ or some variation on a
  • in several other systems y is used for one of the various /j/ glyphs, but it is random, and i opted to not distinguish any of them except the double reed 𓇌 as jj
• the biggest divergence from any standard is the usage of v for the voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ represented by 𓎛 instead of an h variation
  • this pairs quite nicely visually with y for the voiced counterpart, as is common in Latin script to add a stroke to indicated voicing /copium
  • while it may seem desirable to flip y and v so that v is for "voiced", to my ears the "swallowed" sound of the voiced phonation sounds a lot more like a y while the unvoiced phonation's raspiness is more evocative of v sounds
• using l for the voiced uvular trill /ʀ/ represented by 𓄿 instead of ꜣ, ɹ, or again some variation of a
  • in Old Egyptian reconstructions the original sound is known as "a liquid", which includes /l/ as a candidate, and in later stages of Egyptian this glyph may also have been used for /l/ so this works within continuity as well as /ʀ/ being a kind of l-ish sound anyway (as it shares a similar point of articulation which that is often allophonic with it)
• an extremely minor divergence is using ch for the palatal sound (either voice plosive /ɟ/ or unvoiced ejective /cʼ/ depending on the source) represented by 𓆓 instead of the tch as specified by Budge
  • this is simply to avoid the trigraph and because the sound is very similar to English standard ch's /t͡ʃ/
  • later stages of Egyptian do use a simple /t͡ʃ/ sound, so this is very appropriate

modes: transcription vs transliteration

see followup: transcription, transliteration, and you

1. quotes from wiktionary and wikipedia

2. should anyone wish to cite or credit this unique system, you may do so as qim. (2023, October 10). a complete pure-ASCII romanization for Egyptian. cohost. https://cohost.org/queerinmech/post/3306819-a-complete-pure-asci or simply Local (qim 2023)

📷By Hat Lion Photos