Talk:ⲃⲛⲛⲉ

Pronunciation

The reason i'm deleting coptic pronunciations is that they're highly speculative, and often wrong, like in this case, for example was /βənˈneʔ/; the bohairic and fayyumic versions with final -i show that the stressed syllable was the first one, a more probable pronunciation would be */ˈβn̩ne/ - I dont know how you can assume a schwa or a glottal stop in the end, or even in the middle as i have seen; I'm assuming that the Coptic and Egyptian pronunciations are being derived from Loprieno's reconstructions - which can be, to say the least, quite absurd, like his idea that there was little variation between the dialects and that the spelling differences were mere conventions, which is basically the same as me saying that Spanish and Portuguese are pronounced the same way. Or his insistence that initial j was acually /j/ and not /ʔ/, giving rise to unnecessary complicated reconstructions like this current one /juχ/ → /juχ/ → /ʔuχ/ → /ʔøχ/ for jḫ, where a much simple and straightforward reconstruction would be */ʔix/, which accounts for all the descendents very simply (short "i" becomes "a" in Bohairic and Sahidic and "e" in the other dialects). I also feel very tempted to delete all Egyptian IPA reconstruction that i come accross, but i havent yet because i'm thinking of proposing an alternative, non IPA based way of representing the reconstructed pronunciations. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 23:40, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: Well, have you seen the Old Chinese reconstructions on Wiktionary? There are pronunciations according to authors’ POVs. We might give have to give palettes or spectrums of Coptic pronunciations, though I don’t find them as useful as I have found Egyptian pronunciations. Vorziblix put in the effort and it occasionally reminds us that it was a real language. It is a bit of standard-setting and priorities to do it right more than a problem per se. Like reconstructions of whole words and languages. It would be inconsistent to do these but not pronunciations of actually attested languages when possible. Fay Freak (talk) 20:01, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

My main problem resides in using IPA, which is very specific, when describing a dead language whose specific phonetic details we're not sure about. For instance, I'd have no problem in, say, representing the reconstructed pronunciation of the words sn and snt as *san and *sānat, respectively, which were almost certainly pronounced that way, with the advantage of lacking the phonetic specificity of using IPA symbols. For instance, using this non-IPA system, in the case of such consonants as ꜣ, the same egyptological symbol would be used for the reconstructions instead of the currently used "ʁ", which is highly speculative and, honestly, highly unlikely in my opinion (besides Loprieno, I'm not aware of any other egyptologist who gives this pronunciation for that symbol). And don't even get me started on the reconstructions for old Chinese (and proto-Sino-Tibetan, in general), which are so absurd that I'm surprised they are even taken seriously by the linguistics comunity. In fact, I don't even think we can scientificaly prove that proto-Sino-Tibetan is a valid proto-language, since many of the reconstructions are based on many unexplained variable forms. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 21:32, 24 August 2024 (UTC)