Ingeniously Posed Queries
During the ongoing process of crafting this electronic memoir, your scribe has on occasion been asked questions relating to his life and work, as well as various and sundry other subjects, by visiting readers. Perusing other similar ventures in my wanderings about the Internet, I have noticed that many who embark upon this enterprise of public journaling include a section entitled a “FAQ,” short for “Frequently Asked Questions.” It seems to me, however, that mere repetition is an insufficient criterion for judging the worth of a question, as if quantity necessarily trumps quality in these situation. Thus, I have chosen to work under a different rubric: I shall answer those questions which interest me, regardless of who asks them, how often they are asked, or even whether they are asked at all.
Without further ado, I present my “IPQ,” or Ingeniously Posed Queries:
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What’s a Djehuty?
Ah, well, this once frequency matters; I hear this question so often that I simply must answer it first. A Djehuty is the same thing as a Thoth, only with better spelling. Djehuty was the name of the ancient Egyptian god in charge of scribes, writing, and the moon (the latter presumably because writers have always been the night-owl equivalent of daydreamers, prone to gazing out the window at whatever celestial body happens to be convenient). “Djehuty” is a good transliteration of the original Egyptian spelling of the name. He came to be known around the world as Thoth instead because, by the time the ancient Greeks wandered by and tried to guess the spelling, the pronunciation of the name had gotten a bit worn down with use.
Can you speak Egyptian?
No. No one can. Not even modern Egyptians — they speak Arabic. The problem with speaking Egyptian is that the ancient Egyptians didn’t bother recording their vowels. This isn’t as uncommon as one might think, and it’s only a bad idea if you’re planning ahead for when your language becomes a dead language. So, in the absence of vowels, those of us attempting to vocalize Egyptian resort to inserting schwa-sounds between consonants. Occasionally we’re fortunate enough to come across some Egyptian words or names written in a script that did record vowels, like Akkadian, and from that we know that Egyptian sounded much nicer than our attempts to splice it together with linguistic duct tape. But we still cannot speak it, alas.
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It’s a bit spartan at the moment, but more questions shall be added over time. Should any reader wish to hasten this process, the comment section is available for all such activities, answers to be provided at the sole discretion of the proprietor.