What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like (and How We Know)

For most of us, ancient Egyptian is a highly visual language represented by the familiar hieroglyphs left behind on monuments, papyrus documents, and even sarcophagi. But of course it was a spoken language as well…and linguists even have a good idea of what it sounded like. As NativLang’s Josh Rudder explains in this video, by studying the language family that ancient Egyptian descended from, the languages that evolved from it (like Coptic), and languages it traded words with, researchers have been able to determine how many ancient Egyptian words were pronounced.

For more, you can check out Rudder’s extensive list of sources, notes, and quotes related to the video. (via open culture)

• Egypt
• Josh Rudder
• language
• video