#im going to keep using kemet/ic because its the modern standard ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[sandandlightning]

Okay well, I just got keikaku means plan'd by, I shit you not, a video game deciding to liberally use ancient Egyptian. It's uh... Been interesting. I'm a little in pain tbh.

But I am going to use the opportunity to share some research/a hot take on a hot take!

the thing that really is getting me is this recent assertain that Kemet is a WHOLLY INCORRECT PRONUNCIATION and the ACTUAL ONE is... *Checks notes* ...kumat. (spoilers they're both technically wrong ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯)

So we use Kemet a lot. Here's the thing. Most Egypt writing systems didn't really do vowels so a literal transliteration of a hieroglyph is kmt. (Which is what the game is using which they really shouldn't be because it's not actually legible this is like a mid point for people romanizing something but anyway >>)

The reason we know what ancient Egyptian words sounded like is Coptic! This was more an every day system of writing (also later but we gotta take that) opposed to hieroglyphs. Right? Cool. It's kinda close ish to Greek. Like... Greek letters, but to the left.

And you might be thinking 'but if we have the Coptic name, we know how it's pronounced right?' well yes, but actually no, because sometimes people decide they've discovered something new about a dead language. Sometimes they are right, sometimes... Not so much.

In two versions of Coptic we got ⲭⲏⲙⲓ and ⲕⲏⲙⲉ.

So the x guy is (xehanort VC) like Greek chi and in this case K. The h is eeeeeeeeeeee like cheese. The m is fucking m- you can use this one to be asthetique. And the I is 'ih' like bit and the E is 'eh' like bet. Whith eh and ih bing very close.

So fun fact a t at the end of a word in Egyptian is often silent, so uh, if your wondering where that went, that's why.

So we're looking at something pretty close to the modern colonial Kemet. We drop the t and make the first e long and get keeme or kime or however ur gonna spell it.

BUT THEN IN 1997 SOME PEOPLE WROTE A BOOK

And in that book they were like, what if all the Coptic letters like X and Ø (theda basically) that have like, hint of hint of h COMPLETELY CHANGED THE VOWEL SOUND, INSTEAD OF ADDING HINT OF HINT OF H.

Mind you, they literally, in the book, don't even assert this as fact, but a strong possibility. They also use the word Kemet as an example and hit it extra hard for reason I don't understand after reading more of said book and other information on phonics and Coptic (by which I mean they change Khe- to ku but ALSO meh to mat and I am seriously confused where the t is coming from in this case, bc there is no t in the Coptic just the hieroglyph or hieratic. All other examples only change the first syllable.)

Oh and this is only addressing an older form of Coptic. A later one it is ⲕⲏⲙⲉ which like, there's no room for argument there. It's k-eeeee-m-eh keemeh/kime depending on where u are in the world and how you write it long eeeees

Anyway after this dropped a bunch of people started going 'um akchthuallyy' about the modern kemet romanization (which is not perfect admittedly, but like, it's close, recognizable, and easy to say) and even more recently we have... People accusing like... Only ignorant white people™ of using Kemet and not knowing it's 'kumat'?? Which????? I hate to break it to u friends, but the authors who came up with that pronunciation are also white people so?????

Anyway, this game I'm playing, I think, refused to put vowels in because they saw one wiki reference asserting a different pronunciation and went 'well, that's dicy, better just leave it out and offer two pronunciation' neither of which would technically be right because... They gave Kemet and Kumat. They also frequently replace arbitrary words with old Egyptian and have the translation with alt text and I am literally losing sleep over it, so here we are.

Enjoy... Very random prompted Egyptian infodump.

Edit: FORGOT TO MENTION it is written with weird hieroglyphs so neither ka or k nor kh sounds I am familiar with another reason Coptic is handy but like, my guys, there is no way the Mr M owl glyph is passive aggressively make the second half 'mat'.