Byrd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You are reading far too much into a language that
> has been "approximated" into English. We don't
> actually know if the word sounded like "murrrr" or
> "mir" or "maer" or "maour" or "mor" or "meor" or
> "maouer" or a thousand other variants... because
> we don't have the actual language sounds and for
> the most part they left off vowels and used
> ideograms to differentiate between "maier" and "mar".


While it is true that no one can say with certainty exactly how each and every ancient Egyptian word was pronounced, enough is known to have a high level of confidence regarding roughly how they sounded. Certainly enough is known to be able to identify a large number of examples of various kinds of word-play in the PT’s and CT’s – with these being plays on sounds, as well as on meanings and ideas – often in combination. It is clear that in regard to word-play with sounds, there existed no dictum that these sounds had to be precise homophones – the only requirement seems to have been that there needed to be a similarity between the sounds, either in part of a word or phrase, or in total. The objection that you make is not supported by the facts, as a perusal of Faulkner’s and Allen’s footnotes regarding instances of word-play will show you. Mercer also has an interesting little treatise on the subject in his “Literary Criticism of the PT’s”, p. 104ff, which is enlightening and highlights many more examples than do Faulkner and Allen. Scott Noegel has published a number of papers on the subject which are of interest.

But back to the derivation issue – and why was glyph U23 used (if this is in fact what it is) as the first glyph in the word for “pyramid”? (See line 1657d, for instance - [www3.lib.uchicago.edu] )
Does the use of this glyph here not strike you as an odd choice? What function does it serve? In Chace’s transliterations of Problems 56 through 59 of the RMP (Plates 78 – 81) he ascribes the phonetic values of “m” and “r” to the G7 (owl) glyph and the D21 (mouth) glyph respectively in the word for “pyramid”, but no phonetic value to the U23 (chisel) glyph at the word’s beginning – in the same way that he rightly ascribes no phonetic value to the “pyramid” (O24) determinative glyph at the word’s end. So again, what function was U23 meant to serve? Surely this is an important point in trying to understand the derivation of the “mr” / “pyramid” connection. No?

Gardiner (Eg. Gr. p. 518) says that U23 normally had the phonetic value of “mr”, but that it at times could also have the phonetic value of “3b”, and hence the two conjectures that I have made. I make them only as conjectures, and no more. However, I believe that they are each consistent within the context of the kinds of word-play one finds throughout these texts.

A third possibility now also occurs to me, and this is that G7 is here serving as a preposition. The word could then have had a meaning of something like “fashioned” (U23) “from”, or “by means of” (G7) “Re” (D21) – followed by the “pyramid” determinative (O24).

All of the suggestions I have made come with issues that would need to be further resolved. However, the objection that you have raised does not strike me as being one of them.