In order to avoid any misunderstanding I state clearly
that this is just an amateurish experiment I did for my
private fun and it has no scientific pretention.
As a matter of fact it is what programmers call an "alpha release"
which needs many adjustements. But I won't be able to work
on it for at least eight/ten months and I don't know whether then
I'll be willing to. So - even with many doubts - I decided to make
it public.
I am not much interested in vocalization, but in prosody - even though
I am quite aware that the two things are strictly correlated. So there
are many inconsistencies especially in vowel pronounciation.
Sometimes I used the academic "e" between consonants,
sometimes I tried to render a possible pronounciation according
to what I found in Loprieno and Fecht. Sometimes I just experimented
according to my mood and instinct so that the same word
may be pronounced in two or three different ways.
Surely that is not a very serious approach.
But, were I serious, would I ever have attempted it?
As for prosody and accents I made experiments in order to
prove my theory of the "three-tempoed measure" of Egyptian
but it's possible that I did force the lines into my imagined structure.
"If that is so it is a grievous fault
and grievously Orlando'll answer it!"
And I made many experiments on expression. Sometimes I did
overact, many passages are quite scholastic, more dictated than
narrated, sometimes I couldn't help being swayed by hystrionic
mannerism. The duel has some spaghetti-western touch. The song and
the dance of the princesses before Sesostris sound like a kind
of waltz, Sinuhe's meditation on his life is like a
"Pater noster", and so on. It's more like a bunch of scattered notes
than a well balanced text.
Anyway here it is. So just take it as it is or leave it alone.
I think no harm is done and if you feel I have been sacrilegious
just mark this site as "tA bw.t" and keep at large :))
Now some technical notes.
There is an audio version and a video version.
I divided the text in 19 chapters. So there are 19 mp3 chapters
and 19 hieroglyphic files. The hieroglyphs are divided into
sound-units, according to my notorious "three-tempoed measure".
That will make easier to follow the lines.
In the video version voice and hieroglyphs are synchronized
in a sort of karaoke.
Since I did this work to share it with the AEL members I used
the hieroglyphic text available on the AEL site, courtesy of
Jenny Carrington and in particular of Jon J. Hirst who is the
author of the hieroglyphic transcription. I wish to thank them
both for their kindness and indulgence.
Here are the links to their interesting sites:
Jon J Hirst Jenny Carrington
For what concerns the transliteration I did it myself but I used
as a guide the one I found in volume two of
"Antologia della letteratura egizia del Medio Regno"
by Marco Chioffi and Giuliana Rigamonti, Ananke, Torino, 2008.
And I wish to thank them too for their kind permission to use it.
Their transliteration is quite accurate, while I used a MdC simplified one
(e.g. I didn't use the dot to mark the feminine ".t"
and took many other liberties)
so I am the only one responsible for possible mistakes and I am
the only one to blame.
And last but not least I wish to thank Mark-Jan Nederhof
whose pdf file and translations of Sinuhe