Meroitic/Lesson1/Phonology and Orthography

Orthography
The Meroitic script has 4 vowel signs: a, e, i, o, 15 open consonant signs and 4 closed consonant signs (se, ne, te, to). The vowel "a" can only occur at the start of a word. e and i can only start words in early Meroitic. Otherwise, words always start with a consonant sign.

ɣ (voiced velar fricative), c (voiceless palatal stop) and j (voiced palatal stop) are all foreign sounds to English. The Meroitic l and w are phonetically different from their English counterparts.

There are different approaches to actually vocalizing Meroitic.

Traditional Approach
The Meroitic script can be read as a strict alphasyllabary. This means consonant signs open syllables and vowels close them. An closed consonant already has an inherent vowel and so cannot be followed by a vowel sign.

Examples
 * abr /abara/ - "man"
 * mk /maka/ - "god"
 * ant /anata/ - "priest"
 * perite /perite/ - "agent"

The traditional approach prevailed because Meroitic remained a poorly undeciphered language. It allowed for easy, speculative vocalization that was not expected to reflect how the language was actually pronounced. One problem with the traditional approach is that it does not allow words to end with a consonant sound although we know for a fact that some Meroitic place names did end in consonants. Better approaches were developed from expert study of Meroitic words and names with known Greek, Coptic and Egyptian translations.