Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/23/scientists-recreate-sound-of-e.html
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So it sounds like Boris Karloff?
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They found an ancient Egyptian Alexa didn’t they?
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Drier and scratcher than your standard Bela Lugosi.
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Even if the other vowels and consonants could be extrapolated, can we even begin to guess how ancient egyptian was pronounced?
Maybe we’ll find out with the next Mummy reboot.
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For what it’s worth…
Excerpt from video notes: The knowledge of Egyptian vowels is very incomplete though they can be deduced to some extent from Coptic. Other sources are ancient Greek, Assyrian and Babylonian texts in which there are fully vocalized transcriptions of Egyptian words. For the earlier periods of Egyptian, a simple system of three vowels, inherited from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, can be posited. Each vowel had short and long varieties but in most cases the contrast between them was not phonemic. Disclaimer: not 100% accurate; some of the words are my personal reconstructions.
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Tl;Dr: no, they didn’t
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Gotta love a news story that brings to mind ol’ young King Tut!
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Whereas if you recreate the voice of a Mummy now, it says “Why is it so dark in here?”
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You just know this is going to end badly when someone tries to run text from a mysterious Egyptian scroll though the mummy voice synthesizer.
I’m figuring a rain of scarab beetles.
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All that for the equivalent of “meh”? 
Actually, pretty fascinating.
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I dug up the original article (trying to find out what kind of plastic they used to 3D print the reproduction pharynx, which, no luck, they didn’t say), and this bit is fun. Emphasis mine:
Since human remains have unique status not as ‘objects’ but as the remains of once-living people, it was also necessary to consider the ethical issues raised by the research and its possible heritage outcomes. The team concluded that the potential benefits outweighed the concerns, particularly because Nesyamun’s own words [in his burial inscription] express his desire to ‘speak again’ and that the scientific techniques used were non-destructive.
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I hope not.
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Gosh darn! The Bangles were only off by one letter.
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I’m curious if these scientists actually tested their technique by recreating the voice of more-recently-deceased people who actually left recordings of their voices behind for comparison.
If not then this is little more than guesswork.
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It was Rosanne Barr’s mummy.
y tho? I don’t see what they hoped to gain from this.
Perhaps he’s just mostly dead?
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