Talk:Prenomen (Ancient Egypt)

Orthography
The interpetation of the name is apparently quite convoluted. On the face of things, it is simply written as sw.t bj.t. The reading nswt-bjtj needs a lot of explanation, at least involving The idea here is that the orthography of this archaic title was never changed after c. 3100 so that its signs cannot be taken to have the usual sound values. This needs explanation, and while the "transcription" as nswt-bjtj seems to be widespread, we have to make clear that it is a reconstruction that was never universally accepted (and apparently Beckerath 1999 rejects it as untenable based on the cuneiform transliteration). --dab (𒁳) 10:06, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) the fact that the n sign was sometimes present in early times, spelling sw.t.n bj.t
 * 2) the proposition that the archaic value of t used to be tj, hence sw.tj.n bj.tj
 * 3) the interpretation of the n as preposition, i.e. reordering to n(j).sw.t(j?) bj.tj