Does anyone believe, based on some evidence, that Egyptian has not actually been deciphered?

Question

It seems to me that of the first royal cartouches deciphered 'ptolemy', 'cleopatra', 'caesar', 'Alexander', 'Hadrian', 60 percent of the phonetic values of symbols can be determined from Latin (accipiter, trado, leo, collis, caldera, habitatio, ect...). Further of my studies show patterns of correspondence between Semitic and Egypt which directly contradict all of the results of Egyptologists. Am I the only one who knows? Granted I have met some in the past who know of some of these things, but have no contacts with them now; that was before I began to do my research in this area.

Answer 1

Then obviously all of us Egyptologists are part of a vast conspiracy to all somehow come up with similar translations of the same text independently of one another, defend those translations based on the premises of the grammar that has been worked out over the past 200 years, and not ONE of us has broken ranks and told the world. Nor have any of the other philologists who frequently work with Egyptologists noticed or pointed out the discrepancy.

Damn, I wish I'd known that we didn't know what the hell we were doing. It would have saved me a lot of late nights translating "The Ship-Wrecked Sailor"; "The Marriage Scarab of Amenhotep III;" the various commemorative stelae of the Tutmosids and Amenhoteps; "The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant;" "The Hekanakht Letters"; various medical texts and any number of other texts. Not to mention having to carefully identifiy each part of speech, explain verb forms, and defend my translation in front of several other students and my professors. And I really could have done without looking up words in the Worterbuch: going from glyphs, to transliteration, to German, and then to English sucks. Obviously, my entire graduate career has been a waste of time.

Strange how all those translations worked out almost perfectly and made sense seeing as how we really have no idea what we're doing...

Answer 2

How do you explain the Rosetta Stone, then? They can translate the Greek just fine, which is how they were able to translate the Egyptian. Not by using Latin phonetic values. Since it says the exact same thing in hieroglyphics as it does in Greek, and there is a substantial amount of text to get a translation from, I think they have a pretty good handle on it. I have seen the Rosetta Stone and there is a lot on it. I have seen no evidence that supports your claim, so I do believe that they have deciphered it. Not to mention, since Egypt was part of the Roman empire, the language was bound to have been influenced somewhat by Latin. Hence your phonetic value theory.

Answer 3

Without having linguistic experience, I will tell you about my viewpoint:
Basically the language was deciphered. That means once the code was cracked several things made sense. Please note that Champollion was aided by his knowledge of Coptic language as well, and it had similar phonetics as hieroglyphics. So it was possible to understand several aspects of the language based on modernly spoken languages. Still part of Egyptians can speak Coptic language.

Answer 4

To be on the safe side perhaps you should send a personal telegram to Indiana Jones. I believe he could shed some light on the subject.