Hey, you are the apple of King Tut's eye.
Do you want to hear something that I think is funny?
Every now and then you hear King Tut's name pronounced like King Two Tank Amun and this is wrong. Tut is right and Tank is wrong. Right after I wrote that I heard the name pronounced like that some 10 times by a guy on the History Channel. It was a very good show otherwise. If anybody ever says Two Tank Amun in front of you then think of this:
I'm not even going to link this because it's all over the place. Pick any random hieroglyphic site and look at the sign for the letter W and notice it is a chick. They will say the chick stands for the near consonant W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
The chick stands for W and sometimes U.
Over and over they say that. Then, 99% of the instances the chick really does indeed translate to W, or so it is thought. Sometimes you get lucky and have solid cross references, but most of the time you do not. It is not known for certain if any vowels occur before or after or between the known consonants, and here is a near consonant, W, and not even a real one. Vowels are not denoted in hieroglyphics, and U is a vowel.
How do I know it is tut ankh and not two tank or two tankh?
Because the symbols say so.
The word 'tut' means 'image' and the sign sequence looks like this:
But we've been told over and over that means twt, and it does. The ankh, of course is clearly an ankh and is pronounced as such. The t does not go with the ankh so there can be no tank or tankh.
The ligature offers kerning possibilities. Yes, the Egyptians were early kerning specialists. Because the chick is drawn at a diagonal, it provides space that is not to be wasted for the preceding and for the following 't' and that's another way we know the letters go together in a group and are not sounds floating around or part of another group.
And that is how you always see it. It looks like a percent sign immediately, %, see it? I'm not moving until you say you see it. Okay, fine, a backwards percent sign.
But we are taught the chick is a W and infrequently a U so our eye catches this percent sign and our mind reads the twt as twat, perhaps twit.
So, king Twat. That's a potty-mouth word in English. That's what I see every time I see the name and I do see it frequently.
Now who else is going to tell you these things?
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