“He spends more time there than he does at home”

Rick O’Connell on his son and his relationship with the British Museum.

The misplacement  I talked about on the last page is exactly the same problem with the phrase used by Imhotep in The Mummy when the Med-jai turn up, only this time we are talking about adjectives (something which tells us more about a noun e.g. red when we talk about a red ball). Imy says “Per ah med-jay”, but in Egyptian the adjective comes AFTER the verb, so it should be;

Then we get to, via a lot of old cobblers which someone has stuck in just for good measure (there is a lot of that in The Mummy), the famous line from Ankh-su-namun. Yet again there has been a lot of movement of words which should be in other places. She says “Ben be i hawet if haut.’ She should be saying:

Note the added “ntr” (god) to which makes “house” into “god’s house” and therefore a temple. This also was missing from the spoken line.

I could go on all day and bore you silly about what happens with the rest of the film (and by the way “keetah mi pharos” is not Egyptian either) but I hope you have got my drif by the examples given so fart. The spoken Egyptian in The Mummy may have been interesting but it certainly didn’t follow any rules or make any sense to people who knew what they were talking about, and I have talked to several Egyptologists about this matter. Next we go on to The Mummy Returns and thankfully I can say there is quite a bit of difference here… Let me tell you all about it. By the time The Mummy Returns turned up in our cinemas over here in London I had been working like the clappers with my Egyptian, well, six months unemployed prior to the opening did wonders for my time spent on Gardiner’s Grammar... I felt really ready and up to the challenge of some new translations to work on, and what a wonderful surprise met me when I went to the cinema for the first time. It was amazing, they were speaking good Egyptian and even with the conflicting accents of the actors (Mr Armstrong in English being Arabic, Mr Vosloo in South African and Ms Velasquez in South American) it was very plain what the reconstructed pronunciation was trying to do. It even  made sense if you compared it with Coptic which was very reassuring. Dr Smith must have been working overtime. I also have a sneaky little feeling that some of the stuff provided for The Mummy and not applied to that piece of work was put to good use in The Mummy Returns. Well think about it – Mr Hafez the Curator of the British Museum wakes Imhotep up with a recited spell which given time I shall no doubt write down – it did make sense. Then Imhotep uses a line to animate the soldier mummies which is very recognisably actually from the real Book of the Dead. I was as you can expext, over the moon. Please click on the Languages pages link to take you back to find out about the Egyptian in TMR.

Languages pages