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> The land south of Egypt, beyond the first cataract of the Nile, was known to the ancient world by many names: Ta-Seti, or Land of the Bow, so named because th
by kbenson 6y ago
> The land south of Egypt, beyond the first cataract of the Nile, was known to the ancient world by many names: Ta-Seti, or Land of the Bow, so named because the inhabitants were expert archers; Ta-Nehesi, or Land of Copper;
Oh, is that what Ta-Nehesi Coates is named after? I decided to look, and apparently his name is slightly different, Ta-Nehisi. What's weird just just how often he's miscredited with the wrong name in articles online, whether they be blogs or new agencies (those might be alternate spelling tagging) or book clubs.
As I myself have an uncommon spelling of a fairly common name (with no common variations), I can only imagine how annoying this must be. It's probably self propagating at this point, since anyone that searches for it with the wrong name will find plenty of (wrong) evidence that they guessed right, depending on where their eyes land on the page.
- legerdemain 6y agoNote that Ta-Nehisi Coates insists on the pronunciation "Ta-Nehasi Coates."
- kbenson 6y agoYeah, the first few times I heard him on a podcast, I thought people were calling him "Tallahassee".
- slim 6y agoit's a transliteration from a language that's not written in latin alphabet. so all of the combinations you mentioned probably mean that historical region (and his name too, like you suspected)
- jdmichal 6y agoIt's worse than that. Ancient Egyptian only wrote consonants. Those are the "Egyptological" transliterations, which converts consonants to vowels and then inserts extra vowels to make them pronounceable to the (mostly British at the time) Egyptologists. The actual written names are "tꜣ-stj" and "nḥsj". That is, /tʔ stj/ and /nħsj/. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...
- jdmichal 6y agoNote that those are specifically the "Egyptological" names. Ancient Egyptian did not write vowels, but it did write several semi-vowels. So those semi-vowels are transcribed as vowels, and the vowel "e" fills in as necessary elsewhere. The actual written names are "tꜣ-stj" and "nḥsj". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...