Quote Originally Posted by VandalCarthage
This spelling was mine - I don't quite understand what the advantage of the alternative would be. As you say, this is Egyptologist-y, and to my eye at least - easier to wrap one's mouth around.
Because the egyptologist-ese is an artificial rendering of the vowels, both in quality and location, whereas the reconstruction is an educated guess at how egypitan was actually spoken. I don't know how much you know about egyptian, so you'll excuse me if tell you something you already know, but egyptian wasn't written with vowels until it started being written in the more-or-less greek alphabet (i.e. coptic). Egyptologists get around the problem of pronouncing it by adding e's between consonants and a's and i's for certain signs which represented consonants. This is, of course, completely artificial and most of the time bears no resemblence to how we think egyptian was actually spoken. To my mind it's akin to having pereter in the game instead of praetor or beseles instead of basileus.