Talk:Tutankhamon

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Latest comment: 3 years ago by Metaknowledge in topic RFM discussion: December 2018–March 2021
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RFM discussion: December 2018–March 2021

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The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.


The page for the late kingdom Pharaoh is currently called "Tutankhamon". Tutankhamun is overwhelmingly the more common spelling, as evidenced by the title of the corresponding Wikipedia article about the same Pharaoh. I also feel compelled to point out that a google search of "Tutankhamon" results in did you mean Tutankhamun?

And arguably, neither spelling is particularly authentic to either the hieroglyphs nor conventional transcriptions, since, as Wiktionary page "Tutankhamon" admits, the vowel was not present in the original hieroglyphic spelling. Nevertheless, -amun is treated as an alternate spelling in spite of being just as valid a rendering and much more widely used.

I considered the possibility that this was for the sake of consistency; perhaps the creator god that makes up part of Tut's name was referred to as Amon on Wiktionary. But alas, no, he's called Amun here too.

Insisting on -amon, to me, smacks of running against the grain for it's own sake. I really think it ought to be moved to Tutankhamun.— This comment was unsigned.

Google N-Grams show that, since 1995 or so, Tutankhamun ("T.u") is a bit more popular than T.e, both which are much more popular than T.o, in turn more popular than T.a. But until 1980 or so, T.e was the most popular, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. T.e is the spelling given by the most OneLook references, followed by T.u. Spellings with other vowels for the initial u and the as are non-starters.
From this I conclude that Tutankhamun and Tutankhamen are the only candidates for main entry, T.u looking like the winner going forward. DCDuring (talk) 18:32, 30 December 2018 (UTC)Reply