All Words and No Play: Identifying Paronomasia in New Kingdom Texts with Pattern Matching

Abstract

Word-play has not been studied extensively in Egyptian texts, possibly because the iconographic and consonantal nature of Egyptian orthography complicates the identification and analysis of word-play types. For an Egyptologist, an identifiable example of word-play is paronomasia, or the semantic juxtaposition of similar sounding words. In this regard, research in Egyptian word-play might benefit from pattern matching, a technique commonly used in computational linguistics, to identify consonantal patterns within a transliterated text. Our research aims to understand the mechanics underlying constructions of Egyptian paronomasia in texts with variable occurrences of word-play.