IV. The Transliteration of Demotic
In order to render Demotic understandable for academic discourse, many systems of transliteration have been used which transform the phonetic values of the script into (mostly) Latin characters and some special signs borrowed from other languages, similar to hieroglyphic transliteration. When discussing transliteration, a basic principle of all Egyptian scripts must not be forgotten: Only consonants are represented in script, while vocals - although they were certainly present in actual speech - were not noted in the script and can only be seen at the last stage of the Egyptian language, Coptic, which is mostly written with Greek letters. As this last stage only came about around the third century CE, when Egyptian itself already had undergone more than 3000 years of development, it is difficult to restore the original sound of the Egyptian language. However, it is probably more accurate in the case of Demotic.
As mentioned, there are many transliteration systems that have been proposed to render the Demotic script. To fully grasp the intricacies of Demotic transliteration, a deeper understanding of Egyptian grammar is required. A basic field of tension, however, can be outlined: While some scholars desired to render Demotic as a spoken language by means of what is actually written in the script and by deduction from Coptic (phonetic transliteration), others chose to transliterate it with regard to the historical spellings of the Egyptian language (historical transliteration) which certainly did not correspond to the actual state of the Demotic language. Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, but there is no fixed and uniform system of transliteration among Demotists, as of yet.
For the following discussion of the alphabet, the system of the University of Chicago will be used which is a mixed system. It is based on Middle Egyptian, but tries to render what can be seen in the script. This is why alphabetic writings supersede historically inherited spellings, but they are still used if there is no hint at alphabetic writing.
For further reading on the subject see Exercise III on page 7.