[raoulduke]

It's also painfully correct. The Egyptian hieroglyph pr, also monosyllabic /h/, was adapted for /b/ in the Semitic creation of the alphabet. The scribe took the common Semitic word for house be(y)t and used it to supplant the original linguistic meaning attached to the grapheme. Thus the linguistic content was destroyed while the aesthetic content was essentially unchanged (and remains so today, most notably in Cyrillic, I think).

[posterboy]

So you have pt (sky), pr (house) and bt (house), and you are suggesting that there can be no obvious link? pt~bt perhaps? I don't know what's up with the /h/. It doesn't really matter because drawn glyphs pass the test of time better than phonemes by virtue of being homoiconic. Certainly, written language is a linguistic matter, not just merely aesthetic.

If you look at the pt hieroglyph, the lower form might be a roof I think. Of course, my confusion of pt and pr in the previous post shows an aptitude to jump to conclusions. But when Peter<Petrus<??? has no certain etymology, leaps of faith are inevitable. And while I understand that research is always careful to be skeptical, so am I when you say the hypothesis couldn't be. I'm not necessarily defending the theory from the featured article, because a common ancestor can come through a variety of origins. Anyway, the Egyptians are famous anyway, so they are the first go to for a theory.

Also, your claim is evidently wrong. The Bet glyph looks very different to the pr glyph.

I was initially trying to formulate a thought about writing, because it can show patterns of language on a deeper level or at least from a different perspective. After all, verbal communication involves more than phonetics. There are definitely words that have been read incorrectly and proliferated -- e.g. reading gamma for ypsilon, omega for digamma; although I have no evidence at hand this shouldn't be hard to believe.

This was constructive for me, as I hadn't made the connection from pr to beta, before. Thank you.

[raoulduke]

Correct. There can be no obvious link. Particularly in that Old Kingdom /r/ would reflect a Semitic /'/, if memory serves. So /pr/ would be the equivalent of /p'/ which would mean "mouth."

I likely compounded your confusion by referring to the grapheme as pr; whereas it is in fact Gardiner's O4, the monosyllabic /h/ (http://msheflin.blogspot.com/search/label/Early%20Alphabet - take the chart beyond /b/ with a grain of salt; I haven't updated it in years). This isn't my theory... this is basically the only consensus view on Proto-Sinaitic. Please stop wading into a crazy complex and insular, highly esoteric academic subject and then getting mad at me when you misunderstand my comments and attempt to construct a new orthodoxy around them...

The only connection between pr and b(y)t is semantic. Once you move from pure ideograms to logograms or abjads that wholly breaks down.

[posterboy]

I don't want to start a circular argument talking past each other. Wiktionary has for pr: "(Old Egyptian) IPA /paːruw/[1]". That's just one reconstruction but Its source is 20 years old so it could be outdated for all I know. Given your comments, I just see the glottal stop as another datapoint. Whether that also means "mouth" or not doesn't lead to confusion.

[1]: Hoch, James (1997) Middle Egyptian Grammar, Mississauga: Benben Publications, ISBN 0920168124, page 15