About Menat and her moves

[ZpaceJ0ck0]

First of all, I would like to give some shoutouts to Miðgarðsorm from the SRK forums for finding this out. Gotta give credit to SERIOUSLY THOUGH as well for helping me on this one.

Menat's name comes from the Egyptian language  mnj.t¹, "menat", a necklace who was used as a musical instrument rather than a necklace proper.

Contrary to popular belief, Menat's name doesn't come from Arabic, even thought that's the language spoken in modern-day Egypt.

When it comes to Menat's moveset, there are some divergences between the Japanese and English names:

Overflowing Nile is the Japanese ナイルの氾濫 Nairu no hanran, “Flooding of the Nile”. Nile floodings have exceptional importance for both ancient and modern Egyptians.

Wisdom of Thoth was ジェフティの知恵 Jefuti no chie, “Wisdom of Thoth”. This discrepancy in spelling is due to the Japanese using one of the most common of Thoth’s transliterations, from his ancient Egyptian name  ḏḥwty, also pronounced as Jehuti amongst other spellings.

Soul Reflect: Stella, that is ソウルリフレクト・ステラ Souru rifurekuto - Sutera, unmistakably the Italian stella, “star”. The Arabic قمر qamar, “Moon, satellite” would be a perfect choice. Menat just kept an Italian move in Rose’s honour (and Stella resembles Rose’s LP Soul Reflect  with SP properties), then added a variation of her own using her native Arabic.

Here's a video showing Rose's Soul Reflect in Street Fighter Alpha 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e7v46FX4OQ#t=1m04s

Rose's Soul Reflect in action (USFIV gameplay footage).

And the Soul Reflect in Street Fighter V: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZwM8B61Kpw#t=2m52s


Left Eye of the Lion is 獅子の左目 Shishi no hidarime, which actually means “Lion Left Eye”, or “the Left Eye who is a Lion”. This alludes to Sekhmet,⁴ the lion goddess of war and destruction.


Judgement of Anubis is 黒犬の審判 Kuroinu no shinpan, "Judgement of the black dog". Well, Anubis is maybe the most well-known amongst the Egyptian divinities, so his presence here is more or less a given; and he obviously has a black dog (or jackal) head.


Divine Retribution is a generic adaptation of the original 罪人を喰らう顎 Zainin wo kurau ago, "The jaws that eat the sinner", an allusion to the goddess Ammit,⁵ the monster who devours the dead whose heart end up being heavier than the feather of Ma'at. Being that he was the judge of the dead - Anubi weighed the dead person's heart against the feather of Ma'at, goddess of justice.


Khamun Kick is カーメンキック Kāmen Kikku, and derives from a common liberty the Japanese took with Ancient Egyptian language: obviously coming from Tutankhamun's name, the most famous of all the pharaohs. His name in Ancient Egyptian is  Twt ˁnḫ Jmn, "living" ( ˁnḫ, better known as ankh) "image" ( twt) "of Amun" ( Jmn). Amun's name was written first for respect towards the god, even if it was pronounced last. Obviously Tut, Ankh and Amun are single words, so "Khamun" doesn't actually make sense. Nevertheless, Japanese already popularised the use of カーメン kāmen as an ancient Egyptian reference, maybe prompted by the fact that the Japanese 仮面 kamen means "mask" and Tutankhamun's funerary mask is well known. So we have Mister Khamen from Kinnikuman, and the villain in Galaxy Cyclone Braiger was named, well, Khamen Khamen... 


Soul Sphere and Soul Sphere: Ankh are ソウルスフィア Souru sufia and ソウルスフィア・アンク Souru sufia: anku.  Ankh is the Egyptian sign of life.


Guardian of the Sun is in Japanese 太陽の守護者 Taiyō no shugosha, a direct translation. This references Khepri,⁶ the beetle Sun god. Khepri rolls the Sun across the sky, and he is visible on Menat's nape of the neck.

Spoiler

So, basically, it's like it's Khepri who's charging the ball/sun during the move. 

Spoiler

The Nefertem is in Japanese ウン・ネフェル Un - Neferu. Nefertem⁷ is the lotus god of scent and good perfumes, as well as the son of Sekhmet. On the other hand, the Japanese name doesn't actually reference Nefertem, because the title  wnn nfr, variously transliterated "Wenennefer", "Wenufer" or Unnefer, "The perfect one", "The happy one", is one of the epithets of Osiris. ⁸ 


Footnotes by Miðgarðsorm:
¹ Ancient Egyptian language didn't note vowels, only consonants, exactly as modern Arabic and Hebrew do (but, unlike Egyptian, Arabic and Hebrew can mark vowels, it’s just they usually don’t bother to do so because anyone familiar with the languages can readily interpret the writings anyway; well, unless it’s the Qur’an, lest anyone misread it :tongueemoji: ); thus we can't be sure that "menat" was its actual pronunciation. Traditionally, egyptologists insert an e between consonants to facilitate the words pronunciation, and arbitrarily mutate the ꜣ, ˁ,j and w sounds into "a", "e" or “u”, unless there exists some other coeval Greek, Latin - or, later, Coptic - source that could give us more insight about the word original pronunciation. Therefore, “mnjt” becomes variously “menat”, “menit”, “menyet” (I adopted the Erman & Grapow transliteration, so “j” is the German “j”, aka the English “y”) and so on. “Menat” is only the most widespread transliteration.
² Hindi कमल kamal, “lotus”. The Arabic لُوتِس lūtis and the Egyptian  sšn, or seshen, wouldn’t match. Incidentally, the Egyptian Seshen likely became - with a slight shift in meaning - the Hebrew שׁוֹשַׁנָּה Shoshannah “lily, rose”, then the Greek Σουσαννα Susanna... And ultimately the English name Susan.
³ Because the Japanese can’t tell R and L apart, and exactly like us Westerners can’t distinguish between the Arabic K and Q as well.
⁴ Egyptian  Sḫmt, “The powerful one”
⁵ Egyptian  ˁmmjt, "The devourer".
⁶ Egyptian , ḫprj, "He who becomes". Note the beetle.
⁷ Egyptian  nfrtm, "The perfect in being".
⁸ Egyptian  Wsjr, probably "Seat of the eye".

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Here's Menat's moveset in the English release, which I got from this site.

[url=https://game.capcom.com/cfn/sfv/character/menat/movelist][/url] (Menat's moveset in Japanese)

Here's a video showcasing Menat's move list in English:


And here's another one in Japanese:
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[Psychospacecow]

I'm probably going to have to rephrase some of the entry for Menat's name origin since some of it seems unrelated.

I'm not seeing where in your sources the term "Lady of the menat" is stemming from.

[Psychospacecow]

Will be looking into sources when I can do so without some physical pain irl getting in the way ruining my focus.
If I haven't gotten on this by the 9th point it out.

[Psychospacecow]

When we are good with this submission, we gotta make sure it doesn't have the "doens't" typo.

Okay, my headaches haven't subsided, but I'll point out things I've noticed.

The Menat name origin can be its own entry should you so choose.

Not sure why you have Pyramid Hopscotch listed here. Reference seems to be clear there.

I'd axe the bit about star and lotus since we can't verify due to the language barrier, and its acting to debunk information anyway. Just don't include that subject if its debunked.

Need source with Rose's honour. A source showing Rose's Soul Reflect and Menat's Rose's Honour should be fine.

Source on the Sekhmet bit?

The Ma'at bit for Anubis seems unrelated. I get its meant to be a segway to your Divine Retribution bit explaining its Japanese name, but it should be in that section.

The Khamun bit is fine, thought the examples can be left out of the entry proper since they're not game related. They do prove your point just fine mind you.

Soul Sphere is fine since your source for that is present in the Khamun Kick section, but if you could put it in the Soul Sphere section as well, it would be appreciated.

If you can get a video of her individual moves with the names displayed (both names if possible, but that would likely be 2 separate videos), we can work from there. This is good stuff.