I didn't look at the Egyptian data from the website yet, I'll do that soon.
 
About Egyptian /3/ (glottal stop, i.e. /?/) vs. Indo-European /r/: Dolgopolsky links Nost. /r/ to both /r/ and /3/ in Egyptian.  Reduction of the rhotic trill to a glottal stop may sound outlandish, but remember in English you have <r> represented by a somewhat pharyngealized retroflex semivowel or whatever it is (probably by way of the German-Dutch-French uvular /R/).
 
While we're on the subject of Egyptian, I read somewhere that there *was* an /l/ in the language, but it was written the same as /n/ or /r/.  Of course loss of /l/ is not an impossibility, case and point Japanese....
 
~DaW~
Just to congratulate him on being appointed to be Director of the Oriental Institute.
 
I also mentioned that, in their index, no cognizance had been taking of the idea that Egyptian 3 was an [r]-sound, and that this was pretty standard thinking by now.
 
Thus, 3b.t, 'family', is related to IE *eibh-, 'procreate', and 3bw, 'elephant', to Old Indian iba-H, 'elephant'.
 
He mentioned that no work to update the site had been done since 1997 but that he anticipated work on it sometime within the next year.
 
 
Pat