Using letters to recreate sounds
Mike C
It's not uncommon to see people use strings of letters to represent a
sound or a noise. For example, someone might write "grrr" to
represent the sound of a growl. Or "shh" to represent the sound of
someone shushing.
I am attempting to, I guess, categorize, name, or define this
practice.
I considered whether these "letter-based sound representations" fall
under the definition of onomatopoeia. However, I have doubts about
categorizing them as such:
1. Onomatopoeia is defined as a "name" or a "word" which emulates or
mimics the sound it describes. These "letter-based sound
representations" are not really names, nor are they defined words.
2. Even if you relax the restriction that a "name" or a "word" must
be preexisting or predefined, these "letter-based sound
representations" often do not have commonly accepted attributes of
English names and words, such as vowel structure, and limitations on
the number of unbroken repetitions of a single consonant.
So, I have a couple of questions for you:
1. Are there one or more existing terms for this practice?
2. Does this practice reasonably fall within the category of
onomatopoeia? Why or why not?
3. This practice intuitively seems informal, but is there any place
for it in proper English?
4. Do you have any other relevant or related information?
Thanks!
--Mike
(If you're wondering why I'm interested... it came up in a lunch
conversation with my friend the other day, and ... I'm just a curious
person!)
BMCT2010
1. The correct term is onomatopoeia.
2. It falls under the category of onomatopoeias, because an
onomatopoeia is any expression of a sound that is not the sound,
itself. Thus, to represent a sound without actually evoking it is to
commit the sound to onomatopoeia.
3. The practice of using verbal expressions to represent sounds is
often considered a form of vocal slang, but it has no proper place in
the English language.
4. No.
Cece
Um, why do we use the alphabet for writing?
aquachimp
> (If you're wondering why I'm interested... it came up in a lunch
> conversation with my friend the other day, and ... I'm just a curious
> person!)
Well since you're the curious sort...
You might find it interesting to see how others write the sound a cat
makes;
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/miauwen
It's in Dutch, but not that difficult to follow; "miauw" is "meow" in
Dutch.
"Meow" in other languages shown too.
Cece
wrote:
The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly pronounced /
mjuw/.
aquachimp
I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is "Wuuf" of
"Wooph"?
Cece
>
> - Show quoted text -
I'll look it up!
The Egyptian word for "cat" is spelled "milk jug, reed leaf, quail
chick."
John Lawler
> Um, why do we use the alphabet for writing?
We use the alphabet because the Romans did, and they did it
because the Greeks did it, and they did it because the Punes
did it. The Punes (Phoenicians) invented the version of the
alphabet that we use. Other versions spread to the East
and became Asian alphabets like Devanagari.
The Chinese, of course, invented a different way of writing,
even earlier, but they have languages that are better suited
to logographic writing than most.
As for making up words to represent sounds like "grrrr",
that's normal onomatopoeia, as BMCT pointed out. Common
in all languages, whether they have standard spellings
or not (standard spelling is not a universal phenomenon).
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
"A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do;
We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
Words have no words for words that are not true."
-- W.H. Auden, Notes on the Comic
Cece
To put it simply: we use an alphabet because that way, we can most
clearly write down the sounds of our speech. There is nothing weird
or strange about using strings of letters to represent sounds or
noise.
BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
any of the vowels used or where they were placed. (Linguistic
Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
certain about any of them. And I'm a dilletante, with pure book
learning; I have no ideas on that at all.)
Patok
>
> BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
> onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
> w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
> Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
> major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
> any of the vowels used or where they were placed. (Linguistic
> Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
> certain about any of them. And I'm a dilletante, with pure book
> learning; I have no ideas on that at all.)
Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
wrong, though.
--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
John Lawler
Ancient Egyptian was definitely an Afroasiatic language. That's
the family to which Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic) belongs.
Skin color has absolutely *nothing* to do with language family.
Egyptian (and Coptic, which is modern Egyptian, though it's
not spoken by most Egyptians, who speak Arabic, natch),
however, is *not* a Semitic language, but rather a separate
branch of Afroasiatic, parallel to Semitic. Other parallel
branches are Cushitic (spoken in Somalia, NW Kenya, and
environs); Omotic (spoken in the Omo valley of Ethiopia);
Berber (N. Africa, esp. Morocco); and Chadic, which is
spoken west, south, and east of Lake Chad in sub-Saharan
Africa. The most prominent Chadic language is Hausa,
mostly spoken in Nigeria. (details from Comrie (ed) 1990,
'The World's Major Languages', Oxford U Press)
A family tree of Afroasiatic is available online at
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=52-16
As for why we use an alphabet, it is a good way to represent
sounds, though the spelling system of English is a rather
poor one to use to represent anything except Middle English.
If you want to see an alphabet that actually represents the
sounds of modern English, try
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day,
but set fire to him and he's warm for the
rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett
Cece
>
> As for why we use an alphabet, it is a good way to represent
> sounds, though the spelling system of English is a rather
> poor one to use to represent anything except Middle English.
>
> If you want to see an alphabet that actually represents the
>
> -John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/
> "Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day,
> but set fire to him and he's warm for the
>
> - Show quoted text -
In the old books I've used, Egyptian is called "Hamito-Semitic," and
Gardiner uses Hebrew and Arabic examples, here and there, in the
textbook. Like Hebrew and Arabic, the basic concept a word is usually
conveyed by the (three) consonants; the form of the word (rather like
donor, donee, donation, donate) is determined by the vowels, which
don't need to be written because the sense is plain withoiut them.
More or less.
Modern English has 44 sounds and only 26 letters. Middle English had
28 or 29 letters (ash, thorn, yogh), one fewer than Old English
(edh). Our spelling is developed from one variety of late Middle and
our pronunciation developed from another variety. Have you read
Caxton's passage on the differences in language along the Thames?
(The boatman who asked the housewife for eggys and she replied that
she did not speak French. It took a while, but she realized he meant
eyroun.) Personally, I like International Phonetic Alphabet --
however, with that, Brits and Americans spell words differently.
John Varela
wrote:
> Linguistic
> Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
> certain about any of them.
I understand that the god Ra, who used to be Rah, is now Ray, and
sometimes spelled Re.
--
John "I hate change" Varela
Trade NEWlamps for OLDlamps for email
Patok
> Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Cece wrote:
>>
>>> BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
>>> onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
>>> w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
>>> Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
>>> major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
>>> any of the vowels used or where they were placed.
>>
>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
>> wrong, though.
>>
> the family to which Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic) belongs.
> Skin color has absolutely *nothing* to do with language family.
Hmm, I was not /totally/ mistaken then, but close. I had thought
that ancient Egyptian was not Semitic, like Arabic and Hebrew, which
turns out to be true, but I thought they were in a different language
family altogether. That turns out to be wrong, and they are related
after all. Thanks.
As to skin color - it has nothing to do not only with language, but
with race either. Asian Indians are of the white race, even if their
skin is dark, for example.
John Lawler
> > "Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day,
> > but set fire to him and he's warm for the
> > rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> In the old books I've used, Egyptian is called "Hamito-Semitic," and
> Gardiner uses Hebrew and Arabic examples, here and there, in the
> textbook. Like Hebrew and Arabic, the basic concept a word is usually
> conveyed by the (three) consonants; the form of the word (rather like
> donor, donee, donation, donate) is determined by the vowels, which
> don't need to be written because the sense is plain withoiut them.
> More or less.
>
> Modern English has 44 sounds and only 26 letters. Middle English had
> 28 or 29 letters (ash, thorn, yogh), one fewer than Old English
> (edh). Our spelling is developed from one variety of late Middle and
> our pronunciation developed from another variety. Have you read
> Caxton's passage on the differences in language along the Thames?
> (The boatman who asked the housewife for eggys and she replied that
> she did not speak French. It took a while, but she realized he meant
> eyroun.) Personally, I like International Phonetic Alphabet --
> however, with that, Brits and Americans spell words differently.
"Hamito-Semitic" is the old term for what's now called Afroasiatic.
It was used before the relation with Hausa was discovered.
On Dec 30, 9:25 am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Personally, I like International Phonetic Alphabet --
> however, with that, Brits and Americans spell words differently.
Not if you use the English Phonemic Alphabet, which doesn't mark
differences so much as similarities (e.g, /r/ subsumes both rhotic
and non-rhotic pronunciations, /o/ is either [ow] or [ǝʊ]). That's
what
phonemes *are*. A modest example with accompanying transcribed
text is available at http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
(The text is intended as an indication of the intended audience and
the difficulty involved)
Happy New Year, Happy New Decade,
and welcome to the "Twenty-Something" Century.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
"Ye knowe ek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thenketh hem, and yet they spake hem so.
And spedde as wel in love as men now do."
-- Geoffrey Chaucer
Troylus and Criseyde II, 22-26
Cece
> (The text is intended as an indication of the intended audience and
> the difficulty involved)
>
> Happy New Year, Happy New Decade,
> and welcome to the "Twenty-Something" Century.
>
> -John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
> "Ye knowe ek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
> Withinne a thousand yer, and wordes tho
> That hadden prys now wonder nyce and straunge
> Us thenketh hem, and yet they spake hem so.
> And spedde as wel in love as men now do."
> -- Geoffrey Chaucer
>
> - Show quoted text -
The computer I'm at (not mine) doesn't do pdf, nor does it show me
many of the special characters most computers do. Forex, "o is
either ow or [box][box]."
Of course, I figured that "Afroasiatic" must be a newer term for the
"Hamito-Semitic" I'd learned from an old book. Still....
I never will understand why people make so much of skin color! And I
will never understand why some people insist that ancient Egyptians
were "black." Including Cleopatra (whose ancestry was entirely
Greek).
Egyptian vowels -- we don't know, although some idea was gotten from
some of the Amarna tablets, which are written in Akkadian using
cuneiform; names are written phonetically. Also, Coptic has some
hints, if we run the language backward (although we cannot check to
see if we got it right). And Ptolemaic inscriptions can help some,
too, if the text is written in Egyptian and Greek (like the Rosetta
Stone).
Egyptologists look at a string of hieroglyphs, or hieratic or demotic
(the last being characterized as "page after page of demented commas"
by Barbara Michaels), and write down the equivalents of the consonants
indicated, then add "e" wherever a vowel is needed to pronounce the
string. Two letters -- a glottal stop and another that exists in
Arabic -- are often written "a," and another is often written in
"i" (doubled at the end of a word, "y"). If the Egyptologist is an
English-speaker. If the Egyptologist is a French-speaker, some of the
vowels come out "o." For example, the Egyptian word "nfr" is
transcribed by an English Egyptologist "nefer"; by a French one,
"nofre."
The sun god Re -- the writing is a sundisk. I think "Ra" is probably
from Ptolemaic or Greek notes; "Re" is the standard (see above). I've
never seen "Rah." How it was actually pronounced by an Egyptian,
through three or four thousand years, I don't know.
Yusuf B Gursey
what phoneme do you mean by <C>?
> Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
> major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
well, there were single consonant signs, but Egyptian did not
regularly use it as a consonantal aphabet ("abjad"), except for
foreign words. but yes, the signs represent the groups of consonants
and the consonantal skeleton of the words is known with a much higher
degree of certainity than the vowels (unless they happen to be
transliterated into Greek, as it is with some names). there is a
method of guessing reconstructing) the vowels from Coptic with some
complicated rules, but there is a potential error in that so Ancient
Egyptian words are usually given in the consonantal skeleton only.
Yusuf B Gursey
> On Dec 29, 10:13 pm, John Lawler <johnmlaw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Dec 29, 1:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Cece wrote:
>
> > > > BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
> > > > onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
> > > > w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
> > > > Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
> > > > any of the vowels used or where they were placed. (Linguistic
> > > > Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
> > > > certain about any of them. And I'm a dilletante, with pure book
> > > > learning; I have no ideas on that at all.)
>
> > > Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
> > > language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
> > > white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
> > > wrong, though.
>
> > > --
> > > You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
>
> > Ancient Egyptian was definitely an Afroasiatic language. That's
> > the family to which Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic) belongs.
> > Skin color has absolutely *nothing* to do with language family.
>
> > Egyptian (and Coptic, which is modern Egyptian, though it's
> > however, is *not* a Semitic language, but rather a separate
> > branch of Afroasiatic, parallel to Semitic. Other parallel
> > branches are Cushitic (spoken in Somalia, NW Kenya, and
> > environs); Omotic (spoken in the Omo valley of Ethiopia);
> > Berber (N. Africa, esp. Morocco); and Chadic, which is
> > spoken west, south, and east of Lake Chad in sub-Saharan
> > Africa. The most prominent Chadic language is Hausa,
> > mostly spoken in Nigeria. (details from Comrie (ed) 1990,
> > 'The World's Major Languages', Oxford U Press)
>
> > A family tree of Afroasiatic is available online at
> > http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=52-16
>
> > As for why we use an alphabet, it is a good way to represent
> > sounds, though the spelling system of English is a rather
> > poor one to use to represent anything except Middle English.
>
> > If you want to see an alphabet that actually represents the
> > sounds of modern English, try
> > http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
>
> > -John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/
> > "Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day,
> > but set fire to him and he's warm for the
> > rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> In the old books I've used, Egyptian is called "Hamito-Semitic," and
nowadays, the family is called "Afro-Asiatic".
> Gardiner uses Hebrew andArabicexamples, here and there, in the
> textbook. Like Hebrew andArabic, the basic concept a word is usually
Yusuf B Gursey
Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race" has nothing
to do with linguistic classification
Yusuf B Gursey
the last consonant was an `ayn, the voiced pharyngeal fricative, IIRC
though in the late period it is regarded as having disappeared. it
was not something normally romanized as <h>
Yusuf B Gursey
in Turkish meow is miyav, "to meow" is miyavlamak, root miyavla= with
denominal -la=
in chinese "cat" is māo 貓 , different tone and character than the
Chinese leader.
Yusuf B Gursey
a link would be helpful
Patok
> On Dec 29 2009, 4:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Cece wrote:
>>
>>> BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
>>> onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
>>> w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
>>> Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
>>> major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
>>> any of the vowels used or where they were placed. (Linguistic
>>> Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
>>> certain about any of them. And I'm a dilletante, with pure book
>>> learning; I have no ideas on that at all.)
>> Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
>> wrong, though.
>
> Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
> has nothing
> to do with linguistic classification
That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
Yusuf B Gursey
found it, among a summary of the Egyptian writing system:
Yusuf B Gursey
"racial divide" is debatable.
Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
Yusuf B Gursey
and finally, at the end, the classifier "cat"
Yusuf B Gursey
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
<<
The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to the dog's
bark.
>>
AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
Yusuf B Gursey
: On Dec 24 2009, 7:03 am, aquachimp <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk>
: wrote:
:> On Dec 23, 5:52 pm, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
:>
:>
:>
:>
:>
:> > On Dec 23, 10:07 am, aquachimp <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk>
:> > wrote:
:>
:> > > On Dec 21, 11:12 pm, Mike C <mievl...@gmail.com> wrote:
:>
:> > The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly pronounced /
:> > mjuw/.
:>
:> I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is "Wuuf" of
:> "Wooph"?
: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
: <<
:
: The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to the dog's
: bark.
: >>
: AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
two other words are given here:
http://bleedingeyeballs.com/basenjiart/hieroglyphs.htm
<<
Below is the hieroglyphic spelling tsm, one word for dog. The first three
symbols represent the phonetic spelling: the hobble rope [top left] equals
t, the bolt {...} equals s, and the owl equals m. The pictogram
for dog follows, cementing the meaning of the word.
>>
actually it is t_sm , representing *ch*.
also
<<
For instance, uher, another word for dog, also means house. The pictogram
that followed thus helped the ancients clarify the word's meaning: When a
dog pictogram followed uher, the writer meant a dog; if the symbol for
house followed, then the writer meant a house.
The hieroglyphic word dog thus combines phonograms which represent the
sounds of the word together with a pictogram, the visual representation of
the thing itself.
>>
the semitic word for dog is *kalb-um (Classical Arabic kalb-un) root <klb>
(-um is teh nomiantive) from the bilitiral root <kl> + "animal ending"
-<b> . in other Afro-Asiatic language groups IIRC it appears as <kn>
(cognate with the Semitic). NB Latin canis (animal names tend to get
around).
Yusuf B Gursey
: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
: >>
<<
Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *'ayVw-
Meaning: jackal, dog
Semitic: *'VwVy- 'jackal'
Egyptian: i:w 'dog' (MK)
Western Chadic: *'iy- 'dog'
Low East Cushitic: *yayy- 'wild dog; hunting dog; jackal; wolf'
High East Cushitic: *yayy- 'hunting dog'
Notes: Originally descriptive.
>>
Yusuf B Gursey
: On Dec 22, 11:44?am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
:> Um, why do we use the alphabet for writing?
ease of conveying words?
: We use the alphabet because the Romans did, and they did it
: because the Greeks did it, and they did it because the Punes
: did it. The Punes (Phoenicians) invented the version of the
: alphabet that we use. Other versions spread to the East
they invented a strictly consanantal alphabet (abjad)
: and became Asian alphabets like Devanagari.
that is technically called an "abugida" (vowels are indicated by modifying
the consonant symbols)
: The Chinese, of course, invented a different way of writing,
: even earlier, but they have languages that are better suited
: to logographic writing than most.
I'm sure someone will quibble about that. the logographic writing also
represents syllables. due to the many homophones, and the desire to write
the various "dialects" of Chinese in a single script, the logographic
system persists.
: As for making up words to represent sounds like "grrrr",
Yusuf B Gursey
: On Dec 28, 11:35?pm, John Lawler <johnmlaw...@gmail.com> wrote:
:> On Dec 22, 11:44?am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
:>
:> > Um, why do we use the alphabet for writing?
:>
:> We use the alphabet because the Romans did, and they did it
:> because the Greeks did it, and they did it because the Punes
:> alphabet that we use. ?Other versions spread to the East
:> and became Asian alphabets like Devanagari.
:>
:> The Chinese, of course, invented a different way of writing,
:> even earlier, but they have languages that are better suited
:> to logographic writing than most.
:>
:> As for making up words to represent sounds like "grrrr",
:> that's normal onomatopoeia, as BMCT pointed out. Common
:> in all languages, whether they have standard spellings
:> or not (standard spelling is not a universal phenomenon).
:>
:> ?"A sentence uttered makes a world appear
:> ? Where all things happen as it says they do;
:> ? We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
:> ? Words have no words for words that are not true."
:> ? ? ? ?-- ?W.H. Auden, Notes on the Comic
: To put it simply: we use an alphabet because that way, we can most
: clearly write down the sounds of our speech. There is nothing weird
: or strange about using strings of letters to represent sounds or
: noise.
: BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
: onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
considred to be originally onomatopeic too, see my other posts.
: w; the consonants in the word for "hound" are, in order, C, s, m.
ah, <C> stands for *ch* (see my other post.
: Note: Egyptian wrote down the consonants only (just like the other
Yusuf B Gursey
> In sci.lang Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote in <hi47n2$rs...@pcls6.std.com>:
> : On Dec 24 2009, 7:03 am, aquachimp <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk>: wrote:
>
> :> On Dec 23, 5:52 pm, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> :>
> :>
> :>
> :>
> :>
> :> > On Dec 23, 10:07 am, aquachimp <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk>:> > wrote:
>
> :>
> :> > > On Dec 21, 11:12 pm, Mike C <mievl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> :>
> :> > > > (If you're wondering why I'm interested... it came up in a lunch
> :> > > > conversation with my friend the other day, and ... I'm just a curious
> :> > > > person!)
> :>
> :> > > Well since you're the curious sort...
> :> > > You might find it interesting to see how others write the sound a cat
> :> > > makes;
> :>
> :> > >http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/miauwen
> :>
> :> > > It's in Dutch, but not that difficult to follow; "miauw" is "meow" in
> :> > > Dutch.
> :> > > "Meow" in other languages shown too.
> :>
> :> > The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly pronounced /
> :> > mjuw/.
> :>
> :> I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is "Wuuf" of
> :> "Wooph"?
>
> :http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
>
> : <<
> :
> : The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to the dog's
> : bark.
>
> : >>
>
> : AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>
>
> <<
>
> Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *'ayVw-
>
> Meaning: jackal, dog
>
> Semitic: *'VwVy- 'jackal'
jackal in arabic: ibn 'a:wa" "son of 'a:wa" " (ibn 'a:wa:, 'a:wa:
spelled <'a:wy> ) ابن آوى
Hebrew 'i: "jackal" (< *"howler") root *<'wy> *"howl"; arabic 'a:ha
"he cried" آهَ (BDB)
Yusuf B Gursey
> On Jan 7, 4:43 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
> > : <<
> > :
> > : The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to the dog's
> > : bark.
>
> > : >>
>
> > : AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>
> >http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&ba...
>
> > <<
>
> > Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *'ayVw-
>
> > Meaning: jackal, dog
>
> > Semitic: *'VwVy- 'jackal'
>
> jackal in arabic: ibn 'a:wa" "son of 'a:wa" " (ibn 'a:wa:, 'a:wa:
in classical arabic ibn-u 'a:wa: (with the nominative case ending in
the contstruct state)
CDB
> Yusuf B Gursey <y...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>>>>
[onomatopoeia in animal names]
>
>>> The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to
>>> the dog's bark.
>>
>>> AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>>
>> http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&ba...
>>
>> Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *'ayVw-
>>
>> Meaning: jackal, dog
>>
>> Semitic: *'VwVy- 'jackal'
>
> jackal in arabic: ibn 'a:wa" "son of 'a:wa" " (ibn 'a:wa:, 'a:wa:
>
> Hebrew 'i: "jackal" (< *"howler") root *<'wy> *"howl"; arabic 'a:ha
>
Interesting parallel to my reported explanation for "canis"
elsethread. Any comments on "tan"? (I remember a song in Hebrew,
"Erev Ba", that uses that word for "jackal": "melaveh hatan et bo
haleyl," the jackal accompanies (musically, in this case, I suppose)
the coming of night.)
>
Yes, here it is, although the latin-alphabet transcription has a few
typos in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULjyc0sw34
CDB
and has a germanic cognate "hound" which would put it earlier than IE
contact with those southern languages, would it not? (That's really
the question it appears to be: I'm no expert.)
Patok
Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
Cece
>
> - Show quoted text -
Oh, good! I don't have a link; I looked it up in my paper copy of
Gardiner.
Your other comments and questions: Yes, ayin is what I was referring
to; I couldn't remember the name and I have never heard the sound.
The phoneme I meant by C is, in ASCII IPA, /tS/. The consonants at
beginning and end of the English word "church." The monoliteral is a
tethering rope. The spelling of the word for dog does not include
that monoliteral.
A few words are represented by one monoliteral. The preposition "n"
is one; pronominal suffixes are a whole set. Usually, though, the
monoliterals are part of a spelling. Sometimes they are for more
sounds in the word, sounds not included in the pronunciation of the
ideogram or triliteral also used; sometimes they repeat sounds that
are included in the bi- or triliteral.
No, I don't know much Egyptian; I've studied it on my own, getting
into Gardiner's Lesson 11.
By the way, Omniglot says that the word for "cat" includes a picture
of a cat. Not in Gardiner! Gardiner shows the determinative of a
cowhide, used to indicate "animal."
Patok
> On Dec 30, 9:25 am, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Personally, I like International Phonetic Alphabet --
>> however, with that, Brits and Americans spell words differently.
>
> Not if you use the English Phonemic Alphabet, which doesn't mark
> differences so much as similarities (e.g, /r/ subsumes both rhotic
> and non-rhotic pronunciations, /o/ is either [ow] or [ǝʊ]). That's
> what
> phonemes *are*. A modest example with accompanying transcribed
> text is available at http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
> (The text is intended as an indication of the intended audience and
> the difficulty involved)
This is a move in the right direction, but I have some quips. For
one, you need to have upper- and lowercase glyphs for each phoneme. A
cursory look at the Unicode character sets confirms it for the ones I
could find, but you need to make sure that /all/ of them have upper and
lowercase variants.
Second, I think you should strive for single character phonemes.
They don't have to come from the IPA set, if that one doesn't use them.
The 'ch', for instance, is represented in IPA and your set with 't∫'
(hmm, could not find the 'sh' symbol in this charset, had to use the
integral), but the Cyrillic (ч Ч) stands for that sound and is one
glyph. Same for the 'sh' - if '∫' is not widely available, replacing it
with the Cyrillic equivalent (ш Ш) could be more convenient. Same for
the IPA glyph for 'zh' - the one that looks like '3' - could not find
it; maybe use the Cyrillic equivalent (ж Ж)? And so on, you get the drift.
Third, (but it is not related to your proposal, but rather to how
you use it), I find some of your spellings strange. For example, why do
you spell "kittens" as "kItnz", rather than "kItənz"? You have omitted
the schwa almost everywhere. And you spell "modest" as "madəst", while I
would expect the second letter to be anything but 'a'. I personally
would spell it "moudəst".
Bill McCray
> Interesting parallel to my reported explanation for "canis"
> elsethread. Any comments on "tan"? (I remember a song in Hebrew,
> "Erev Ba", that uses that word for "jackal": "melaveh hatan et bo
> haleyl," the jackal accompanies (musically, in this case, I suppose)
> the coming of night.)
"Evening Falls". I don't know about the words, but the melody is
beautiful. I love the dance associated with it.
Bill in Kentucky
Yusuf B Gursey
> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> > On Jan 7, 3:12 am, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> >>> On Dec 29 2009, 4:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
> >>>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
> >>>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
> >>>> wrong, though.
> >>> Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
> >> Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
> >> Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
>
> >>> has nothing
> >>> to do with linguistic classification
> >> That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
>
> > "racial divide" is debatable.
>
> > Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
>
> Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
I don't subscribe to the notion of "race" to begin with, but NB the
great variation in apperance of the speakers in those language groups.
besides, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish are spoken as a first
language by people of African and Native American origin.
Patok
> On Jan 7, 1:56 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>>> On Jan 7, 3:12 am, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>>>>> On Dec 29 2009, 4:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
>>>>>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
>>>>>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
>>>>>> wrong, though.
>>>>> Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
>>>> Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
>>>> Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
>>>>> has nothing
>>>>> to do with linguistic classification
>>>> That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
>>> "racial divide" is debatable.
>>> Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
>> Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
>
> I don't subscribe to the notion of "race" to begin with, but NB the
This is your problem. Races in humans are equivalent to breeds in
dogs or cats (cats is a closer match, since the variation between dog
breeds is too extreme). Are you unsubscribing from the notion of breeds too?
> great variation in apperance of the speakers in those language groups.
External appearance (especially skin color) is the most
insignificant of the markers that separate races.
> besides, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish are spoken as a first
> language by people of African and Native American origin.
Well, yes, but these are not the languages that they spoke
natively. My point was, that native languages and populations evolve
together, and speakers of the same language family share genetic origins
too.
Yusuf B Gursey
> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> > On Jan 7, 1:56 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> >>> On Jan 7, 3:12 am, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> >>>>> On Dec 29 2009, 4:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>> Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
> >>>>>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
> >>>>>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
> >>>>>> wrong, though.
> >>>>> Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
> >>>> Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
> >>>> Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
> >>>>> has nothing
> >>>>> to do with linguistic classification
> >>>> That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
> >>> "racial divide" is debatable.
> >>> Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
> >> Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
>
> > I don't subscribe to the notion of "race" to begin with, but NB the
>
> This is your problem. Races in humans are equivalent to breeds in
> dogs or cats (cats is a closer match, since the variation between dog
> breeds is too extreme). Are you unsubscribing from the notion of breeds too?
>
"race" as conventionally tthought of is not a scientific category.
there are population groups with certain genetic markers.
> > great variation in apperance of the speakers in those language groups.
>
> External appearance (especially skin color) is the most
> insignificant of the markers that separate races.
>
> > besides, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish are spoken as a first
> > language by people of African and Native American origin.
>
> Well, yes, but these are not the languages that they spoke
they speek it natively. adoption of a new language by a population
group is quite common. so is intermarriage.
> natively. My point was, that native languages and populations evolve
> together, and speakers of the same language family share genetic origins
> too.
sometimes, but there are many grand exceptions, and as I said before,
adoption of a new language, intermarriage etc. are quite common. this
issue was just discussed in another thread in sci.lang . attempts to
make a close correlation between language families and genetic markers
have not proven to be very succesful.
Harlan Messinger
> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>> On Jan 7, 3:12 am, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>>>> On Dec 29 2009, 4:33 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Interesting. But are you sure about that Egyptian was a Semitic
>>>>> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts)
>>>>> were
>>>>> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I
>>>>> may be
>>>>> wrong, though.
>>>> Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
>>> Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
>>> Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
>>>
>>>> has nothing
>>>> to do with linguistic classification
>>> That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial
>>> divide?
>>
>> "racial divide" is debatable.
>>
>> Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
>
> Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
All of them, given almost anyone's definition of "race".
Trond Engen
> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>
>> On Jan 7, 1:56 pm, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Jan 7, 3:12 am, Patok <crazy.div.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> [...]
>>>>>
>>>>> Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
>>>>
>>>> "racial divide" is debatable.
>>>> Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Turkic for starters.
>>>
>>> Which of these language groups are spoken by more than one race?
>>
>> I don't subscribe to the notion of "race" to begin with, but NB the
>
> This is your problem. Races in humans are equivalent to breeds
> in dogs or cats (cats is a closer match, since the variation between
> dog breeds is too extreme). Are you unsubscribing from the notion of
> breeds too?
Only where deliberate selection of arbitrary characteristica has been
pursued over many generations, artificially narrowing the genetic pool,
resulting in a population with some few very characteristic arbitrary
features and a high risque of genetic diseases.
>> great variation in apperance of the speakers in those language
>> groups.
>
> External appearance (especially skin color) is the most
> insignificant of the markers that separate races.
Yeah, right. Musicality and rhythm, then?
>> besides, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish are spoken as a first
>> language by people of African and Native American origin.
>
> Well, yes, but these are not the languages that they spoke natively.
Brilliant! "Excluding languages spoken by other populations than the
original no language has ever spread to other populations."
> My point was, that native languages and populations evolve
> together, and speakers of the same language family share genetic
> origins too.
No.
Or: Over a short time span: Yes, naturally, by collocation. Over a long
time span: No, too much noise from language change and migration.
--
Trond Engen
CDB
>
[onomatopoeia]
>
> Your other comments and questions: Yes, ayin is what I was
> referring
> to; I couldn't remember the name and I have never heard the sound.
>
to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At about 1:14
here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for English)
>to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At about 1:14
>here:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
Some real ains here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com
Yusuf B Gursey
> Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:12:05 -0500: "CDB" <bellema...@sympatico.ca>: in
> sci.lang:
>
> >Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for English)
> >to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At about 1:14
> >here:
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
>
> Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
hamza is a glottal stop, for those who don't know
Yusuf B Gursey
> sci.lang:
>
> >Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for English)
> >to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At about 1:14
> >here:
> >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
>
> Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
> Some real ains here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
the title of the song and the refrain is: h.abi:bi: ya: nu:r el`ain ,
"my love, o light the eye (soul, self)"
`ain "eye" obviously starts with an `ayn , i.e. the voiced pharyngeal
fricative. h. is it's unvoiced equivalent (in Ancient Egyptian
symbolized by "twisted flax")
>
> --
> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com
Yusuf B Gursey
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> Oh, good! I don't have a link; I looked it up in my paper copy of
> Gardiner.
>
> Your other comments and questions: Yes, ayin is what I was referring
> to; I couldn't remember the name and I have never heard the sound.
>
> The phoneme I meant by C is, in ASCII IPA, /tS/. The consonants at
> beginning and end of the English word "church." The monoliteral is a
> tethering rope. The spelling of the word for dog does not include
> that monoliteral.
>
> A few words are represented by one monoliteral. The preposition "n"
> is one; pronominal suffixes are a whole set. Usually, though, the
> monoliterals are part of a spelling. Sometimes they are for more
> sounds in the word, sounds not included in the pronunciation of the
> ideogram or triliteral also used; sometimes they repeat sounds that
> are included in the bi- or triliteral.
>
> No, I don't know much Egyptian; I've studied it on my own, getting
> into Gardiner's Lesson 11.
>
> By the way, Omniglot says that the word for "cat" includes a picture
> of a cat. Not in Gardiner! Gardiner shows the determinative of a
> cowhide, used to indicate "animal."
maybe it evolved as Egyptians got more and very familiar with cats?
Yusuf B Gursey
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> Oh, good! I don't have a link; I looked it up in my paper copy of
> Gardiner.
>
> Your other comments and questions: Yes, ayin is what I was referring
> to; I couldn't remember the name and I have never heard the sound.
>
voiced phayngeal fricative. lsiten to the video posted. for layman,
one coudl describe it as a slight retching sound.
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
>
> >>> BTW, ancient Egyptian for "dog" does not seem to have been
> >>> onomatopoeic at all. The consonants in the word for "dog" are y and
> >>> major Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic); we do not know for sure
> >>> any of the vowels used or where they were placed. (Linguistic
> >>> Egyptologists have some idea for many words, but even they aren't
> >>> certain about any of them. And I'm a dilletante, with pure book
> >>> learning; I have no ideas on that at all.)
> >> language? I seem to remember that the Egyptians (modern-day Copts) were
> >> white (Caucasian), just like ancient and modern-day Ethiopians. I may be
> >> wrong, though.
>
> > Ethiopians have dark skin color and skin color or "race"
>
> Skin color has nothing to do with race. Ethiopians, same as Asian
> Indians, have dark skin, but are not of the black race.
There's no single black race. Would you like to guess why the British
called Chennaipatnam* Blacktown.
* the native settlement just north of Ft. St. George; what currently
stands there is Madras High Court & Law College
> > has nothing
> > to do with linguistic classification
>
> That's debatable. Which language groups have crossed the racial divide?
Cece
>
> - Show quoted text -
The "emphatic h"? I've never heard that, either! Even though I
attended a talk on Egyptian gods, paintings and statues, by an
Egyptologist, an Egyptian whose English and Egyptian were both
accented by his modern Egyptian Arabic. He'd mentioned /'be da
[upsidedown R]/ several times, with me wondering which god he was
talking about until he finally put up a slide of a wallpainting of
Ptah.
And no, I've never heard of Merrilee Rush.
Cece
>
> > > - Show quoted text -
>
> > Oh, good! I don't have a link; I looked it up in my paper copy of
> > Gardiner.
>
> > Your other comments and questions: Yes, ayin is what I was referring
> > to; I couldn't remember the name and I have never heard the sound.
>
> > The phoneme I meant by C is, in ASCII IPA, /tS/. The consonants at
> > beginning and end of the English word "church." The monoliteral is a
> > tethering rope. The spelling of the word for dog does not include
> > that monoliteral.
>
> > A few words are represented by one monoliteral. The preposition "n"
> > is one; pronominal suffixes are a whole set. Usually, though, the
> > monoliterals are part of a spelling. Sometimes they are for more
> > sounds in the word, sounds not included in the pronunciation of the
> > ideogram or triliteral also used; sometimes they repeat sounds that
> > are included in the bi- or triliteral.
>
> > No, I don't know much Egyptian; I've studied it on my own, getting
> > into Gardiner's Lesson 11.
>
> > By the way, Omniglot says that the word for "cat" includes a picture
> > of a cat. Not in Gardiner! Gardiner shows the determinative of a
> > cowhide, used to indicate "animal."
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
I double-checked Gardiner last night. In the Vocabulary, both
Egyptian-English and English-Egyptian, the determinative is "cow's
skin," meaning, among other things, animal/beast/mammal. So I looked
up the picture of the cat in the Sign-List -- and there it is, a
determinatve, for use at the end of the word "cat"!
Ruud Harmsen
<ceceliaa...@yahoo.com>: in sci.lang:
>The "emphatic h"? I've never heard that, either!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
Habi:bi:, as Yusuf already pointed out.
Yusuf B Gursey
> On Jan 8, 9:32 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jan 8, 8:35 am, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
>
> > > Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:12:05 -0500: "CDB" <bellema...@sympatico.ca>: in
> > > sci.lang:
>
> > > >Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for English)
> > > >to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At about 1:14
> > > >here:
> > > >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
>
> > > Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
> > > Some real ains here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
>
> > the title of the song and the refrain is: h.abi:bi: ya: nu:r el`ain ,
> > "my love, o light the eye (soul, self)"
>
> > `ain "eye" obviously starts with an `ayn , i.e. the voiced pharyngeal
> > fricative. h. is it's unvoiced equivalent (in Ancient Egyptian
> > symbolized by "twisted flax")
>
> > > --
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> The "emphatic h"? I've never heard that, either! Even though I
it's symbolized as an emphatic (sometimes it is written with barred h
<ħ> and it is written as such in Maltese), but it is not. it's not
pharyngelaized as the emphatics are, but it has has single point
pharygeal articulation.
> attended a talk on Egyptian gods, paintings and statues, by an
> Egyptologist, an Egyptian whose English and Egyptian were both
> accented by his modern Egyptian Arabic. He'd mentioned /'be da
> [upsidedown R]/ several times, with me wondering which god he was
arabic has no /b/, so he was pronouncing it [b], dunno why he voiced /
t/, and /h./ is not pronounced as the uvular sound you symbolized. you
might have misheard.
> talking about until he finally put up a slide of a wallpainting of
> Ptah.
apparently it means "opener" (Wikipedia) in Ancient Egyptian.
interesting because the root <pth.> means "to open" in Semitic.
>
> And no, I've never heard of Merrilee Rush.
never mind, turns out to be irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Ruud Harmsen
<y...@theworld.com>: in sci.lang:
>Peter Moylan:
>
>> On 05/01/10 02:06, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>
>>> On Jan 4, 9:22 am, Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Your last sentence is true of my wife, but not of me. I am rarely
>>>> if ever in doubt about what language someone has used (if it's one
>>>> I know, i.e. English, French or Spanish), and I always know what
>>>> language I am speaking. My wife, however, hears sense and not
>>>> words, and frequently can't say what language someone has used, and
>>>> will often reply in a different one -- that is quite unconscious;
>>>> it's certainly not deliberate.
>>>
>>> Hopefully only when she knows (at some level) that her interlocutor
>>> speaks the language she is using. Early studies of code-switching
>>> found that that's the _sine qua non_ of doing it.
>>
>> I can report at least one exception to that. When my Belgian ex-wife
>> and I were in a mixed-language conversation, she would sometimes
>> speak to me in Dutch after addressing someone else in French. I don't
>> speak Dutch, and of course she knew that, but apparently she had my
>> native language mentally tagged as "not-French", and the most common
>> not-French language in Belgium is Dutch.
>
>> attended a talk on Egyptian gods, paintings and statues, by an
>> Egyptologist, an Egyptian whose English and Egyptian were both
>> accented by his modern Egyptian Arabic. �He'd mentioned /'be da
>> [upsidedown R]/ several times, with me wondering which god he was
>
>arabic has no /b/, /
has no /p/, you no doubt meant.
>/ so he was pronouncing it [b], dunno why he voiced /
>t/, and /h./ is not pronounced as the uvular sound you symbolized. you
>might have misheard.
>
>> talking about until he finally put up a slide of a wallpainting of
>> Ptah.
>
>apparently it means "opener" (Wikipedia) in Ancient Egyptian.
>interesting because the root <pth.> means "to open" in Semitic.
Must be cognate with Arabic alFatah., from fatah.a = open, conquer.
Yusuf B Gursey
yes, sorry.
>
> >/ so he was pronouncing it [b], dunno why he voiced /
> >t/, and /h./ is not pronounced as the uvular sound you symbolized. you
> >might have misheard.
>
> >> talking about until he finally put up a slide of a wallpainting of
> >> Ptah.
>
> >apparently it means "opener" (Wikipedia) in Ancient Egyptian.
> >interesting because the root <pth.> means "to open" in Semitic.
>
> Must be cognate with Arabic alFatah., from fatah.a = open, conquer.
in standard arabic it is al-Fath. . I remember that reading that it
was the Hebraized pronounciation with the second /a/ that got
popular in West. Wikipedia conifrms that it is also spelled al-Fateh.
it's a reverse acronym of << h.arakat al-tah.ri:r al-wat.ani: al-
filast.i:ni: >>, meaning the "Palestinian National Liberation
Movement".
> --
> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com
Yusuf B Gursey
I didn't realize it until know but Wikipedia adds:
(H.ataf حتف, the non-reverse acronym, would mean "death", and has not
been used by the movement.)
actually it should be Hatf in standard arabic.
CDB
>>
>>> Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for
>>> English) to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At
>>> about 1:14 here:
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
>>
>> Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
>> Some real ains here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
>
> the title of the song and the refrain is: h.abi:bi: ya: nu:r el`ain
> , "my love, o light the eye (soul, self)"
>
> `ain "eye" obviously starts with an `ayn , i.e. the voiced
> pharyngeal fricative. h. is it's unvoiced equivalent (in Ancient
> Egyptian symbolized by "twisted flax")
>> --
>> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com
>
speak Arabic, or any other language with a pronounced 'ain/ayin, but
I thought I saw the words for "my beloved", "light", and "eye" in the
song title, and was going to ask if there was an ayin at the beginning
of "ayn".
>
I must say that Merrilee's "angel" does seem to me to begin with a
voiced "h" at the back of the throat, which is how I would,
non-technically, describe a "voiced pharyngeal fricative", more than
like glottal stop. Considering that she's singing in English, I mean.
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>I must say that Merrilee's "angel" does seem to me to begin with a
>voiced "h" at the back of the throat, which is how I would,
>non-technically, describe a "voiced pharyngeal fricative", more than
>like glottal stop.
All three are very different. Voiced h and glottal stop occur in my
own language, Dutch, and form an opposition.
Yusuf B Gursey
> Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> > On Jan 8, 8:35 am, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
> >> "CDB" <bellema...@sympatico.ca>: in sci.lang [and aeu]:
>
> >>> Remember Merrilee Rush? I thought she came pretty close (for
> >>> English) to an ayin with "Just call me ?angel of the morning". At
> >>> about 1:14 here:
> >>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhMqFNWnVNU
>
> >> Sounds more like hamza than ain.'
> >> Some real ains here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5V3dPz1jQ
>
> > the title of the song and the refrain is: h.abi:bi: ya: nu:r el`ain
> > , "my love, o light the eye (soul, self)"
>
> > `ain "eye" obviously starts with an `ayn , i.e. the voiced
> > pharyngeal fricative. h. is it's unvoiced equivalent (in Ancient
> > Egyptian symbolized by "twisted flax")
> >> --
> >> Ruud Harmsen,http://rudhar.com
>
> I thank you and Ruud for the example, and the explanation. I don't
> speak Arabic, or any other language with a pronounced 'ain/ayin, but
the diphthongal character of /ay/ is more apparent in colloquial
rather than classical arabic, that's why the differences in spelling.
> I thought I saw the words for "my beloved", "light", and "eye" in the
> song title, and was going to ask if there was an ayin at the beginning
> of "ayn".
yes. and the phoenician letter from which ultimately the hebrew script
(actually aramaic) and arabic script letter is derived (it became
omicron in greek script) ultimately comes from the picture of an eye
(which is what `ayn litterally means).
Yusuf B Gursey
> > <hi47n2$rs...@pcls6.std.com>:
> >> On Dec 24 2009, 7:03 am, aquachimp
> >> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >>> On Dec 23, 5:52 pm, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >>>> On Dec 23, 10:07 am, aquachimp
> >>>> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >>>>> On Dec 21, 11:12 pm, Mike C <mievl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>>> The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly
> >>>> pronounced / mjuw/.
>
> >>> I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is
> >>> "Wuuf" of "Wooph"?
>
>
> >> <<
>
> >> The ancient Egyptian word for dog was "iwiw", which referred to
> >> the dog's bark.
>
> >> AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>
> > two other words are given here:
>
> >http://bleedingeyeballs.com/basenjiart/hieroglyphs.htm
>
> > <<
>
> > Below is the hieroglyphic spelling tsm, one word for dog. The first
> > three
> > symbols represent the phonetic spelling: the hobble rope [top left]
> > equals
> > t, the bolt {...} equals s, and the owl equals m. The pictogram
> > for dog follows, cementing the meaning of the word.
>
> > actually it is t_sm , representing *ch*.
>
> > also
>
> > <<
>
> > For instance, uher, another word for dog, also means house. The
> > pictogram
> > that followed thus helped the ancients clarify the word's meaning:
> > When a
> > dog pictogram followed uher, the writer meant a dog; if the symbol
> > for
> > house followed, then the writer meant a house.
>
> > The hieroglyphic word dog thus combines phonograms which represent
> > the
> > sounds of the word together with a pictogram, the visual
> > representation of
> > the thing itself.
>
> > the semitic word for dog is *kalb-um (Classical Arabic kalb-un)
> > root <klb> (-um is teh nomiantive) from the bilitiral root <kl> +
> > "animal ending" -<b> . in other Afro-Asiatic language groups IIRC
> > it appears as <kn> (cognate with the Semitic). NB Latin canis
> > (animal names tend to get
> > around).
memory played tricks it seemes the article "Languages of the World" in
Brittannica says Semitic kalb(-um) comes from kal-b- cognate with
Cushitic and Chadic *kala- / kara- . close but no that close.
nevertheless there are many words for "dog" in various language
families that start with k- (in pinyin Chinese gǒu, i.e. gou3 with g-,
but that is only weakly voiced, cantonese kau). turkic qan*ch*Iq (I
represents the undotted i of turkish, the back narrow unrounded vowel)
"female dog, bitch" (-*ch*Iq is a dimunitive), turkish köpek, uzbek
kopak (domestic, as opposed to feral dog) - probably russian sobaka is
"satem" version of it (acc. to Menges), bulgarian kuche (thought to be
of iranian origin), ku*ch*u ku*ch*u (turkish for calling a dog), etc.
similarly p- words for "panther, leopard", i.e. pardus, turkic bars /
pars etc. . I think these words traveled along with the animal.
>
> That's often explained as being related to IE words meaning "sing",
> and has a germanic cognate "hound" which would put it earlier than IE
> contact with those southern languages, would it not? (That's really
> the question it appears to be: I'm no expert.)
another internal latin etymology is from cānus (with long a) "hoary,
white". but acc. to Britannica from PIE.: Hierog. Luwian śuwana-,
Sanskrit śvan-, Greek kúōn, Latin canis, Armenian *sh*un , Tocharian B
kwen-, Old Irish con-, Lithuanian *sh*un- (some of these are "satem
forms).
Yusuf B Gursey
ah, Omotic has kan- .
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iln/LING2110/v07/THEIL%20Is%20Omotic%20Afroasiatic.pdf
<<
4.2 Fleming's lexical comparisons
Below follows a summary of Fleming's (1974) presentation of
21 OM words with alleged AA cognates.
...
8. DOG. PNOM *kan-; «kana … virtually universal in [NOM]. SGO has an
innovating form kuna:n-o but NGO has kana» • SE *kl-b «with the
assumption
that -b is a suffix for animal terms».
>>
but the article in question does not regard Omotic as a branch of AA,
although most do.
Yusuf B Gursey
On Jan 13, 4:56 pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> wrote:
> On Jan 7, 11:36 am, "CDB" <bellema...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> > > <hi47n2$rs...@pcls6.std.com>:
> > >> On Dec 24 2009, 7:03 am, aquachimp
> > >> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > >>> On Dec 23, 5:52 pm, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> On Dec 23, 10:07 am, aquachimp
> > >>>> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > >>>>> On Dec 21, 11:12 pm, Mike C <mievl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly
> > >>>> pronounced / mjuw/.
>
> > >>> I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is
> > >>> "Wuuf" of "Wooph"?
>
> > >>http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
>
> > >> <<
>
> > >> thedog'sbark.
>
> > >> AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>
> > > two other words are given here:
>
> > >http://bleedingeyeballs.com/basenjiart/hieroglyphs.htm
>
> > > <<
>
> > > Below is the hieroglyphic spelling tsm, one word for dog. The first
> > > three
> > > symbols represent the phonetic spelling: the hobble rope [top left]
> > > equals
> > > t, the bolt {...} equals s, and the owl equals m. The pictogram
>
> > > actually it is t_sm , representing *ch*.
>
> > > also
>
> > > <<
>
> > > For instance, uher, another word for dog, also means house. The
> > > pictogram
> > > that followed thus helped the ancients clarify the word's meaning:
> > > When a
> > > dog pictogram followed uher, the writer meant a dog; if the symbol
> > > for
> > > house followed, then the writer meant a house.
>
> > > The hieroglyphic word dog thus combines phonograms which represent
> > > the
> > > sounds of the word together with a pictogram, the visual
> > > representation of
> > > the thing itself.
>
> > > the semitic word for dog is *kalb-um (Classical Arabic kalb-un)
> > > root <klb> (-um is teh nomiantive) from the bilitiral root <kl> +
> > > "animal ending" -<b> . in other Afro-Asiatic language groups IIRC
> > > it appears as <kn> (cognate with the Semitic). NB Latin canis
> > > (animal names tend to get
> > > around).
>
> memory played tricks it seemes the article "Languages of the World" in
> Brittannica says Semitic kalb(-um) comes from kal-b- cognate with
> Cushitic and Chadic *kala- / kara- . close but no that close.
I do remember right, but wrong source.
Yusuf B Gursey
> On Jan 7, 11:36 am, "CDB" <bellema...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> > > <hi47n2$rs...@pcls6.std.com>:
> > >> On Dec 24 2009, 7:03 am, aquachimp
> > >> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > >>> On Dec 23, 5:52 pm, Cece <ceceliaarmstr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> On Dec 23, 10:07 am, aquachimp
> > >>>> <aquach...@aquachimp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > >>>>> On Dec 21, 11:12 pm, Mike C <mievl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >>>> The ancient Egyptian word for "cat" is "miw," possibly
> > >>>> pronounced / mjuw/.
>
> > >>> I don't suppose that the ancient Egyptian word for "dog" is
> > >>> "Wuuf" of "Wooph"?
>
> > >>http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/dogs.htm
>
> > >> <<
>
> > >> the dog's bark.
>
> > >> AFAIK <i> may represent the glottal stop, perhaps read 'aw'aw ?
>
> > > two other words are given here:
>
> > >http://bleedingeyeballs.com/basenjiart/hieroglyphs.htm
>
> > > <<
>
> > > three
> > > symbols represent the phonetic spelling: the hobble rope [top left]
> > > equals
> > > t, the bolt {...} equals s, and the owl equals m. The pictogram
> > > fordogfollows, cementing the meaning of the word.
>
> > > actually it is t_sm , representing *ch*.
>
> > > also
>
> > > <<
>
> > > For instance, uher, another word for dog, also means house. The
> > > pictogram
> > > that followed thus helped the ancients clarify the word's meaning:
> > > When a
> > > for
> > > house followed, then the writer meant a house.
>
> > > the
> > > sounds of the word together with a pictogram, the visual
> > > representation of
> > > the thing itself.
>
> > > the semitic word for dog is *kalb-um (Classical Arabic kalb-un)
> > > root <klb> (-um is teh nomiantive) from the bilitiral root <kl> +
> > > "animal ending" -<b> . in other Afro-Asiatic language groups IIRC
> > > (animal names tend to get
> > > around).
>
> memory played tricks it seemes the article "Languages of the World" in
I do remember right, but wrong source.
It's from Ruhlen, found in the Starling database by Starostin et al.
Starostin et. al. have three similar Afro-Asiatic words for "dog"
Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *kVl-
Meaning: dog, wolf
Semitic: *kʷahil- 'fox-like animal' ˜ *ta-kʷVl- 'wolf,
jackal' (<Cush?) (Cf. *kalb- 'dog')
Berber: *kulVn 'wolf (or squirrel?)'
Central Chadic: *kVl- 'dog'
Beḍauye (Beja): tákʷla 'wolf; Lycaon pictus'
Central Cushitic (Agaw): *ta-kʷil- 'wolf'
Saho-Afar: *ta-kla 'wolf; hyena dog'
Warazi (Dullay): (?) *tVlVkk- (met.) 'Felis serval'
Omotic: *tolk- (<*tV-lVk-, with met.) 'hyena' 1, 'leopard' 2
Notes: > Sem *kalb-, with b- suffix of harmful animals? Cf. Bla Beja
24: Eth; Cush; Om; CCha (Uzam)
Borean etymology:
Long-range etymologies :
Borean (approx.) : KVLV
Meaning : dog
Afroasiatic : *kVl-
Austric : *kVlu(R)
and, (what M. Ruhlen regards as from proto-world *kuan - see "On the
Origin of Languages" - Ch. 14 "Global Etymologies" p. 302-303):
Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *kwVHen-
Meaning: dog
Berber: *kun- 'dog'
Western Chadic: *kwin-H- 'dog'
East Chadic: *kany- 'dog'
Mogogodo (Yaaku): kwehen 'dog'
Omotic: *keHen- 'dog'
Borean etymology:
Long-range etymologies :
Borean (approx.) : KVNV
Meaning : wolf, dog
Eurasiatic : *ḲüjnA
Afroasiatic : *kwVHen-
Sino-Caucasian : *ẋHwĕ́je
Austric : PAN *u(ŋ)kuq 'puppy'? (POc. *nkaun 'dog'?)
Amerind (misc.) : *(a)kuan 'dog' (R 179) [+ A K]
Reference : МССНЯ 334, ОСНЯ 1, 361-362; GE 7 *kuan (+ ? Khois., ?IP).
which gives:
Nostratic etymology :
Eurasiatic: *ḲüjnA
Meaning: wolf, dog
Indo-European: *k'uu̯on-
Altaic: ? *káŋV
Uralic: *küjnä 'wolf' (Wichmann FUF)
Eskimo-Aleut: *qǝnʁa- (˜ *qiHǝnʁa-?)
Comments: [For PA cf. rather PIE *(s)ken- 527?]
References: МССНЯ 334, ОСНЯ 1, 361-362; ND 1083 *Ḳüy(a)n̄V 'wolf,
dog'.
thus Indo-European:
Proto-IE: *k'wen-
Meaning: dog
Hittite: h.l. śuwanis (Tischler 500)
Tokharian: A ku, obl. kon, B ku `собака' (Adams 179)
Old Indian: ś(u)vā́, gen. śúnaḥ m. `dog'
Avestan: spā, gen. sūnō 'Hund'; spaka- 'hunderartig, Hund-'
Armenian: šun, gen. šan `Hund'
Old Greek: küṓn, gen. künós, acc. kǘna m., f. `Hund, Hündin'
Baltic: *čō̃ (*čun=), *čwin-ia- c., -iā̃ f.
Germanic: *xun-d-a- m.
Celtic: OIr cū, gen. con; Cymr ci, pl. cwn; Bret, Corn ki 'Hund'
Russ. meaning: зверек (собака)
References: WP I 465 f
and Altaic:
Proto-Altaic: *káŋV
Nostratic:
Meaning: dog
Russian meaning: собака
Turkic: *KAŋ-čɨk
Tungus-Manchu: *kači-kān
Korean: *kàŋ-
Comments: The TM form may belong here if it goes back to *kaŋ-čikān (=
PT *Kaŋčɨk, MKor. kàŋ'àčí). See SKE 84-85, ТМС 1,385, Menges 1984,
270-271, АПиПЯЯ 296, Дыбо 9; TMN 3, 520 ("alles sehr unsicher").
the third Afro-Asiatic word for dog is:
Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *kar-/*kayar-
Meaning: dog
Semitic: *wakar- 'fox'
Western Chadic: *kyara-
Central Chadic: *kur-/*kir-
Saho-Afar: *kar- 'dog'
Low East Cushitic: *kayir- 'dog'
Warazi (Dullay): *kaHar- 'dog'
South Cushitic: *ta-kur- 'bat-eared fox' 1, 'wild dog' 2
> Brittannica says Semitic kalb(-um) comes from kal-b- cognate with
> Cushitic and Chadic *kala- / kara- . close but no that close.
> nevertheless there are many words for "dog" in various language