Egyptian Tree Words
Saida
Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
or imported for their wood:
sycamore -- nehiti
cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
you can get kebes out of cypress)
cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
originated)
myrrh-- tesher
gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
acacia-- shentch
tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
ebony-- iban
juniper-- war
palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
pa yam and then "palm"
persea -- ishet
olive-- ba'ak
incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
"censer", a vessel for burning incense
BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
long u and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
the bee, was called "beet".
Piotr Michalowski
In article <50peiq$l...@newsbf02.news.aol.com> sa...@aol.com (Saida) writes:
>
>Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
>ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
>point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
>or imported for their wood:
(list snipped)
I really do not mean to be rude, but the origins of most of these words are
well knowm. DId you check the Oxford English Dictionary before you posted
this entry? We could all have a better discussion if people checked their
facts first. I know that in the heat of discussion we tend to write and then
check things sometimes, but we really could have a better exchange of ideas if
we did not have to constantly argue about well established facts.
Henry Hillbrath
sa...@aol.com (Saida) writes:
[snip]
>tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
>but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
"acer" is usually clued as "genus of maples."
Nothing AFAIK to do with Egyptian, but, I was amazed that in Moscow, the
common trees are "Lime" trees.
(I had to look it up, to find out that we call them "Linden" trees, but,
I wasn't able to find out how that happened.)
Henry Hillbrath
Saida
Excuse me, Piotr, but did you read my post? Why did I need an Oxford
Dictionary to make a list of ancient Egyptian tree words, whose usage
seems, somehow, to have survived into English? Why is it so important
to you to discount Egyptian? It has, after all, been around a very long
time, longer than the sources the dictionary would probably give. If
you know the "real" sources of the tree words, why didn't you advise us?
I haven't noticed you hesitant to display your erudition in the past.
Why don't you open your closed mind just a teeny bit? Not all knowledge
has already been written down in a source somewhere--sometimes we have
to do a little delving of our own. You know, think for ourselves, use
our intellectual curiosity, that kind of unorthodox activity that always
irks people with a limited imagination.
Loren Petrich
In article <50peiq$l...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, Saida <sa...@aol.com> wrote:
I checked out my trusty American Heritage Dictionary, and I found:
>sycamore -- nehiti
>cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>you can get kebes out of cypress)
Cypress is from Greek kuparissos, which is from some pre-Greek
Mediterranean language; The Egyptian word is probably a borrowing from
that language also.
>cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
>originated)
Ash trees are broadleaf trees, cedar trees are not.
>myrrh-- tesher
>gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
Probably correct.
>acacia-- shentch
>tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
>but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
>ebony-- iban
Probably correct.
>juniper-- war
>palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
>pa yam and then "palm"
"Palm" (both of the hand and the tree) is from Latin palma (both
meanings), and my trusty AHD traces it to IE *pel@- "flat".
>persea -- ishet
>olive-- ba'ak
Interesting that that differs from Latin oliva, Greek elaia, from
"Mediterranean" *elaiwa
>incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
>"censer", a vessel for burning incense
"censer" is short from "encenser", which came from Old French
encens (gives rise to our word "incense"), which comes from Latin
ince:nsum ("something set on fire"), from incendere "to set on fire",
ultimately from IE *kand- "to shine". Remember that Latin c was pronounced
/k/, and only got turned into /ch/ or /sh/ or /s/ in the various Romance
dialects.
>BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
>long u and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
>the bee, was called "beet".
First off, how does one figure out the vowels? Egyptian writing
was very deficient in representing vowels.
English "root" is from IE *wra:d- "branch, root".
English "bee" is from IE *bhei-
There *might* be a relationship, but it would have to be as old
as Nostratic.
--
Loren Petrich Happiness is a fast Macintosh
pet...@netcom.com And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
Mirrored at: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pe/petrich/home.html
Loren Petrich
In article <323097...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>Excuse me, Piotr, but did you read my post? Why did I need an Oxford
>Dictionary to make a list of ancient Egyptian tree words, whose usage
>seems, somehow, to have survived into English?
Ms. Saida, it is good that you were honest enough to list all the
glaring phonetic mismatches in many of your tree words; however, "ebony"
and "gum" do seem to make it :-)
... Why is it so important
>to you to discount Egyptian?
Because many of the "comparisons" have a poor match in phonetics,
semantics, or both.
And Northern Europe is *awfully* far away from Egypt. Imagine
yourself 2000 or 3000 or 4000 or 5000 years ago -- would it have been
easy to travel to England or Denmark (likely Germanic homeland) from Egypt?
... It has, after all, been around a very long
>time, longer than the sources the dictionary would probably give.
True, Egyptian has a much longer paper trail than any of the
Germanic languages can boast (nearly 5000 years, counting Coptic, vs.
nearly 1500 years for English, one of the best Germanic ones). However,
by doing *lots* of comparisons, one can work out a lot of word histories,
like finding out which words were borrowed from where, and which words
are likely to be inherited from common ancestors, and so forth.
Scattershot "comparisons" just don't work; one has to be systematic.
... If
>you know the "real" sources of the tree words, why didn't you advise us?
By doing comparative linguistics, one can reach back to long
before there was a written word. In particular, the ancestral
Indo-European dialects were probably spoken about 6500-5500 years ago,
which is 2000-3000 years older than the oldest recorded IE languages
(Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Sanskrit).
Alan M. Dunsmuir
In article <sourisDx...@netcom.com>, Henry Hillbrath
<sou...@netcom.com> writes
>(I had to look it up, to find out that we call them "Linden" trees, but,
>I wasn't able to find out how that happened.)
In the UK we call them 'lime trees'. 'Linden(baum)' is German for 'Lime
Tree'. (As in "Unter den Linden".)
--
Alan M. Dunsmuir
Henry Hillbrath
The dictionary at hand ("American Heritage") thinks "Linden" comes from
an OE word, "linde" (meaning "linden"). "lime" comes from Arabic,
"limah." Meaning, I guess, "lime."
So, what is a "lime" tree called in the UK, the sort that has "limes" on
it?
I don't know if linden trees exist in the U. S., but, if they do, and
they were called "lime" trees, no one would understand. We do have lime
trees, in the far south. We do know about "Unter den Linden".
Henry Hillbrath
Saida
Loren Petrich wrote:
>
> In article <50peiq$l...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, Saida <sa...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> I checked out my trusty American Heritage Dictionary, and I found:
>
> >sycamore -- nehiti
> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
> Cypress is from Greek kuparissos, which is from some pre-Greek
> Mediterranean language; The Egyptian word is probably a borrowing from
> that language also.
Why can't it be the other way around? The Greek word Hyksos, after all,
describing a whole people, is surely from the Egyptian "Hikau-khoswet",
meaning "desert princes". I can assure you with great certainty that,
while Egyptian, in time, borrowed words from her Semitic neighbors, I
don't know of any instances where they borrowed from Greek until
the Ptolemaic era.
>cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
> >originated)
>
> Ash trees are broadleaf trees, cedar trees are not.
I know that they are not the same. I merely wondered why the "ash"
trees we know are called by this name.
>
> >myrrh-- tesher
> >gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
>
> Probably correct.
>
> >acacia-- shentch
> >tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
> >but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> > I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
> >ebony-- iban
>
> Probably correct.
>
> >juniper-- war
> >palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> >pa yam and then "palm"
>
> "Palm" (both of the hand and the tree) is from Latin palma (both
> meanings), and my trusty AHD traces it to IE *pel@- "flat".
How many palm trees do you think there are in Italy?
>
> >persea -- ishet
> >olive-- ba'ak
>
> Interesting that that differs from Latin oliva, Greek elaia, from
> "Mediterranean" *elaiwa
>
> >incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
> >"censer", a vessel for burning incense
>
> "censer" is short from "encenser", which came from Old French
> encens (gives rise to our word "incense"), which comes from Latin
> ince:nsum ("something set on fire"), from incendere "to set on fire",
> ultimately from IE *kand- "to shine". Remember that Latin c was pronounced
> /k/, and only got turned into /ch/ or /sh/ or /s/ in the various Romance
> dialects.
I think this one could go either way, Loren. The Egyptian word for
"incense" is senter. Also, some people believe Latin words were
pronounced with the Italian "sh" or "tsc" for "c" instead of a hard
sound.
>
> >BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
> >long u and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
> >the bee, was called "beet".
>
> First off, how does one figure out the vowels? Egyptian writing
> was very deficient in representing vowels.
Good question! Just as the "i" and "u" are represented in Hebrew, so
they .are shown with signs in Egyptian. The "i" is a reed and the "u" a
chick. The "a" is represented oftentimes as well. So that leaves the
"e" and the "o" to be guessed at. It seems it has been determined that
the "o" sound was rarely used in Egyptian. The situation with the
vowels is not nearly as bad as people seem to believe.
>
> English "root" is from IE *wra:d- "branch, root".
>
> English "bee" is from IE *bhei-
>
> There *might* be a relationship, but it would have to be as old
> as Nostratic.
Maybe. But, as it stands, we can never be 100% sure. Thanks for being
so open-minded as to at least allow the possibility. This is more than
your colleagues seem to be able to do.
> --
> Loren Petrich
Saida
Don Staples
Been awhile since I took dendrology, but I seem to remember the American
Linden Family is the Basswood, and when in Germany noted that the Linden over
there looked similar to the American Basswood. And oriental Linden called the
Japanese linden, and the European cut leaf linden. Guess it is in there some
where.
ruminations of an old forester.
In article <sourisDx...@netcom.com> sou...@netcom.com (Henry Hillbrath)
writes:>From: sou...@netcom.com (Henry Hillbrath)
>Subject: Re: Egyptian Tree Words
>Date: Sat, 7 Sep 1996 17:28:34 GMT
Loren Petrich
In article <3231B7...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>Loren Petrich wrote:
>> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
>> Cypress is from Greek kuparissos, which is from some pre-Greek
>> Mediterranean language; The Egyptian word is probably a borrowing from
>> that language also.
>Why can't it be the other way around?
... I
>don't know of any instances where they borrowed from Greek until
>the Ptolemaic era.
Read more carefully. I claimed that the word was from some
language that people had spoken in Crete and Cyprus before the Greek
speakers showed up there. I think it very possible that the Egyptian word
is a borrowing for these reasons: phonetic simplification, and the rarity
of trees in Egypt. If cypress trees had been an import, then the name for
them would have traveled with the tree.
>> "censer" is short from "encenser", which came from Old French
>> encens (gives rise to our word "incense"), which comes from Latin
>> ince:nsum ("something set on fire"), from incendere "to set on fire",
>> ultimately from IE *kand- "to shine". Remember that Latin c was pronounced
>> /k/, and only got turned into /ch/ or /sh/ or /s/ in the various Romance
>> dialects.
>I think this one could go either way, Loren. The Egyptian word for
>"incense" is senter. Also, some people believe Latin words were
>pronounced with the Italian "sh" or "tsc" for "c" instead of a hard
>sound.
Which people? And are we talking about Classical Latin or later
Medieval Church Latin?
There are some Romance languages that do not have this shift, such
as Sardinian. For example, "hundred" in Sardinian is kentu, with /k/, but
in Italian it is cento, with /ch/, in Spanish it is ciento, with /th/ or
/s/, and in French it is cent, with /s/. This makes one confident that
Latin centum had a /k/. Furthermore, if Latin had had a /ch/, say, when
the Romans learned their alphabet, they would have used a different
letter for it, since it is noticeably different in sound from /k/.
Saida
Loren Petrich wrote:
>
> In article <3231B7...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
> Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
> >Loren Petrich wrote:
>
> >> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> >> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
> >> Cypress is from Greek kuparissos, which is from some pre-Greek
> >> Mediterranean language; The Egyptian word is probably a borrowing from
> >> that language also.
>
> >Why can't it be the other way around?
> ... I
> >don't know of any instances where they borrowed from Greek until
> >the Ptolemaic era.
>
> Read more carefully. I claimed that the word was from some
> language that people had spoken in Crete and Cyprus before the Greek
> speakers showed up there. I think it very possible that the Egyptian word
> is a borrowing for these reasons: phonetic simplification, and the rarity
> of trees in Egypt. If cypress trees had been an import, then the name for
> them would have traveled with the tree.
Of course, you are right. Egypt, if it had any Cypress trees, would
certainly not have had a large population of them.
> >> "censer" is short from "encenser", which came from Old French
> >> encens (gives rise to our word "incense"), which comes from Latin
> >> ince:nsum ("something set on fire"), from incendere "to set on fire",
> >> ultimately from IE *kand- "to shine". Remember that Latin c was pronounced
> >> /k/, and only got turned into /ch/ or /sh/ or /s/ in the various Romance
> >> dialects.
>
> >I think this one could go either way, Loren. The Egyptian word for
> >"incense" is senter. Also, some people believe Latin words were
> >pronounced with the Italian "sh" or "tsc" for "c" instead of a hard
> >sound.
I would like to interject that, in Egyptian, the burning of "senter" or
incense (there were several other words for incense, too, depending upon
what sort it was) was pronounced "het" or "heta" with a sort of gutteral
"h". "Heta" was also the word for "fever". I suppose this could lead to
a "heated" argument.
>
> Which people? And are we talking about Classical Latin or later
> Medieval Church Latin?
>
> There are some Romance languages that do not have this shift, such
> as Sardinian. For example, "hundred" in Sardinian is kentu, with /k/, but
> in Italian it is cento, with /ch/, in Spanish it is ciento, with /th/ or
> /s/, and in French it is cent, with /s/. This makes one confident that
> Latin centum had a /k/. Furthermore, if Latin had had a /ch/, say, when
> the Romans learned their alphabet, they would have used a different
> letter for it, since it is noticeably different in sound from /k/.
Well, I wouldn't rely too much on Sardinian or "Sardu", as it is called
there. Italians could probably understand the Latin of the Caesars
better than they can Sardinian. To them it is a foreign tongue. I don't
have any strong opinions on the pronunciation of latin, although I
certainly studied it long enough. It seems to me "Caesar" was
pronounced with the "k" sound (hence Kaiser) and any word beginning in
"cae" or "ca". It is, of course, the same for Italian. But "ce", for
example, might have been soft, or we would, perhaps, say "kenturion" now
instead of "centurion" or "kentury" instead of "century". "Ci" may have
had a soft sound, as well. I can't think right now of any words from
Latin in other languages that began with "ci" that take on a "k" sound.
By "soft" I mean sibillant, but if there had been the Italian "sh" for
"c", as in "cento", I have no idea.
Apropos of nothing, here is an Egyptian magical word or name that I cam
across today It is Tekaharsapusaremkakarmit. I wonder what it
represents. It seems to me I read that "abracadabra" comes either from
an Egyptian or a Hebrew spell. I will try to find out.
It is fun talking to you about this, Loren.
>
> --
> Loren Petrich
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
> ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
> point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
> or imported for their wood:
[note: since "on-the-fly" transliteration of Egyptian is a bit confusing, I am
using the standard computer transliteration system in the Manual de Codage; you
can see it at:
http://131.211.68.206/names/rules.html
Expections: I will use /`/ for `ayn, and /3/ for the "alif"-vulutre (the a/A
distinction tends to get lost, and some tend to mistakenly treat them as
vowels)]
> sycamore -- nehiti
> cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> you can get kebes out of cypress)
According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive this word shares a
common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but someone with more
resources than I would have to check.
>
> cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
> originated)
Our "ash" is a good Germanic word for the ash tree: Old English /aesc/; Old
Norse /askr/; Old High German /ask/
Egyptian /`S/ is *not* cedar, but some type of yellow-wooded conifer or fir (or
the entire class of such trees); in certain circumstances it refers to the
lumber from such trees. You might want to look at:
Loret, Victor. 1916. "Quelques notes sur l'arabe a^ch." Annales du Service des
Antiquites de l'Egypte 16:3351.
Meiggs, Russell. 1982. Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
> myrrh-- tesher
The word "myrrh" is Semitic in origin, borrowed via Greek /murra/; Semitic
examples include Arabic /murr/ and Hebrew /mor/.
Egyptian for "myrrh" is /`ntyw/ not "tesher"(?)
> gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
Actually /gummi/ is Latin -- Greek is /kommi/; The Egyptian /qmyt/ is indeed
the likely origin.
> acacia-- shentch
>
> tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
> but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
The English word "acer" is an old-fashioned word for maple; it is from Latin /
acer/.
> ebony-- iban
Egyptian for "ebony" is /hbny/ and is very likely the origin of the English
(via Greek and Latin)
>
> juniper-- war
"war"???
> palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> pa yam and then "palm"
"yam"?
> persea -- ishet
>
> olive-- ba'ak
Egyptian /b3q/ for "olive tree" is not at all certain; it most likely the
moringa tree and its oil. The Egyptian word for "olive" and "olive oil", /Ddt/,
is a loan-word from Semitic (cognates include Arabic /zayt/; Ugaritic /zt/;
Phoenician /zt/; Syriac /zayta/; Ethiopic (Ge`ez) /zayt/.
>
> incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
> "censer", a vessel for burning incense
English "incense" and "censer" both come from the Latin verb /incendere/ (to
set on fire); Egyptian /s.nTr/ is a nominal form of the causitive verb "to make
god-like".
> BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
> long u
> and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
> the bee, was called "beet".
Egyptian /bit/ is the subject of a recent word study, and is from a known Afro-
asiatic root:
Schneider, Thomas. 1993. "Zur Etymologie der Bezeichnung "Ko"nig von Ober- und
Untera"gypten". Zeitschrift fu"r A"gyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde
120:166118.
Steve Whittet
In article <petrichD...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com says...>...a list of ancient Egyptian tree words, whose usage
>
>
>>... Why is it so important
>>to you to discount Egyptian?
>Northern Europe is *awfully* far away from Egypt. Imagine
>yourself 2000 or 3000 or 4000 or 5000 years ago -- would it have been
>easy to travel to England or Denmark (likely Germanic homeland) from Egypt?
The wreck of the vessel found off the Turkish coast which Stella
referenced portrays this as quite possible.
She cites Renfrews "Archaeology" as listing its trade goods on p 359.
The bill of lading included goods from both the Baltic and Egypt as
well as every every culture in between. Baltic Amber, German cobalt,
Mycenean and Phoenician and Caananite proto geometric pots, metals
including Gold, Silver, Copper, Lead, Zinc, Tin and Bronze; Glass
and Egyptian Faience.
>
>>... It has, after all, been around a very long
>>time, longer than the sources the dictionary would probably give.
>
> True, Egyptian has a much longer paper trail than any of the
>Germanic languages can boast (nearly 5000 years, counting Coptic, vs.
>nearly 1500 years for English, one of the best Germanic ones). However,
>by doing *lots* of comparisons, one can work out a lot of word histories,
>like finding out which words were borrowed from where, and which words
>are likely to be inherited from common ancestors, and so forth.
>Scattershot "comparisons" just don't work; one has to be systematic.
It seems saida has very systematically examined the words for trees
and found very good matches in Egyptian. Why should this suprise anyone?
The Egyptians needed to buy and sell and import lumber and thus
needed words to describe what they wanted to someone else.
In heavily forested Europe if you needed a tree you went
and chopped it down.
>>... If you know the "real" sources of the tree words,
>>why didn't you advise us?
>
> By doing comparative linguistics, one can reach back to long
>before there was a written word. In particular, the ancestral
>Indo-European dialects were probably spoken about 6500-5500 years ago,
>which is 2000-3000 years older than the oldest recorded IE languages
>(Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Sanskrit).
One can speculate all one want's, what Saida seems to be doing
ids going beyond the speculation to examine the evidence.
>
>--
>Loren Petrich
steve
Loren Petrich
In article <3231F6...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
>I would like to interject that, in Egyptian, the burning of "senter" or
>incense (there were several other words for incense, too, depending upon
>what sort it was) was pronounced "het" or "heta" with a sort of gutteral
>"h". "Heta" was also the word for "fever". I suppose this could lead to
>a "heated" argument.
My trusty American Heritage Dictionary traces the English word to
Germanic *haiti:-, and ultimately to Indo-European *kai-, with extended
form *kaid-. One problem with a direct Egyptian -> English transmission is
that it would have to have been transmitted to some early Germanic
dialect *after* the sound shift from original Indo-European /k/ to
Germanic /h/, but *before* the Germanic tribes had spread significantly
from their northern-European homeland.
[Sardinian...]
>Well, I wouldn't rely too much on Sardinian or "Sardu", as it is called
>there. Italians could probably understand the Latin of the Caesars
>better than they can Sardinian. To them it is a foreign tongue. ...
I have a limited acquaintance with both Latin and modern Italian,
and that is absolute merda tauri / merda di toro (I'm guessing a bit on
the latter). Their grammar is much too different, just for starters.
Italian, like several other Romance languages, had obliterated the Latin
noun cases and uses prepositions for all these functions. Also, many of
the verb tenses have been totally rebuilt. Spellings are also different,
and Italian does try to be reasonably phonetic, so that means that there
were some Latin -> Italian sound shifts.
>Apropos of nothing, here is an Egyptian magical word or name that I cam
>across today It is Tekaharsapusaremkakarmit. I wonder what it
>represents. It seems to me I read that "abracadabra" comes either from
>an Egyptian or a Hebrew spell. I will try to find out.
You're probably right there.
>It is fun talking to you about this, Loren.
Thanx :-)
Loren Petrich
In article <50t42s$o...@shore.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whi...@shore.net> wrote:
>In article <petrichD...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com says...
>>Northern Europe is *awfully* far away from Egypt. Imagine
>>yourself 2000 or 3000 or 4000 or 5000 years ago -- would it have been
>>easy to travel to England or Denmark (likely Germanic homeland) from Egypt?
>The wreck of the vessel found off the Turkish coast which Stella
>referenced portrays this as quite possible.
>The bill of lading included goods from both the Baltic and Egypt as
>well as every every culture in between. ...
So what? Just because there were such voyages does not mean that
the English language is derived from ancient Egyptian. For one thing,
there does not seem to be any evidence of Phoenician or Mycenaean or any
other such colonies in the Baltic or elsewhere in northern Europe. I
would be happy to be proved wrong, but I've yet to see any such evidence.
>It seems saida has very systematically examined the words for trees
>and found very good matches in Egyptian. Why should this suprise anyone?
And looking at her list revealed several NON-matches, in fact,
more non-matches than matches. If you want to be a good scientist, you
HAVE to take account negative evidence.
>The Egyptians needed to buy and sell and import lumber and thus
>needed words to describe what they wanted to someone else.
And sometimes used the words of others, in the case of cypress
trees.
>> By doing comparative linguistics, one can reach back to long
>>before there was a written word. In particular, the ancestral
>>Indo-European dialects were probably spoken about 6500-5500 years ago,
>>which is 2000-3000 years older than the oldest recorded IE languages
>>(Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Sanskrit).
>One can speculate all one want's, what Saida seems to be doing
>ids going beyond the speculation to examine the evidence.
And she was honest enough to reveal several non-matches.
And why is comparative Indo-European linguistics "speculation"?
Because the IE languages don't have written records as old as those for
Egyptian? (Hittite, the IE champ, goes back to before 1500 BCE; Egyptian
goes back to nearly 3000 BCE, so the difference is not all that great).
Loren Petrich
In article <32318A...@utoronto.ca>,
Troy Sagrillo <t.sag...@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>Saida wrote:
>> cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>> you can get kebes out of cypress)
>According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive this word shares a
>common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but someone with more
>resources than I would have to check.
That looks like it's correct; the Greek work is probably from
some pre-Greek language of the region, and the Egyptian word almost
certainly has the same source.
Emmett Jordan
To Loren et al: Tree words and even a tree alphabet are characterized
in the Celtic languages, i.e. Irish Gaelic.
Steve Whittet
In article <petrichD...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com says...
>
>In article <50t42s$o...@shore.shore.net>,
>Steve Whittet <whi...@shore.net> wrote:
>>In article <petrichD...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com says...
>
>>>Northern Europe is *awfully* far away from Egypt. Imagine
>>>yourself 2000 or 3000 or 4000 or 5000 years ago -- would it have been
>>>easy to travel to England or Denmark (likely Germanic homeland) from
Egypt?
>
>>The wreck of the vessel found off the Turkish coast which Stella
>>referenced portrays this as quite possible.
>>The bill of lading included goods from both the Baltic and Egypt as
>>well as every every culture in between. ...
>
> So what? Just because there were such voyages does not mean that
>the English language is derived from ancient Egyptian.
One question at a time. If the travel were not too difficult that
still doesn't mean anybody went the entire distance to the end of
the line, only that they could expect their merchandise to be
passed from middleman to middleman with each adding on a little
something for his trouble until it got far enough away from
home for it to be considered exotic enough and interesting enough and
precious enough for
someone to buy it.
Anything traveling a long distance on a land route
might have to cross unexplored wilderness.
Mountains, deserts, swollen rivers, forests, with savage beasts,
bandits all took their toll.
Most trade probably went from farm to village to urban center.
Raw materials, and wood for construction, mixed with manufactured and
luxury goods, herbal medicines and salt was brought to the harbor to make
cargos to be carried
by boat up river, along coasts and across oceans.
The wrecks cargo included metals, like gold, silver, copper, tin,
zinc, lead, their metalic salts and alloys, cobalt, bronze, wood
for joinery, marquetry, and turnings, along with a few industrial
uses; incense, dye, tanning, and the medicinal byproducts, mixed
with gemstones, amber, pearls, ivory, frankincense, myhhr and salt
all sharing the holds with manufactured goods, glass, faiance, ivory
carvings, tools, and farm
produce jugs of wine and jars of olives.
The traders would have been at home in any port.
> For one thing, there does not seem to be any evidence of
>Phoenician or Mycenaean or any other such colonies in the
>Baltic or elsewhere in northern Europe.
There is certainly evidence for the Phoenicians having traded
metals from Northern Europe and having established colonies in
what they refered to as Iberia (Spain) and the Casserites (The
English Channel Islands and the coast of Cornwall) The presence
of Cobalt blue glass in Egyptian pectorals required the use of
Cobalt. The only known source of cobalt at the time was mines
in what we know as Germany but today it also comes from Cornwall.
>I would be happy to be proved wrong,
>but I've yet to see any such evidence.
Follow the Danube west from the Black Sea to the Rhone (and the Rhine).
There is La Adam, Baile Herculane, Cuina Turcului, Lapenski Ver, Peres,
Sered, Tannstock, Lautereck, Birsmatten, Oberlang Mannlefelsen, Villars
soux Dampjoux, Baulmes, Sou Balme, connect to the Po at Col du Coq and
come back down the Adriatic. All these were Mesolithic settlements. By
the Bronze age they were engaged in transporting Europes metals to the
Mediterranean. The principle evidence for the networks of trade is the
diffusion of pottery styles along the rivers.
Are you familiar with this pottery? Beaker and Corded Ware pottery
is closely associated with the use of copper and social stratification
or hierarcical societies in Europe c 4000 BC.
The copper trade is typified by carved ivory sandals, portugese schist
plaques, bossed bone
plaques, Cycladic "frying pans" and Asherah figures
of seated women playing harps. It follows very closely the coasts and
rivers of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Danube, Rhone and Po,
the Adriatic Sea, Britain, Gaul, Iberia, North Africa, Corsica, Scicily,
The Balkans and the Aegean.
In the Aegean rock cut tombs and Cycladic "frying pans" enbossed with
whorls closely match the consolidation of skill and resources typified
by an increasing frequency of sea borne traffic and proto geometric designs.
By the 2nd millenium the wealth of the copper trade has resulted in citadels
and fortresses
being built across the Mediterranean from Mellili on Scicily
to Troy guarding the Dardenelles.
The Urnfield culture focused on the Danube dates c 2000-1000 BC
but its height is c 1400-900 BC contemporary with the events we
have been discussing in the near East.
Proto geometric linear incised pottery, metals and amber follow
the rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Adriatic and Aegean.
and connect what becomes Germany with the Mycenean Mediterranean.
Horned helmets, axes, high stemmed boats propelled with an ash breeze,
wheeled vehicles, horses, protogeometric pottery and metals are typical
of all the cultures we have been discussing.
>
>>It seems saida has very systematically examined the words for trees
>>and found very good matches in Egyptian. Why should this suprise anyone?
>
> And looking at her list revealed several NON-matches, in fact,
>more non-matches than matches. If you want to be a good scientist, you
>HAVE to take account negative evidence.
I see more matches than not. It is reasonable when evaluating what
matches to make some allowance for things changing over time.
The matches she provides are closer than Old English is to the
language we speak.
>
>>The Egyptians needed to buy and sell and import lumber and thus
>>needed words to describe what they wanted to someone else.
>
>And sometimes used the words of others, in the case of cypress
>trees.
Yes, I think that is fair. I would expect to see some borrowed
words in Egyptian. The point is that since the Egyptians begin
to document their language much earlier than the people of Byblos
do theirs, the earliest written evidence for the terminology does
tend to be Egyptian.
>
>>> By doing comparative linguistics, one can reach back to long
>>>before there was a written word. In particular, the ancestral
>>>Indo-European dialects were probably spoken about 6500-5500 years ago,
>>>which is 2000-3000 years older than the oldest recorded IE languages
>>>(Hittite, Mycenaean Greek, Sanskrit).
>
>>One can speculate all one want's, what Saida seems to be doing
>>ids going beyond the speculation to examine the evidence.
>
> And she was honest enough to reveal several non-matches.
I am a little uncomfortable determining what matches and what
doesn't match without fully evaluating synonyms, homonyms,
antonyms, idioms, slang, jargon, mispelling, phoenetics, the
implied use of vowels, dialects, and the various accents of
the different peoples involved.
>
>And why is comparative Indo-European linguistics "speculation"?
Because there is a lot of lattitude in reconstructing a system
to fill in some of the gaps with subjective assumtions and
opinions.
If you assume there are no connections between Europe and
the Near East and that Egypt stands alone all by itself
on its own continent on the other side of an ocean
you get a very different picture than you do if
you fill in all the interconnections to other people
including those following rivers and seas in the 2nd
and 3rd milleniums BC when copper and bronze and amber
are hot trade items.
>Because the IE languages don't have written records as old as those for
>Egyptian? (Hittite, the IE champ, goes back to before 1500 BCE; Egyptian
>goes back to nearly 3000 BCE, so the difference is not all that great).
Ahmose drove out the Hyksos rulers c 1532 BC
The fact is that c 1500 BC when the Hittite Empire was limited to
Hatussas the Egyptians were in control of the territory which later
became the Hittites Empire.
When Tuthmosis I c 1504-1492 BC reached the Euphrates and
took control of Carchemish, from the Hurrians and Mitanni who
had destroyed Babylon at the command of Mutawalis c 1595-1531 BC
the Hittites were still centuries away from the campaigns of
Supilulumas c 1370-1330 BC which resulted in a Hittite empire.
You would be better advised to look at what happens to language
in the time of Hamurrabi.
>--
>Loren Petrich
steve
Steve Whittet
>Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>>Loren Petrich wrote:
>
>>I would like to interject that, in Egyptian, the burning of "senter" or
>>incense (there were several other words for incense, too, depending upon
>>what sort it was) was pronounced "het" or "heta" with a sort of gutteral
>>"h". "Heta" was also the word for "fever". I suppose this could lead to
>>a "heated" argument.
The glyph which we read has the Egyptian "h" has the sense of
get into or enter a place. The Egyptian "per" or place, and also
home or house, house of, abode, swelling place.
Some related meanings are travel,(to go from place to place)
portal (to enter a place you pass through a portal)
measure of capacity (how much you can put into a place)
drive out (force to leave a place)
neighborhood, enviornment, (the area of a place)
belongings, possessions, laws (things associated with a place)
"hm" be burning (in the sense of smoke leaving or being driven out
from its place in wood by the application of a fire)
It uses the hierogyphic for h followed by the owl or "m" used as
a preposition and meaning "from" followed by the determinative
Gardiner Q7 "brazier with flame rising from it" which shows a long
tendril of smoke. (see Faulkner Middle Egyptian page 158)
>
> My trusty American Heritage Dictionary traces the English word to
>Germanic *haiti:-, and ultimately to Indo-European *kai-, with extended
>form *kaid-. One problem with a direct Egyptian -> English transmission is
>that it would have to have been transmitted to some early Germanic
>dialect *after* the sound shift from original Indo-European /k/ to
>Germanic /h/, but *before* the Germanic tribes had spread significantly
>from their northern-European homeland.
The "h" and "kh" sounds are very similar. as to the homeland of the
Germanic tribes, they appear to have come together out of the trade
in copper and amber being conducted up the Danube, Rhone and Po rivers
connecting the Baltic with the Black Sea, Adreatic and Aegean...
>
> [Sardinian...]
>
>>Well, I wouldn't rely too much on Sardinian or "Sardu", as it is called
>>there. Italians could probably understand the Latin of the Caesars
>>better than they can Sardinian. To them it is a foreign tongue. ...
Iberia, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Cyprus and Syria
were connected as the route by which Tin arrived in the Near East
to be mixed with the copper to make Bronze. There is a certain
similarity in the suffixes, Sar, Sur, Syr, Si, Cy, Cr...whether
it has anything to do with Copper, Cupric, Cuprous...Cyprus...
I don't know.
>...snip...
>>Apropos of nothing, here is an Egyptian magical word or name that I cam
>>across today It is Tekaharsapusaremkakarmit. I wonder what it
>>represents. It seems to me I read that "abracadabra" comes either from
>>an Egyptian or a Hebrew spell. I will try to find out.
Abbarakadabara is the process by which the sun moves through the sky
and analagously a man moves through his life.
First there is the dawn of a new day or life.
"Ab" the heart case representing the physical body and its attributes
strength, courage, mobility...ability
Then morning or youth
"Ba" the heart soul representing the physical essence or
the essence of all things physical, physical desires, lust,
motivating passions...the basis or reason why we do things
the sun or man reach a zenith or high point
"Ra" the sun and its attributes,
at which point there is an apparent change of goals
"Ka" the physical double, or mind
there is an attitude of releasement toward things
and an openess to the mystery as we move toward
the darkness of the night
"Da" the heat or fire which allows elements to combine
and transform into something new; the synthesis of mind
and body sparked by...
the mind now leads the body
"Ba" ... as an Eros for wisdom.
into Becoming what it is and was and will Be
"Ra" as enlightenment representing a process which
waxes and wanes and by association, dawn, day, warmth,
energy, radiance, twilight, and eventually enlightenment
perhaps even rage against the dying of the light
>
> You're probably right there.
>
>>It is fun talking to you about this, Loren.
>
> Thanx :-)
>--
>Loren Petrich
steve
Steve Whittet
>Troy Sagrillo <t.sag...@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>Saida wrote:
>
>>> cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>>> you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
>>According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive this word
>>shares a common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but
>>someone with more resources than I would have to check.
>
> That looks like it's correct; the Greek work is probably from
>some pre-Greek language of the region, and the Egyptian word almost
>certainly has the same source.
ht = wood, timbers, woodland, tree, stick, pole, rod, mast
htwt = furniture
hti = retire retreat
htyw = who pervade the land
htyw = platform, dias
the sense of ht and htyw seems to be "tall, high, elevated,"
stick up, rise up like a tree.
khi (hi) also means high, exalted, raised on high,
hot tempered, loud voiced, presumptuous
k3t = height
k33 = hill, high ground
k3yt = high ground, high throne
k3w = height
but also k3t foreign foes,
The modern kurds or mountain people of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran
are the descendents of the Hatti, Hurrians, Mitanni,the Egyptians fought.
the sense of htwt and hti seems to be "break",
cut in pieces, chop up, hack your way through
Hatti = Hittites (tall men, giants)
kbn = Byblos (with the determanitive for high mountain)
k3s = Kush in Nubia (with the determanitive for high mountain)
kbnt = seagoing ship
kfcw = warrior
kf3 = flow forth, flood
kftw = class of seagoing ships
kfytw = Crete
kmt = Egypt
km = The Red Sea, Sinai, Seir (with the determanitive for high mountain)
I don't think this word really adresses a type of wood, but rather
associations with some properties of trees; big, tall, hard, tough...
applying to men and ships and mountains equally well.
>--
>Loren Petrich
steve
Steve Whittet
In article <dstaples.1...@livingston.net>, dsta...@livingston.net
says...
>
>Been awhile since I took dendrology, but I seem to remember the American
>Linden Family is the Basswood, and when in Germany noted that the Linden
over
>there looked similar to the American Basswood. And oriental Linden called
the
>Japanese linden, and the European cut leaf linden. Guess it is in there
some
>where.
>
>ruminations of an old forester.
Linden or Basswood or Lime tree, genus Tilea
belongs to the family Tilacae.
There are about thirty species
Native to temperate regions of the northern hemisphere
Decidious translucent heart shaped leaves
The american basswood, a tall tree, grows to heights of 80 feet
The European variety is used in plantings on streets because
it can resist salt and drought.
>
>
>In article <sourisDx...@netcom.com> sou...@netcom.com (Henry Hillbrath)
>writes:>From: sou...@netcom.com (Henry Hillbrath)
>>Subject: Re: Egyptian Tree Words
>>Date: Sat, 7 Sep 1996 17:28:34 GMT
>
>>"Alan M. Dunsmuir" <al...@moonrake.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>>>In article <sourisDx...@netcom.com>, Henry Hillbrath
>>><sou...@netcom.com> writes
>>>>(I had to look it up, to find out that we call them "Linden" trees, but,
>>>>I wasn't able to find out how that happened.)
>
>>>In the UK we call them 'lime trees'. 'Linden(baum)' is German for 'Lime
>>>Tree'. (As in "Unter den Linden".)
>
>>The dictionary at hand ("American Heritage") thinks "Linden" comes from
>>an OE word, "linde" (meaning "linden"). "lime" comes from Arabic,
>>"limah." Meaning, I guess, "lime."
>
>>So, what is a "lime" tree called in the UK, the sort that has "limes" on
>>it?
The Lime tree "Citrus Aurantifolia" comes from southeast Asia
Its fruit was adopted by the British navy as a cure for scurvy.
>
>>I don't know if linden trees exist in the U. S., but, if they do, and
>>they were called "lime" trees, no one would understand. We do have lime
>>trees, in the far south. We do know about "Unter den Linden".
>
>>Henry Hillbrath
>
>
steve
>
Saida
Troy Sagrillo wrote:
>
> Saida wrote:
> >
> > Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
> > ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
> > point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
> > or imported for their wood:
>
> [note: since "on-the-fly" transliteration of Egyptian is a bit confusing, I am
> using the standard computer transliteration system in the Manual de Codage; you
> can see it at:
>
> http://131.211.68.206/names/rules.html
>
> Expections: I will use /`/ for `ayn, and /3/ for the "alif"-vulutre (the a/A
> distinction tends to get lost, and some tend to mistakenly treat them as
> vowels)]
Hi, Troy! Well, I know many find this system helpful, but I am dead
against it. I would rather be in error here and there and have
Egyptian, which to me is and always has been a living language look like
that.
>
> > sycamore -- nehiti
> > cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> > you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
> According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive this word shares a
> common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but someone with more
> resources than I would have to check.
The Island of Cyprus was called "Ay Nibinaitet enti em her ib Wat Ur" or
"The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
evocative of "water".
> > cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
> > originated)
>
> Our "ash" is a good Germanic word for the ash tree: Old English /aesc/; Old
> Norse /askr/; Old High German /ask/
>
> Egyptian /`S/ is *not* cedar, but some type of yellow-wooded conifer or fir (or
> the entire class of such trees); in certain circumstances it refers to the
> lumber from such trees. You might want to look at:
>
> Loret, Victor. 1916. "Quelques notes sur l'arabe a^ch." Annales du Service des
> Antiquites de l'Egypte 16:3351.
>
> Meiggs, Russell. 1982. Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World.
> Oxford: Oxford University Press.
I haven't read the sources you cite, but "ash" used to be considered
"cedar" and I don't know how it's been determined that it's not so. I
can only say that "ash" is written with the little ovoid sign for
something odiforous and cedar certainly has its distinctive smell.
>
> > myrrh-- tesher
>
> The word "myrrh" is Semitic in origin, borrowed via Greek /murra/; Semitic
> examples include Arabic /murr/ and Hebrew /mor/.
>
> Egyptian for "myrrh" is /`ntyw/ not "tesher"(?)
You are certainly right about "myrrh" being Semitic. I am not familiar
with "ntyw". "Anti" was a commonly used word for myrhh--the "shemsi
anti" being a ceremony involving the offering of this substance. "Kher"
was perhaps also myrrh and must have been commonly used because it
survived into the Coptic "kal" (another example of my theory that the
Egyptian "r" was a weak consonant).
>
> > gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
>
> Actually /gummi/ is Latin -- Greek is /kommi/; The Egyptian /qmyt/ is indeed
> the likely origin.
>
> > acacia-- shentch
> >
> > tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
> > but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> > I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
>
> The English word "acer" is an old-fashioned word for maple; it is from Latin /
> acer/.
>
> > ebony-- iban
>
> Egyptian for "ebony" is /hbny/ and is very likely the origin of the English
> (via Greek and Latin)
>
> >
> > juniper-- war
>
> "war"???
Yes. Juniper is presumably from Latin, again, but perhaps it did have
its origin in Egyptian with something like "tscha'au pensh em war",
meaning the seedy berries coming from the "war" tree. This is
speculative, but a better example of Latin from Egyptian might be the
word for "ivory", pronounced variously "ab", "abu" or "yab". The
Egyptians liked to say "pure as the ivory" like we do "pure as the
driven snow". Ivory in Latin is "eboreus". We have been doing this on
the sci.arch for a while now and it seems to me that, at the very least,
we are beginning to see that those exotic things not commonly known to
northern climes have found their way into Anglo-Saxon via a route of
languages going straight back to Egyptian.
>
> > palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> > pa yam and then "palm"
>
> "yam"?
Yup. "Bener" is a good palm word, too, denoting the "dum" palm which
flourished best in the southern part of Upper Egypt.
>
> > persea -- ishet
> >
> > olive-- ba'ak
>
> Egyptian /b3q/ for "olive tree" is not at all certain; it most likely the
> moringa tree and its oil. The Egyptian word for "olive" and "olive oil", /Ddt/,
> is a loan-word from Semitic (cognates include Arabic /zayt/; Ugaritic /zt/;
> Phoenician /zt/; Syriac /zayta/; Ethiopic (Ge`ez) /zayt/.
I am not too sure about olive tree, either. "Ba'aq" is found in the
Book of the Dead, for example.
>
> >
> > incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
> > "censer", a vessel for burning incense
>
> English "incense" and "censer" both come from the Latin verb /incendere/ (to
> set on fire); Egyptian /s.nTr/ is a nominal form of the causitive verb "to make
> god-like".
That well may be. How about the word "scent"?
>
> > BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
> > long u
> > and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
> > the bee, was called "beet".
>
> Egyptian /bit/ is the subject of a recent word study, and is from a known Afro-
> asiatic root:
>
> Schneider, Thomas. 1993. "Zur Etymologie der Bezeichnung "Ko"nig von Ober- und
> Untera"gypten". Zeitschrift fu"r A"gyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde
> 120:166118.
I am happy with this thread because, disagreements and all, I think we
are getting to the bottom of something, separating the wheat from the
chaff, linguistically, and I am not hearing a unanymous "Egyptian
couldn't possibly have anything to do with English" any longer. Putting
our heads together is the way it should be done.
Loren Petrich
In article <50ump3$f...@shore.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whi...@shore.net> wrote:
>> So what? Just because there were such voyages does not mean that
>>the English language is derived from ancient Egyptian.
>One question at a time. If the travel were not too difficult that
>still doesn't mean anybody went the entire distance to the end of
>the line, only that they could expect their merchandise to be
>passed from middleman to middleman with each adding on a little
>something for his trouble until it got far enough away from
>home for it to be considered exotic enough and interesting enough and
>precious enough for
>someone to buy it.
There goes you great maritime empire. And Egyptian as the great
ur-language.
>> For one thing, there does not seem to be any evidence of
>>Phoenician or Mycenaean or any other such colonies in the
>>Baltic or elsewhere in northern Europe.
>There is certainly evidence for the Phoenicians having traded ...
Trade != establishing colonies.
[Saida's Egyptian tree-word list...]
>> And looking at her list revealed several NON-matches, in fact,
>>more non-matches than matches. If you want to be a good scientist, you
>>HAVE to take account negative evidence.
>I see more matches than not. It is reasonable when evaluating what
>matches to make some allowance for things changing over time.
>The matches she provides are closer than Old English is to the
>language we speak.
Linguists know how to do that, and even with that, there are more
non-matches than clear matches.
For instance, "ash" (the tree) was pronounced more like /ask/ in
Old English, rather removed from Egyptian.
... I would expect to see some borrowed
>words in Egyptian. The point is that since the Egyptians begin
>to document their language much earlier than the people of Byblos
>do theirs, the earliest written evidence for the terminology does
>tend to be Egyptian.
Much earlier? Given how old Ebla's writing was, only by a few
centuries.
[Saida...]
>> And she was honest enough to reveal several non-matches.
>I am a little uncomfortable determining what matches and what
>doesn't match without fully evaluating synonyms, homonyms,
>antonyms, idioms, slang, jargon, mispelling, phoenetics, the
>implied use of vowels, dialects, and the various accents of
>the different peoples involved.
And if one does not apply appropriate critical sense, thus giving
one an *enormous* field of possibilities to play with.
>>And why is comparative Indo-European linguistics "speculation"?
>Because there is a lot of lattitude in reconstructing a system
>to fill in some of the gaps with subjective assumtions and
>opinions.
Ek'wosko:r. True, our knowledge is incomplete in some ways, but
there is enough known to exclude Ancient Egyptian as the ancestor of the
Indo-European languages.
>If you assume there are no connections between Europe and
>the Near East and that Egypt stands alone all by itself
>on its own continent on the other side of an ocean
>you get a very different picture than you do if
>you fill in all the interconnections to other people
>including those following rivers and seas in the 2nd
>and 3rd milleniums BC when copper and bronze and amber
>are hot trade items.
Mr. Whittet, you are trying to cloud the issue like some
ink-squirting squid. Whenever one of these critters is threatened, it
squirts out some ink and swims away, leaving its attacker with only a
cloud of ink to grasp at. And that is what you are doing with trade
routes. The most linguistic diffusion they are likely to produce is names
for items traded, and that's that.
[more irrelevant stuff deleted...]
Loren Petrich
In article <323339...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>The Island of Cyprus was called "Ay Nibinaitet enti em her ib Wat Ur" or
>"The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
>sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
>evocative of "water".
English "isle" is a borrowing from Old French, which is
ultimately from Latin i:nsula, which may be derived from [terra] in salo
("[land] in the sea"), which is what an island is. The Latin form is
already very distinct from the Egyptian one, and all of it appears to
have Indo-European antecedents, *ters- "dry", *en "in", and *sal- "salt"
(related English words: "thirst", "in", and "salt").
wat, "sea", *may* be related by way of Nostratic (*wete).
ur is "green", a color not commonly associated with water, unless
the Egyptian word was a sort of indefinite "green or blue".
>That well may be. How about the word "scent"?
From Old French sentir, Latin senti:re "to feel", and ultimately
IE *sent- "to head for, go".
Steve Whittet
In article <323339...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net>,
sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net says...
>
>Troy Sagrillo wrote:
>>
>> Saida wrote:
>> >
>> > Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
>> > ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
>> > point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in
Egypt
>> > or imported for their wood:
>>
>> [note: since "on-the-fly" transliteration of Egyptian is a bit confusing,
I am
>> using the standard computer transliteration system in the Manual de
Codage; you
>> can see it at:
>>
>> http://131.211.68.206/names/rules.html
>>
>> Expections: I will use /`/ for `ayn, and /3/ for the "alif"-vulutre (the
a/A
>> distinction tends to get lost, and some tend to mistakenly treat them as
>> vowels)]
>
>Hi, Troy! Well, I know many find this system helpful, but I am dead
>against it. I would rather be in error here and there and have
>Egyptian, which to me is and always has been a living language look like
>that.
>
I can see this either way. Had I been the one to set up the system
I wouldhave used Saidas method and let the similarities to ordinary
English come through loud and clear, but with the system in place
it is perhaps less confusing though also less readable to use the accents.
>>
>> > sycamore -- nehiti
>> > cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>> > you can get kebes out of cypress)
The Egyptian I found was ht (high) or kht or kywht
and I think mes (birth) or ses (protect)is a possibility
if the sweet smelling wood was used for cribs, cradels,
cedar closets, arks, chests, coffers, the lining of temples...
I think you might also consider the Mesopotamian Seso or Meso wood
kebes, khtses, ksises, seso, siso, sisa, syca, sypa, cyprs
>>
>> According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive
>>this word shares a common root with the Greek word for Cyprus
>>(the island), but someone with more resources than I would have
>>to check.
I think there is an association with copper (cupric)
>
>The Island of Cyprus was called "Ay Nibinaitet enti em her ib Wat Ur" or
>"The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
>sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
>evocative of "water".
Yes
>
>> > cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
>> > originated)
>>
>> Our "ash" is a good Germanic word for the ash tree: Old English /aesc/;
>> Old Norse /askr/; Old High German /ask/
Here I think the reference is to the shape of the leaf
or crown of the tree as sharp, or pointed like an ax or a spear
however
ist = (given as tomb or chamber using "per")[chest]
ist = lightweight, ancient, well aged, dry [dust]
ist = palace (but the glyph shows the ceiling of a room)[joist]
isp = hew or cut [rasp]
isw = reeds (seso wood = mangrove)[sumack]
isr= tamarisk, isd = a tree the determinative seems to show an olive [press]
isdd = sweat, glisten [polished]
>>
>> Egyptian /`S/ is *not* cedar, but some type of yellow-wooded
>> conifer or fir (or the entire class of such trees); in certain
>> circumstances it refers to the lumber from such trees.
>> You might want to look at:
>>
>> Loret, Victor. 1916. "Quelques notes sur l'arabe a^ch." Annales du Service
des
>> Antiquites de l'Egypte 16:3351.
>>
>> Meiggs, Russell. 1982. Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean
World.
>> Oxford: Oxford University Press.
>
>I haven't read the sources you cite, but "ash" used to be considered
>"cedar" and I don't know how it's been determined that it's not so. I
>can only say that "ash" is written with the little ovoid sign for
>something odiforous and cedar certainly has its distinctive smell.
It could also be sisal or hemp; canabais satavia
which also has a distinctive smell; ie [hash]
Yes, You have provided some excellent examples and recieved some good
comments. It would be nice if all the threads went this well.
steve
Loren Petrich
In article <50uqe9$k...@shore.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whi...@shore.net> wrote:
>In article <petrichD...@netcom.com>, pet...@netcom.com says...
>The "h" and "kh" sounds are very similar. as to the homeland of the
>Germanic tribes, they appear to have come together out of the trade
>in copper and amber being conducted up the Danube, Rhone and Po rivers
>connecting the Baltic with the Black Sea, Adreatic and Aegean...
There you go again with your trade routes, Mr. Whittet. The
Germanic homeland was likely the area of northern Germany and southern
Scandinavia, where the Jastorf culture was found; this is concluded from
an extrapolation from their earliest historically-recorded presence and
comparison to archeological remains.
>Abbarakadabara is the process by which the sun moves through the sky
>and analagously a man moves through his life.
[Contrived etymology deleted...]
I'm sure that Mr. Whittet can come up with similar etymologies
for practically *anything*, and that they will sound equally pretentious.
Loren Petrich
In article <50vt0s$3...@shore.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whi...@shore.net> wrote:
>I can see this either way. Had I been the one to set up the system
>I wouldhave used Saidas method and let the similarities to ordinary
>English come through loud and clear, but with the system in place
>it is perhaps less confusing though also less readable to use the accents.
Saida's method is rather phonologically misleading, however.
But at least she's honest enough to post plenty of non-matches.
Alan M. Dunsmuir
>it?
We don't have any citrous trees in the UK (or in Germany, come to that),
so don't get confused by them forrin critturs with fruit on them, which
should naturally be found only in grocers' shops.
A similar lack of confusion exists, I believe between the "English Oak"
(simply 'oak' or 'oak tree' in the UK) and the other forms of oak around
the world, as well as the Biblical "oak", the terebinth.
--
Alan M. Dunsmuir
Stella Nemeth
pet...@netcom.com (Loren Petrich) wrote:
> ur is "green", a color not commonly associated with water, unless
>the Egyptian word was a sort of indefinite "green or blue".
I don't know anything about linguistics, so I'm not commenting on
that. However I'd like to point out that the ancients, both the
Egyptians and the Greeks saw color differently than we do. The
Egyptians didn't differentiate between green and blue the same way we
do. (If you absolutely insist I will go dig out the page number in
The Complete Tutankhamun where there are examples and a discussion of
this fact, but it is late now and I'm going to go to bed.) The Greeks
kept talking about a "wine dark sea". I don't know what they meant by
that, and as far as I can tell the Classics scholars don't know
either. But if it is a color description, it is a very odd one to our
eyes.
Also, you may not see the sea as green, but I frequently do see it as
that color and I've lived along an ocean coastline most of my life.
The Egyptians may have seen water as green as well. I think ponds are
as likely to be green as blue on wall paintings, but I don't have
cites for that to back me up.
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Saida
Loren Petrich wrote:
>
> In article <323339...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
> Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>
> >"The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
> >sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
> >evocative of "water".
>
> ultimately from Latin i:nsula, which may be derived from [terra] in salo
> ("[land] in the sea"), which is what an island is. The Latin form is
> already very distinct from the Egyptian one, and all of it appears to
> have Indo-European antecedents, *ters- "dry", *en "in", and *sal- "salt"
> (related English words: "thirst", "in", and "salt").
"Insula" is not much like "ay", certainly, but neither is "isle" much
like "insula".
>
> wat, "sea", *may* be related by way of Nostratic (*wete).
>
> ur is "green", a color not commonly associated with water, unless
> the Egyptian word was a sort of indefinite "green or blue".
Yes to the latter part. The Egyptians were vague about the difference
between green and blue. Yet I have seen the ocean and it looked more
green than blue to me.
>
> >That well may be. How about the word "scent"?
>
> From Old French sentir, Latin senti:re "to feel", and ultimately
> IE *sent- "to head for, go".
That is a bit of a stretch and, perhaps, those who determined the source
of "scent" were unaware of the Egyptian word, which, you must admit, is,
again, one of those exotic things (incense) that the "old French" would
have had to import from more southern regions.
> --
> Loren Petrich
Saida
You also stated that you believe my way of transliterating Egyptian is
"phonologically misleading". There is nothing intentional in this, you
know, but you are right. Yet the other system is no more helpful,
because we have much less of an idea how Egyptian was pronounced than it
was written. I have some theories on this pronunciation that would
surprise most people interested in this subject. I believe, given its
geographic location, that Egyptian has been treated too much like a
Semitic language as regards its intonation. Yet it seems to me that
Egyptian is such an eccentric language that we cannot count on Semitic
to give us much of an idea how it sounded. Even the "ayin" sound, which
is so distinctly Semitic, has been attributed to Egyptian, yet I am far
from sure that their "ayin" signs (the foremost being the extended
forearm) were pronounced in the Semitic fashion.
Piotr Michalowski
In article <5116ig$r...@dfw-ixnews2.ix.netcom.com> S.NE...@IX.NETCOM.COM (Stella Nemeth) writes:
>
>Also, you may not see the sea as green, but I frequently do see it as
>that color and I've lived along an ocean coastline most of my life.
>The Egyptians may have seen water as green as well. I think ponds are
>as likely to be green as blue on wall paintings, but I don't have
>cites for that to back me up.
There has been alot of work done on color terminology in different languages.
It is important to keep in mind that language is a convention and semantics is
a complex matter. We know that there are many languages that have only four
color terms, for example, white, black, red and "grue" that is one term that
covers what in English would be divided into "green", "yellow" and "blue."
This is, for example, the case in most older Semitic languages and in
Sumerian. Howver, this does not mean that people could not distinguish colors
just as well as we do, as has been demonstrated by anthropologists who have
worked with contemporary cultures that use similar systems. The classic book
on the subject is Kay and Berlin, Basic Color Terms, and there have been
hundreds of studies since. There is even a book on color terminology in
Homeric Greek as well as an excellent article on Egyptian color terms by John
Baines.
Saida
Linguistics aside for a moment, I thought some of the people reading
this thread might be interested in knowing what the wood from the
various trees mentioned was used for. I got the following information
from "The Dwellers On the Nile", a very handy little reference book by
Sir E.A. Wallis Budge.
"...Though little wood was grown in Egypt, the carpenter readily found
employment. Though there were no wooden floors and no wooden window
frames and sashes in the houses, and the furniture was scanty in most of
them...the woods principally used by him were the sycamore-fig, from
which he made coffins, doors, large tables, funerary coffers, etc; the
acacia or tamarisk, which on account of its close grain and hardness, he
used for masts of boats, weapons, articles of furniture, etc; ebony,
imported in logs from the Sudan, and used for making or inlaying
ornamental boxes, jewel-cabinets, etc; and cedar, imported from Lebanon
in large quantities, and used for making the great barges of the gods.
Tough woods obtained from the trees in the deserts and various kinds of
deal, thought to have been imported from southern Europe, were also
used."
I admit I have never heard of a wood called "deal". Does it have
another name? I wish that Budge had elaborated or been more specific,
since he brought it up, which part of southern Europe this deal was
supposed to have come from! Perhaps someone else can enlighten us.
Troy Sagrillo
> >> you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
> >common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but someone with more
> >resources than I would have to check.
>
> some pre-Greek language of the region, and the Egyptian word almost
> certainly has the same source.
To tell you the truth, I have been unable to locate Saida's "kebes" in
either Faulkner's or Lesko's Egyptian dictionaries (I need the
Worterbuch for this I guess!) -- I'm guessing she means /kbs/ or /qbs/.
However there is a Late Egyptian word /`wn.w/ which means "cypress(es)"
(in p.Wilbour and p.Anastasi I) and a related word /`wn.t/ which means
"stave, baton, club, chariot pole" (made of cypress wood??). /`wn.w/
does not apparently show up in Middle Egyptian, but /`wn.t/ "stave" does
appear in the 'Tale of the Eloquent Peasant'.
Troy
Troy Sagrillo
Steve Whittet wrote:
[with much snippage]
> The modern kurds or mountain people of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran
> are the descendents of the Hatti, Hurrians, Mitanni,the Egyptians fought.
Really now?! And just how did you happen to figure this one out? ;-)
(Oooooh, what did I just ask...? ;) )
> kbn = Byblos (with the determanitive for high mountain)
/kbn; kpn/ "Byblos" is an Egyptian attempt to render the Semitic name of
the city Gebel (Akkadian "Gubla"; Phoenician /gbl/; modern Arabic
"Jubayl" (a tasghir (diminuitive) of "Jebel")). While the "hill"
determinative [N25] is doublely appropriate due to the Semitic meaning
of the city's name ('mountain'), it is only used here because /kbn; kpn/
is a toponym (see below).
> k3s = Kush in Nubia (with the determanitive for high mountain)
> kbnt = seagoing ship
Lit., a "Byblos" ship...
> km = The Red Sea, Sinai, Seir (with the determanitive for high mountain)
>
> I don't think this word really adresses a type of wood, but rather
> associations with some properties of trees; big, tall, hard, tough...
> applying to men and ships and mountains equally well.
The **"hill"** determinative [N25] was applied to almost *all* foreign
toponyms in Egyptian regardless of the local topography. The "mountain"
determinative [N26] is only rarely used for toponyms, and I can't think
of a one outside of Egypt.
Saida
ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>
> sa...@aol.com (Saida) wrote:
>
> >Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
> >ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
> >point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
> >or imported for their wood:
>
> import goods, and very often such items kept the indiginous name, and
> all the people who got it by trade just used that word. So if item Y
> was called X in Egyptian and X in Greek, then that does not establish
> a relation between those two languages, just shows the fact that both
> people were trading the same goods. See my posting on the word 'wine'
> elsewhere in this newsgroup.
>
> >sycamore -- nehiti
>
> ** nht =nehet=sycomore,
> nh.wt = nehut=sycamores [plural]
>
> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
>
Hi, Aayko, welcome to the discussion--but hold on there! My theory is
that the ancient Egyptian "r" was a very weak consonant--so weak that
foreigners often did not even hear it, as we have seen in Akkadian
transliterations of Egyptian names. Perhaps, when the Egyptians
borrowed a word that contained an "r", they didn't even bother to
include it.
>
> >cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
> >originated)
>
> ***Egyptian 'sh =ash, esh
>
> ***1) Different kind of trees.
> 2) Different non-similar words. For the english word stems from an
> older form which has a hard -k at the end [germanic *askia], which has
> a solid indoeuropean origin [cf.Greek oxue].
>
> >myrrh-- tesher
> >gum or resin-- gemiit (the actual gum being "gemi") Greek, "gummi"
>
> A tradegood; and yes, the Greeks ['kommi'] kept the Egyptian name!
> That's certain, as any dictionary will tell.
>
> >acacia-- shentch
> >tamarisk--iser (I always thought "acer" was a kind of tree in English
> >but couldn't find it in my dictionary. It seems to show up in crosswords.
> > I recall the "acer" means "sharp" in Latin, though).
>
> Hmm, the Hebrews called a tamarisk 'eshel'. and as you will know, the
> Egyptians used the 'r' for foreign names that had a 'l'. So my guess
> would be that they borrowed the word from a semitic language, as there
> was plenty of trade with Palestine. Stricly my own guess, but i would
> say highly likely.
>
> >ebony-- iban
>
> ****Again one of these famous tradegoods!
> In Egyptian: hbnj = hebeni
> which was borrowed by the Greeks and Romans
> as 'ebenos'/'ebenus' from which derives English ebony.
> Again a certain Egyptian loanword in English!
> See any dictionary.
>
> And as that song says: ebony and ivory
>
> ***Egyptian: 3b = ab, eb = elephant
> Borrow by the Romans as ebur = 'ivory',
> from which our English ivory stems.
> i would say: Egyptian loanword 3!
> Again a famous tradegood, and again via Greek and Latin
> into European languages.
> [I must confess I invented this on the spot; no dictionary gave the
> origin of Latin ebur; but as ivory and elephants come from Africa,
> it seems a educated guess, not?]
>
> >juniper-- war
> >palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> >pa yam and then "palm"
>
> **sorry, that is unacceptable Stevetymology :)
What? Why?
>
> >persea -- ishet
> >olive-- ba'ak
> >incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
> >"censer", a vessel for burning incense
> ***sentjer is better
>
> >BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
> >long u and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
> >the bee, was called "beet".
>
> The bee was in Egyptian bj.t = bi, beje
> My first guess [Okham's razor] would be that the Indo-europian and the
> Egyptian are independent, both formed after the sound of the *B*zzzing
> insect?
Maybe, but you would be surprised how differently different cultures
spell out the sounds of animals. The crowing of the rooster is a good
example.
>
> Yours was an interesting posting though!
> It is always nice to see one is not alone in one's excentric
> hobbies, like ethymology and ancient tongues. :)
Aayko Eyma
Doug Weller
In article <m1eAbKAY...@moonrake.demon.co.uk>
"Alan M. Dunsmuir" <al...@moonrake.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <sourisDx...@netcom.com>, Henry Hillbrath
> <sou...@netcom.com> writes
> >So, what is a "lime" tree called in the UK, the sort that has "limes" on
> >it?
>
> We don't have any citrous trees in the UK (or in Germany, come to that),
> so don't get confused by them forrin critturs with fruit on them, which
> should naturally be found only in grocers' shops.
To be accurate, they aren't native. The orangery at Warwick castle
wasn't called that for nothing!
--
Doug Weller Moderator, sci.archaeology.moderated
Co-owner UK-Schools mailing list: email me for details
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Loren Petrich wrote:
[snip]
> > First off, how does one figure out the vowels? Egyptian writing
> > was very deficient in representing vowels.
>
> Good question! Just as the "i" and "u" are represented in Hebrew, so
> they .are shown with signs in Egyptian. The "i" is a reed and the "u" a
> chick. The "a" is represented oftentimes as well. So that leaves the
> "e" and the "o" to be guessed at. It seems it has been determined that
> the "o" sound was rarely used in Egyptian. The situation with the
> vowels is not nearly as bad as people seem to believe.
Sorry, I really have to disagree with this. First of all, Egyptian has a very
long life as a spoken language and was constantly changing. The Egyptian
spoken during the Old Kingdom was substantially different than that of the
Saite Period (Dyn. XXVI), not to mention Coptic. Secondly, the orthography
(writting) changed as well. In Late Egyptian the signs for /i/ and /w/ are
often used as visual space fillers.
This brings up a second important point: /i/ and /w/ in Egyptian are weak
consonants not vowels. Yes, they *may* have been used as **long** vowels as
well (as "ya'" and "waw" are in Arabic are), but this is not a given fact.
The /i/ for example in /imn/ "right side, west" (southern orientation) is
likely related to Semitic /ymn/ "right side, south" (eastern orientation),
but Egyptian /iwn/ "colour" (prob. pronounced in Middle Egyptian as *'awin
(note the glottal stop)) is likely cognate with Semitic *lawn.
For Old & Middle Egytian, as best can be known from Semitic loan words,
Egyptian writings of Semitic toponyms and personal names, and Egyptian words
in Semitic texts -- Coptic is less useful here -- it seems that the Egyptian
vocalic phonemes included a, i, u (all both short and long), but not e, o, or
schwa. In Late Egyptian it seems there was schwa, short a, short e, long i,
long e, and long o. For example, it is thought that Horus was pronounced as *
Ha:ruw in Middle Egyptian but *Ho:re (e = schwa here; the H is emphatic) in
Late Egyptian -- yet the spelling is the same (we know they were pronounced
differently thanks to cuneiform sources).
And none of this deals with the issue of how the *consonants* changed in
pronunciation.....
I mentioned them in another post, but you might want to take a serious look
at these sources if you are really interested in Egyptian phonology:
Loprieno, Antonio. 1995. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vycichl, Werner. 1990. La vocalisation de la langue egyptienne. Volume 1: La
phonetique. Bibliotheque d'Etude 16. Cairo: Imprimerie de l'Institut francais
d'Archeologie orientale.
Also, you might be interested in "group writting" (also called "syllabic
writing") -- which was the Egyptian system for transcribing foreign words and
names into Egyptian orthography -- as it *may* have indicated vowels to a
certain degree, though it also evolved over time. Take a look at:
Albright, William Foxwell. 1934. The Vocalization of the Egyptian Syllabic
Orthography. American Oriental Series 5; eds. William Norman Brown, John K.
Shryock, and Ephraim Avigor Speiser. New Haven: American Oriental Society.
Hoch, James Eric. 1994. Semitic Loan Words in Egyptian Texts of the New
Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schneider, Thomas. 1992. Asiatische Personennamen in a"gyptischen Quellen des
Neuen Reiches. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 114; ed. Othmar Keel. Freiburg
and Go"ttingen: Universita"tsverlag Freiburg and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> >
> > Saida wrote:
> > >
> > > Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
> > > ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
> > > point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
> > > or imported for their wood:
> >
> > [note: since "on-the-fly" transliteration of Egyptian is a bit confusing, I am
> > using the standard computer transliteration system in the Manual de Codage; you
> > can see it at:
> >
> > http://131.211.68.206/names/rules.html
> >
> > Expections: I will use /`/ for `ayn, and /3/ for the "alif"-vulutre (the a/A
> > distinction tends to get lost, and some tend to mistakenly treat them as
> > vowels)]
>
> Hi, Troy! Well, I know many find this system helpful, but I am dead
> against it. I would rather be in error here and there and have
> Egyptian, which to me is and always has been a living language look like
> that.
Fair enough Saida, but I had difficulties finding the Egyptian original in
various dictionaries because I couldn't "reconstruct" the Egyptian you
intended. With 4 kinds of "h"s to deal with, and the Latin letter "a" being
used to represent both the `ayn and the "alif" vulture, IMO we need some
sort of standard system that is clear to all. Moreover, some letters are
frequently rendered as vowels in the Latin alphabet, but they were *not*
vowels in Egyptian (such as "a" for `ayn). Lastly, Egyptian is not a living
language (not even Coptic is used as a daily language anymore), and
pronunciation in Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian (not to mention demotic and
and the various dialects of Coptic) are all different. If we don't know the
vowels (or only have vague clues), any vocalised rendering is going to be at
least somewhat circumspect. If you are interested in the reconstruction of
Egyptian vocalisations, I highly recommend (though they aren't exactly fun
reads ;) ):
Loprieno, Antonio. 1995. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vycichl, Werner. 1990. La vocalisation de la langue egyptienne. Volume 1: La
phonetique. Bibliotheque d'Etude 16. Cairo: Imprimerie de l'Institut
francais d'Archeologie orientale.
> > > cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> > > you can get kebes out of cypress)
> >
> > According to the OED, from the Greek /kuparissoi/; I beleive this word shares a
> > common root with the Greek word for Cyprus (the island), but someone with more
> > resources than I would have to check.
>
> The Island of Cyprus was called "Ay Nibinaitet enti em her ib Wat Ur" or
> "The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
> sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
> evocative of "water".
Except that your "Wat Ur" is /w3D wr/ (normally vocalised today as "wadj
wer", but was probably pronounced in Old/Middle Egyptian as *wa:Rij wu:r;
the /R/ is the "thick "r" (sort of half way between a normal "r" and "l"
(often used in Japanese); Loprieno discusses this issue in detail)). BTW, /
w3D wr/ was applied to the Mediterranean (as you note), the Red Sea, Lake
Moeris, and the "celestial" ocean of the Netherworld.
>
> > > cedar-- ash
> > Egyptian /`S/ is *not* cedar, but some type of yellow-wooded conifer or fir (or
> > the entire class of such trees); in certain circumstances it refers to the
> > lumber from such trees. You might want to look at:
> >
> > Loret, Victor. 1916. "Quelques notes sur l'arabe a^ch." Annales du Service des
> > Antiquites de l'Egypte 16:3351.
> I haven't read the sources you cite, but "ash" used to be considered
> "cedar" and I don't know how it's been determined that it's not so. I
> can only say that "ash" is written with the little ovoid sign for
> something odiforous and cedar certainly has its distinctive smell.
You are right, it did *used* to be considered "cedar", because /`S/ wood was
imported from Lebanon (the whole Cedars of Lebanon business). Unfortunately,
as Loret discusses, in paintings /`S/ wood (`ash if you must) is light
yellow in colour, not red. In most modern translations the term "conifers"
is now used. The question now is, what is the Egyptian term for "cedar"?
> > > myrrh-- tesher
> >
> > The word "myrrh" is Semitic in origin, borrowed via Greek /murra/; Semitic
> > examples include Arabic /murr/ and Hebrew /mor/.
> >
> > Egyptian for "myrrh" is /`ntyw/ not "tesher"(?)
>
> You are certainly right about "myrrh" being Semitic. I am not familiar
> with "ntyw". "Anti" was a commonly used word for myrhh--the "shemsi
> anti" being a ceremony involving the offering of this substance.
We're talking about the same thing here. You missed my little tick /`/ for
the `ayn in /`ntyw/. ;)
> "Kher"
> was perhaps also myrrh and must have been commonly used because it
> survived into the Coptic "kal" (another example of my theory that the
> Egyptian "r" was a weak consonant).
> >
You are absolutely right about the /r/ coming down into most Coptic dialects
as /l/. Now imagine what kind of vowel shifts must have been going on as
well and you can see how difficult it is to reconstruct ancient Egyptian as
a spoken language...
> > > juniper-- war
> >
> > "war"???
>
> Yes. Juniper is presumably from Latin, again, but perhaps it did have
> its origin in Egyptian with something like "tscha'au pensh em war",
> meaning the seedy berries coming from the "war" tree.
Please help me out here. I am guessing your "war" is /w3r/ (or /w`r/?), but
I have been unable to find such a word meaning "juniper" in either Faulkner
or Lesko. Are you using another source? Oh, wait, I found it in Budge's
dict. in typically Late Egyptian orthography. It is /w`r/ (with the `ayn),
and Budge notes it as being questionable. Since this is Budge, it would be
best to check the Worterbuch on this, IMHO. Anyhow, the medial `ayn needs to
be accounted for (though by the time Egyptian "becomes" Coptic, it was
apparently lost).
> This is
> speculative, but a better example of Latin from Egyptian might be the
> word for "ivory", pronounced variously "ab", "abu" or "yab".
Just a point of discussion (not an attack): how do you know this? At what
point in the history of the language (Old, Middle, New, &c.) is /3bw/
vocalised in such ways? Unfortunately I don't have either Crumm's or Cerny's
Coptic dictionaries here, but that would be a place to start.
The
> Egyptians liked to say "pure as the ivory" like we do "pure as the
> driven snow". Ivory in Latin is "eboreus". We have been doing this on
> the sci.arch for a while now and it seems to me that, at the very least,
> we are beginning to see that those exotic things not commonly known to
> northern climes have found their way into Anglo-Saxon via a route of
> languages going straight back to Egyptian.
> >
> > > palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> > > pa yam and then "palm"
> >
> > "yam"?
>
> Yup. "Bener" is a good palm word, too, denoting the "dum" palm which
> flourished best in the southern part of Upper Egypt.
Ahh, found it in Budge as /imi/ and /im3/; again questioned by Budge, and
ought to be checked in the Worterbuch. Lesko's Late Egyptian dict. gives /
im3w/ and /i3mw/ (same orthography as Budge's) as "wood, tree". Faulkner
gives /im3/ "a tree" and cites p. Wilbour 31 as '*not* date-palm'.
> >
> > > persea -- ishet
> > >
> > > olive-- ba'ak
> >
> > Egyptian /b3q/ for "olive tree" is not at all certain; it most likely the
> > moringa tree and its oil. The Egyptian word for "olive" and "olive oil", /Ddt/,
> > is a loan-word from Semitic (cognates include Arabic /zayt/; Ugaritic /zt/;
> > Phoenician /zt/; Syriac /zayta/; Ethiopic (Ge`ez) /zayt/.
>
> I am not too sure about olive tree, either. "Ba'aq" is found in the
> Book of the Dead, for example.
I did some checking on this. Olive trees are not reperesented until late
Dyn. XVIII and the Semitic loan word /Ddt/ does not show up until Dyn. XIX
(when a huge number of Semitic loanwords start showing up in Egyptian). /
b3q/ is the moringa tree (and its oil) -- Lucas & Harris (Ancient Egyptian
Materials & Industries) comment that "references to olive trees, olives, and
olive oil in translations of Egyptian texts are to be treated with
caution...since in many cases it is the Egyptian words for the moringa tree
and ben oil that have been incorrectly interpreted as olive" (4th ed., p.
333).
> > > incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
> > > "censer", a vessel for burning incense
> >
> > Egyptian /s.nTr/ is a nominal form of the causitive verb "to make
> > god-like".
>
> That well may be. How about the word "scent"?
> >
> > > BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
> > > long u
> > > and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
> > > the bee, was called "beet".
> >
> > Egyptian /bit/ is the subject of a recent word study, and is from a known Afro-
> > asiatic root:
> >
> > Schneider, Thomas. 1993. "Zur Etymologie der Bezeichnung "Ko"nig von Ober- und
> > Untera"gypten". Zeitschrift fu"r A"gyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde
> > 120:166118.
>
> I am happy with this thread because, disagreements and all, I think we
> are getting to the bottom of something, separating the wheat from the
> chaff, linguistically, and I am not hearing a unanymous "Egyptian
> couldn't possibly have anything to do with English" any longer. Putting
> our heads together is the way it should be done.
I have my doubts, but I was taught that Egyptian /dSr.t/ "red land" comes
into English as "desert". Personally I think this is unlikely (there is a
Latin root /deserere/ "to leave, forsake"), but who knows, seeing that /kmt/
"black land" (Coptic "keme"/"kheme") *may* come into English via Arabic via
Greek as "alchemy".
Olice Certain
Loren Petrich wrote:
[Big snip]
>
> Ek'wosko:r. True, our knowledge is incomplete in some ways,
> but there is enough known to exclude Ancient Egyptian as the
> ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
>
I've been following this thread for quite a while, and I think
that Steve and Sadia are only trying to point out the possibility
of some English words *borrowed* from Egyptian. I don't think
either of them has tried to claim Ancient Egyptian as the
ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Just my 2 cents...
Olice Certain
Olice_...@clr.com
--
===================================================================
The opinions expressed above are my own and should not be confused
with those of my employer.
===================================================================
Saida
Troy, you are right in that there must be standard, but it is THIS
standard with the symbols I don't like the looks of. Just a personal
prejudice and I must learn to read it, I suppose, although this is the
first time (in this thread) that I have ever discussed ancient Egyptian
with anybody at any great length.
>
> > The Island of Cyprus was called "Ay Nibinaitet enti em her ib Wat Ur" or
> > "The Island of Cyprus which is in the midst of the Great Green (i.e. the
> > sea). "Ay" isn't a far cry from "isle" and "Wat Ur" certainly is
> > evocative of "water".
>
> Except that your "Wat Ur" is /w3D wr/ (normally vocalised today as "wadj
> wer", but was probably pronounced in Old/Middle Egyptian as *wa:Rij wu:r;
> the /R/ is the "thick "r" (sort of half way between a normal "r" and "l"
> (often used in Japanese); Loprieno discusses this issue in detail)). BTW, /
> w3D wr/ was applied to the Mediterranean (as you note), the Red Sea, Lake
> Moeris, and the "celestial" ocean of the Netherworld.
It is my suspicion that both "r" and "l" (when needed) were pronounced
like "w", so I think that pretty much agrees with what you are saying.
Kind of crazy, isn't it? Also, I would guess that the "r" at the end of
a word was negligible in BBC English fashion. The glyph that looks like
a chick was, I think, pronounced as a "w" at the beginning of a word but
as a "u" thereafter. "Wat Ur" should, theoretically, have had a "w" in
the beginning of both words, but, as it really served as one word, I
think the "Ur is correct.
>
> >
> > > > cedar-- ash
>
> > > Egyptian /`S/ is *not* cedar, but some type of yellow-wooded conifer or fir (or
> > > the entire class of such trees); in certain circumstances it refers to the
> > > lumber from such trees. You might want to look at:
> > >
> > > Loret, Victor. 1916. "Quelques notes sur l'arabe a^ch." Annales du Service des
> > > Antiquites de l'Egypte 16:3351.
>
> > I haven't read the sources you cite, but "ash" used to be considered
> > "cedar" and I don't know how it's been determined that it's not so. I
> > can only say that "ash" is written with the little ovoid sign for
> > something odiforous and cedar certainly has its distinctive smell.
>
> You are right, it did *used* to be considered "cedar", because /`S/ wood was
> imported from Lebanon (the whole Cedars of Lebanon business). Unfortunately,
> as Loret discusses, in paintings /`S/ wood (`ash if you must) is light
> yellow in colour, not red. In most modern translations the term "conifers"
> is now used. The question now is, what is the Egyptian term for "cedar"?
I wish I had access to your sources. I would love to read them.
>
> > > > myrrh-- tesher
> > >
> > > The word "myrrh" is Semitic in origin, borrowed via Greek /murra/; Semitic
> > > examples include Arabic /murr/ and Hebrew /mor/.
> > >
> > > Egyptian for "myrrh" is /`ntyw/ not "tesher"(?)
> >
> > You are certainly right about "myrrh" being Semitic. I am not familiar
> > with "ntyw". "Anti" was a commonly used word for myrhh--the "shemsi
> > anti" being a ceremony involving the offering of this substance.
>
> We're talking about the same thing here. You missed my little tick /`/ for
> the `ayn in /`ntyw/. ;)
Are you surprised? :) It's a whole new language! Anyway, by "tesher" I
only meant the tree itself. It seems to have had something to do with
redness, but I wouldn't be able to guess why.
>
> > "Kher"
> > was perhaps also myrrh and must have been commonly used because it
> > survived into the Coptic "kal" (another example of my theory that the
> > Egyptian "r" was a weak consonant).
> > >
>
> You are absolutely right about the /r/ coming down into most Coptic dialects
> as /l/. Now imagine what kind of vowel shifts must have been going on as
> well and you can see how difficult it is to reconstruct ancient Egyptian as
> a spoken language...
The difficulty isn't as great as all that. Egyptian didn't use "o"
much, so that eliminates having to guess about this vowel. There are a
couple of "a" sounds represented and also "u" "i" and "y". That leaves
only "e", with which Coptic has been most helpful.
>
> > > > juniper-- war
> > >
> > > "war"???
> >
> > Yes. Juniper is presumably from Latin, again, but perhaps it did have
> > its origin in Egyptian with something like "tscha'au pensh em war",
> > meaning the seedy berries coming from the "war" tree.
>
> Please help me out here. I am guessing your "war" is /w3r/ (or /w`r/?), but
> I have been unable to find such a word meaning "juniper" in either Faulkner
> or Lesko. Are you using another source? Oh, wait, I found it in Budge's
> dict. in typically Late Egyptian orthography. It is /w`r/ (with the `ayn),
> and Budge notes it as being questionable. Since this is Budge, it would be
> best to check the Worterbuch on this, IMHO. Anyhow, the medial `ayn needs to
> be accounted for (though by the time Egyptian "becomes" Coptic, it was
> apparently lost).
Budge, IMHO, was a great linguist and scholar of ancient Egyptian and I
see no reason to trust German interpretations over his. Probably, he
made errors. Even those who "corrected" him were second-guessed by
somebody else, in turn, on certain things. Sir Alan Gardiner has
corrected himself in various editions of his grammar. Were he still
here, he'd still be doing it, no doubt. The Egyptologists who
specialized in the language had to convince each other that they were
right in their assertions. Sometimes they did (see Gardiner's notes on
how he changed his mind because Prof. X made him see the
light--sometimes grudgingly) just like we are trying to do in this
thread. But the truth is elusive here. If Budge guessed "war" was
"juniper" we may as well take his word--especially since you say there
is not much alternative. How about "Tcha'au en pa war"? This would be
referring to the berries, which seem to figure in Egyptian medicinal
recipes. Unless someone can give me a good idea of how the Romans came
up with the catchy word "juniper".
>
> > This is
> > speculative, but a better example of Latin from Egyptian might be the
> > word for "ivory", pronounced variously "ab", "abu" or "yab".
>
> Just a point of discussion (not an attack): how do you know this? At what
> point in the history of the language (Old, Middle, New, &c.) is /3bw/
> vocalised in such ways? Unfortunately I don't have either Crumm's or Cerny's
> Coptic dictionaries here, but that would be a place to start.
Look in Budge. It won't do you irreparable harm. Just don't tell
anybody.:)
>
> The
> > Egyptians liked to say "pure as the ivory" like we do "pure as the
> > driven snow". Ivory in Latin is "eboreus". We have been doing this on
> > the sci.arch for a while now and it seems to me that, at the very least,
> > we are beginning to see that those exotic things not commonly known to
> > northern climes have found their way into Anglo-Saxon via a route of
> > languages going straight back to Egyptian.
> > >
> > > > palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
> > > > pa yam and then "palm"
> > >
> > > "yam"?
> >
> > Yup. "Bener" is a good palm word, too, denoting the "dum" palm which
> > flourished best in the southern part of Upper Egypt.
>
> Ahh, found it in Budge as /imi/ and /im3/; again questioned by Budge, and
> ought to be checked in the Worterbuch. Lesko's Late Egyptian dict. gives /
> im3w/ and /i3mw/ (same orthography as Budge's) as "wood, tree". Faulkner
> gives /im3/ "a tree" and cites p. Wilbour 31 as '*not* date-palm'.
I'll check this one over. Maybe I'll have to rethink it, but there
should be one most frequently used term for this common item and I'll
try to determine what it was. Maybe you can help me :) Anyway, "im3w"
is quite a mouthful, in your transliteration or mine.
Yes, those "black" arts. Troy, whenever you are tempted to doubt me,
remember who figured out Ishinan's gibberish wasn't really Arabic!
Okay, okay, just kidding...
Saida
Olice Certain wrote:
>I've been following this thread for quite a while, and I think that
>Steve and Saida are only trying to point out the possibility of some
>English words *borrowed* from Egyptian. I don't think either of them
>has tried to claim Ancient Egyptian as the ancestor of the
>Indo-European languages. Just my 2 cents...
Hi, Olice, I'm glad you've been reading the thread and haven't lost
sight of its original purpose! Your 2 cents worth are exactly what is
needed at this point. What a learning experience this discussion has
been and now Greg Reeder has kindly given us what must be the ultimate
list of Egyptian trees, foreign and domestic. Obviously the people in
this group have access to some great sources!
Troy Sagrillo and I could argue for a long time on the pronunciation and
transliteration of Egyptian (although I acknowledge him my master in
this regard). Nevertheless, perhaps to the surprise of some persons, we
have brought out that, yes, it was possible for ancient Egyptian to get
into English. Some dictionaries even admit this--mine don't, drat them.
They are pretty old, I suppose. True, the words "borrowed" from
Egyptian appear to be costly, exotic dainties, but such things always
demand notice. It is beginning to look as if the path of some of these
words is via Latin, which should be no surprise, but perhaps yet other
words took a different route. Something else that is emerging from all
this is that it pays to keep an open mind.
Steve Whittet knew there was something there and he stuck to his guns
through monumental opposition. Give him a little credit. Steve and I
formed our opinions independently. We have never compared notes and are
not part of any plot.
I know Loren Petrich is not convinced by trees or birds or bees, but
Loren has been a big help in this thread. I don't even know whether
Loren is a man or a woman, but, if I had the expertise to do a proper
study of the subject discussed here, I would like to work with Loren at
all times. Perhaps I should begin a thread about Egyptian dog names
next, dogs being closely associated with trees, and the Egyptians had no
fire plugs. I think.
ay...@tip.nl
sa...@aol.com (Saida) wrote:
>Apropos of the ongoing (but haphazard) discussion about whether the
>ancient Egyptian language has any bearing on English, I would like to
>point out some Egyptian words for trees that were either growing in Egypt
>or imported for their wood:
***That word 'imported' is vital. A lot of the goods you name are
import goods, and very often such items kept the indiginous name, and
all the people who got it by trade just used that word. So if item Y
was called X in Egyptian and X in Greek, then that does not establish
a relation between those two languages, just shows the fact that both
people were trading the same goods. See my posting on the word 'wine'
elsewhere in this newsgroup.
>sycamore -- nehiti
** nht =nehet=sycomore,
nh.wt = nehut=sycamores [plural]
>cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>you can get kebes out of cypress)
**** No, the r is still there....
>cedar-- ash (I wonder where our word "ash" for a certain tree
>originated)
***Egyptian 'sh =ash, esh
>ebony-- iban
>juniper-- war
>palm-- yam (perhaps with the Egyptian definite article "pa" it becomes
>pa yam and then "palm"
**sorry, that is unacceptable Stevetymology :)
>persea -- ishet
>olive-- ba'ak
>incense tree-- senter (I believe this word is allied to "incense" and
>"censer", a vessel for burning incense
***sentjer is better
>BTW, in Egyptian the word for "plant" or growing things was "rut" with a
>long u and even the little creature that buzzes among flowers and plants,
>the bee, was called "beet".
The bee was in Egyptian bj.t = bi, beje
My first guess [Okham's razor] would be that the Indo-europian and the
Egyptian are independent, both formed after the sound of the *B*zzzing
insect?
Yours was an interesting posting though!
It is always nice to see one is not alone in one's excentric
hobbies, like ethymology and ancient tongues. :)
To add som botanical terms from Egypt:
d3b = figs
dgm = a treek
k3mw=vinyard
hrrt=flower
mnw=trees
'ntjw=myrrh
j3rrt=grapes
kind regards,
Aayko Eyma
Greg Reeder
According to Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries by A. Lucas p429ff
the following kinds of wood have been identified in objects from ancient
Egypt.
Foreign Timber:
Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)
Beech (Fagus sylvatica)
Birch
Box (Buxus sempervirens)
Cedar (Cedrus Libani)
Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens)
Ebony (Dalbergia melanoxylon)
Elm
Fir (Abies cilicia )
Hornbeam (Carpinus Betulus)
Juniper (Juniperus phoenicea)
Lime (Tilia eurpaea)
Liquidamber ( Liquidamber orientalis)
Maple (Acer campestre or Acer pseudo platanus)
Oak (Quercus Cerris?)
Pine (Pinus halepensis?)
Plum (Prunus domesticus)
Yew (Taxus baccata)
Egyptian Timber:
Acacia
Almond
Carob (Ceretonia Siliqua
Fig (Ficus carica)
Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifia)
Dom Palm Hyphaene thebaica)
Persea (Mimusops Schimperi)
Poplar (Populus euphratica)
Sidder ( Zizyphus mucronata or Zizyphus spina Christi)
Sycamore Fig (Ficus sycamous)
Tamarisk (T. nilotica and T. articlata)
Willow (Salix safsaf)
--
Greg Reeder
On the WWW
at Reeder's Egypt Page
---------------->http://www.sirius.com/~reeder/egypt.html
ree...@sirius.com
Stella Nemeth
pio...@umich.edu (Piotr Michalowski) wrote:
>There has been alot of work done on color terminology in different languages.
>It is important to keep in mind that language is a convention and semantics is
>a complex matter. We know that there are many languages that have only four
>color terms, for example, white, black, red and "grue" that is one term that
>covers what in English would be divided into "green", "yellow" and "blue."
>This is, for example, the case in most older Semitic languages and in
>Sumerian. Howver, this does not mean that people could not distinguish colors
>just as well as we do, as has been demonstrated by anthropologists who have
>worked with contemporary cultures that use similar systems. The classic book
>on the subject is Kay and Berlin, Basic Color Terms, and there have been
>hundreds of studies since. There is even a book on color terminology in
>Homeric Greek as well as an excellent article on Egyptian color terms by John
>Baines.
When I reread what I had written I recognized that I could have been
misunderstood. Read what I meant, not what I wrote. Please. <g>
Anyway, what I meant wasn't that people couldn't see different colors,
but that they didn't necessarily distinguish between colors that we
call green and blue. (I wasn't aware of the yellow.) Or red and
orange.
The absence of color names is an interesting one. Can one think about
something if one doesn't have a name for it?
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Loren Petrich
In article <512pq9$e...@dfw-ixnews8.ix.netcom.com>,
Stella Nemeth <S.NE...@IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:
>The absence of color names is an interesting one. Can one think about
>something if one doesn't have a name for it?
One can picture it in one's mind, or else imagine some other
appropriate sensation.
And as to describing colors without abstract color words, one can
always use terms of the form <something>-colored.
Loren Petrich
In article <32348F...@clr.com>,
Olice Certain <Olice_...@clr.com> wrote:
>Loren Petrich wrote:
>> Ek'wosko:r. True, our knowledge is incomplete in some ways,
>> but there is enough known to exclude Ancient Egyptian as the
>> ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
>I've been following this thread for quite a while, and I think
>that Steve and Sadia are only trying to point out the possibility
>of some English words *borrowed* from Egyptian. I don't think
>either of them has tried to claim Ancient Egyptian as the
>ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Just my 2 cents...
So what?
But the trouble is that Steve Whittet, especially, finds it hard
to accept that *any* English word can have a non-Egyptian origin.
Loren Petrich
In article <3234A5...@pioneerplanet.infi.net>,
Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
... How about "Tcha'au en pa war"? This would be
>referring to the berries, which seem to figure in Egyptian medicinal
>recipes. Unless someone can give me a good idea of how the Romans came
>up with the catchy word "juniper".
Which was pronounced by them something like /yuniperus/.
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> You also stated that you believe my way of transliterating Egyptian is
> "phonologically misleading". There is nothing intentional in this, you
> know, but you are right. Yet the other system is no more helpful,
> because we have much less of an idea how Egyptian was pronounced than it
> was written.
But, with all due respect, what is the point then of making up a
pronunciation? If all we have are consonants, then these is all we have -- no
point in *assuming* a particular vowelling pattern is being employed. Sure,
we should try to determine the vowels and pronunciation as best can be based
on available sources, but ultimately, this is only an approximate
reconstruction. Besides, with regard to *transliteration*, this is only
intended as a way of noting the *written* orthography of Egyptian, not the
phonetics. /imn-Htp/ might look strange, but I can look this right up in any
scholarly source instead of having to dig around looking for "Amenhotep",
Amunhopte", "Imunhetep", &c. (all of which have been used in print at one
time or another).
> I have some theories on this pronunciation that would
> surprise most people interested in this subject. I believe, given its
> geographic location, that Egyptian has been treated too much like a
> Semitic language as regards its intonation. Yet it seems to me that
> Egyptian is such an eccentric language that we cannot count on Semitic
> to give us much of an idea how it sounded.
Egyptian is no more eccentric than any other language; it just has its own
set of rules. And you are right about using only Semitic sources for
reconstructing Egyptian phonology, but they *are* the closest we have, and
the ones with the most interchange with Egyptian (Berber languages are also *
extremely* helpful, but much less well known).
> Even the "ayin" sound, which
> is so distinctly Semitic, has been attributed to Egyptian, yet I am far
> from sure that their "ayin" signs (the foremost being the extended
> forearm) were pronounced in the Semitic fashion.
Not at all! `ayn is a general phoneme found in most Afro-asiatic languages,
Semitic and Egyptian included, but also Berber languages.
Piotr Michalowski
>The absence of color names is an interesting one. Can one think about
>something if one doesn't have a name for it?
Apparently one can. Why don;t you check out Kay and Berlin and some of the
literature that followed. They actually deal with living people who use
color systems that are structurally similar to the ones you are interested in.
Saida
Troy Sagrillo wrote:
>
> Saida wrote:
>
> >
> > You also stated that you believe my way of transliterating Egyptian is
> > "phonologically misleading". There is nothing intentional in this, you
> > know, but you are right. Yet the other system is no more helpful,
> > because we have much less of an idea how Egyptian was pronounced than it
> > was written.
>
> But, with all due respect, what is the point then of making up a
Troy does not mean, I am sure, to give the impression that I,
personally, am making them up. For my spellings I check Budge and
Gardiner and try to determine what's most reasonable. I have learned to
read Coptic because I consult that language whenever possible. Where
the vowels are absent, Coptic is often the best bet and, otherwise, the
vowel "e" serves pretty well. Vowels are not the basis of any given
word, anyway. Change them or substitute them and the word will still be
understandable. If you use only the consonants, you will have the word
wrong 100% of the time instead of just sometimes. That is also a point
of view.
> > I have some theories on this pronunciation that would
> > surprise most people interested in this subject. I believe, given its
> > geographic location, that Egyptian has been treated too much like a
> > Semitic language as regards its intonation. Yet it seems to me that
> > Egyptian is such an eccentric language that we cannot count on Semitic
> > to give us much of an idea how it sounded.
>
> Egyptian is no more eccentric than any other language; it just has its own
> set of rules. And you are right about using only Semitic sources for
> reconstructing Egyptian phonology, but they *are* the closest we have, and
> the ones with the most interchange with Egyptian (Berber languages are also *
> extremely* helpful, but much less well known).
>
> > Even the "ayin" sound, which
> > is so distinctly Semitic, has been attributed to Egyptian, yet I am far
> > from sure that their "ayin" signs (the foremost being the extended
> > forearm) were pronounced in the Semitic fashion.
>
> Not at all! `ayn is a general phoneme found in most Afro-asiatic languages,
> Semitic and Egyptian included, but also Berber languages.
I don't know about Afro-asiatic at all, but I do know about Semitic.
They certain do have the "ayin" but, then again, they also have the
hard, burring "r". Of course, we have not clear idea what ancient
Hebrew speakers once employed for their "r" and in modern Hebrew it has
become pretty weak, probably due to the Germans who revived it, with
their deep-throated "r" sound. I strongly feel, as I said, that the
Egyptians did not have the strong, forward "r" and their vocalization,
identified as "ayin", seems to have been heard by Hittites, Greeks and
others as a sort of nasal sound, i.e. "Ozymandias" for User-Ma'at-Re.
Perhaps the trouble was their unfamiliarity with this gutteral. As you
can see, the "r" in User did not make much of an impression. Sure, the
"ayin" might have been there, but with Egyptian, I wouldn't take
anything for granted.
BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> Troy, you are right in that there must be standard, but it is THIS
> standard with the symbols I don't like the looks of. Just a personal
> prejudice and I must learn to read it, I suppose, although this is the
> first time (in this thread) that I have ever discussed ancient Egyptian
> with anybody at any great length.
So it is just basically an aesthetic problem? ;) Seriously, as far as I am
concerned, it doesn't really make a difference as long as we all know what
Egyptian phonemes/lexemes we are discussing. As I said with *some* of your
original renderings were a bid difficult for me to figure out as to the
original. But as long as we communicate in the long run, that is fine! :)
> > > "Wat Ur" certainly is evocative of "water".
> >
> > Except that your "Wat Ur" is /w3D wr/ (normally vocalised today as "wadj
> > wer", but was probably pronounced in Old/Middle Egyptian as *wa:Rij wu:r;
> > the /R/ is the "thick "r" (sort of half way between a normal "r" and "l"
> > (often used in Japanese); Loprieno discusses this issue in detail)).
> It is my suspicion that both "r" and "l" (when needed) were pronounced
> like "w", so I think that pretty much agrees with what you are saying.
> Kind of crazy, isn't it? Also, I would guess that the "r" at the end of
> a word was negligible in BBC English fashion.
Actually this is quite apparent in Late Egyptian. Many words containing
/r/ in the middle or end of their Middle Egyptian predicessors have lost it
in writing (and no doubt in speech as well) in Late Egyptian. (Like the New
England pronunciation of "car" as /caa/, or the loss of the /r/ in standard
British English.) This trend continues into Coptic as well (noufe for M.E.
/nfr/ (nefer); noute for M.E. /nTr/ (netjer), L.E. /ntr/ (neter)). Often in
Coptic though, the Middle Egyptian /r/ has become /l/. *HOWEVER*, please note
that the "thick" /R/ of the reconstruced *wa:Rij is *not* the same kind of
"r"; the "thick" /R/ is written in Egyptian as the so-called alif vulture
(since in Late Egyptian the /R/ had shifted in pronunciation to a glottal stop
like the Semitic alif).
> The glyph that looks like
> a chick was, I think, pronounced as a "w" at the beginning of a word but
> as a "u" thereafter. "Wat Ur" should, theoretically, have had a "w" in
> the beginning of both words, but, as it really served as one word, I
> think the "Ur is correct.
Sorry, but I really doubt this. While I agree the /w/ in the middle of a word
*may* have been pronouced as /u:/ or /aw/ or /w/, it was almost certainly a
consonantal /w/ at the beinging of a word. As /w3D wr/ is two words, I don't
see how the /wr/ would shift in pronuciation from */wu:r/ to /u:r/ (as no
glottal stop (alif) is written) merely on the basis that another word happens
to proceed it -- Semitic languages don't do this, nor do Berber languages (as
far as I am aware), so I seriously doubt Egyptian would either.
[snip -- Cedar]
> > You are right, it did *used* to be considered "cedar", because /`S/ wood was
> > imported from Lebanon (the whole Cedars of Lebanon business). Unfortunately,
> > as Loret discusses, in paintings /`S/ wood (`ash if you must) is light
> > yellow in colour, not red. In most modern translations the term "conifers"
> > is now used. The question now is, what is the Egyptian term for "cedar"?
>
> I wish I had access to your sources. I would love to read them.
Actually Lucas and Harris's book (Ancient Egyptian Materials & Industries, 4th
ed.) is fairly easy to track down via inter-library loan (if neccessary), and
they discuss this issue and summarise Loret and others. Also I believe Lisa
Manniche's recent "Egyptian Herbal" (?) book discusses this as well.
[snip]
> The difficulty isn't as great as all that. Egyptian didn't use "o"
> much, so that eliminates having to guess about this vowel. There are a
> couple of "a" sounds represented and also "u" "i" and "y". That leaves
> only "e", with which Coptic has been most helpful.
Sorry to be a stickler, but at which stage of the language? The vocalic system
varied quite considerably through out history. Old Egyptian and very likely
Middle Egyptian used the standard Afro-asiatic vocalic inventory of /a, i, u/
but these shifted other vowels (including /e, o/ and the schwa) later in Late
Egytian (as happens in many other Afro-asiatic languages as well). Coptic is *
very* useful in many respects (though even the pronuciation of Coptic itself
is tenative), but it has to be used with care -- no one would suggest
reconstructing the phonology of Old English **solely** on the basis of 20th
Century Mid-Western USA pronuciation of Modern English, or reconstructing the
Arabic of 7th century CE Mecca on the basis of modern Moroccan dialect or
Maltese.
[snip]
> Budge, IMHO, was a great linguist and scholar of ancient Egyptian and I
> see no reason to trust German interpretations over his. Probably, he
> made errors. Even those who "corrected" him were second-guessed by
> somebody else, in turn, on certain things. Sir Alan Gardiner has
> corrected himself in various editions of his grammar. Were he still
> here, he'd still be doing it, no doubt. The Egyptologists who
> specialized in the language had to convince each other that they were
> right in their assertions. Sometimes they did (see Gardiner's notes on
> how he changed his mind because Prof. X made him see the
> light--sometimes grudgingly) just like we are trying to do in this
> thread. But the truth is elusive here.
Budge, IMHO, was dated even in his day, and even more so now (and Gardiner is
getting a bit hoary himself, and even Faulkner) -- the only reason he is
around today is that his books are cheap and widely distributed. I don't think
that Budge is totally useless, but that he needs to be used with a lot of
care. The "Germans" who compiled the Worterbuch (who happened to include
Gardiner, btw) where the very best of their day and the Worterbuch has yet to
be superceeded at a standard recource (and we long for the day when the 2nd
ed. on CD-ROM is **finally** available). But, like Budge, even the Worterbuch
(and Faulkner and Lesko too) needs to be checked -- a lot has been discovered
since it originally appeared. But my point was that /w`r/ was given by Budge
as "juniper ?"; maybe research since has removed the "?", but I don't know off
hand.
> If Budge guessed "war" was
> "juniper" we may as well take his word--especially since you say there
> is not much alternative.
There may be an alternative; *I* just don't know, that's all.
> How about "Tcha'au en pa war"? This would be
> referring to the berries, which seem to figure in Egyptian medicinal
> recipes.
Late Egyptian /D3`w n p3 w`r/ "seed/grain/berry of the w`r tree/bush/whatever"
(and juniper is being referred to for all I know). BTW, a modern "readable"
transliteration would be "dja`u en pa we`r"
> Unless someone can give me a good idea of how the Romans came
> up with the catchy word "juniper".
> >
> > > This is
> > > speculative, but a better example of Latin from Egyptian might be the
> > > word for "ivory", pronounced variously "ab", "abu" or "yab".
> >
> > Just a point of discussion (not an attack): how do you know this? At what
> > point in the history of the language (Old, Middle, New, &c.) is /3bw/
> > vocalised in such ways? Unfortunately I don't have either Crumm's or Cerny's
> > Coptic dictionaries here, but that would be a place to start.
>
> Look in Budge. It won't do you irreparable harm. Just don't tell
> anybody.:)
As I said, I don't mind taking a gander at old Budge's dictionary, but he was
treating his transliterations as vocalised (ie., vowelled) words -- after the
practice of Lepsius (and was therefore VERY dated). We have learnt much more
about Egyptian phonology since then. I am not saying that Budge is 100% wrong,
but just that he needs to be varified elsewhere IMHO (he *made up* stuff quite
a bit, as you will quickly learn if you check the original Egyptian sources).
[palm]
> > Ahh, found it in Budge as /imi/ and /im3/; again questioned by Budge, and
> > ought to be checked in the Worterbuch. Lesko's Late Egyptian dict. gives /
> > im3w/ and /i3mw/ (same orthography as Budge's) as "wood, tree". Faulkner
> > gives /im3/ "a tree" and cites p. Wilbour 31 as '*not* date-palm'.
>
> I'll check this one over. Maybe I'll have to rethink it, but there
> should be one most frequently used term for this common item and I'll
> try to determine what it was. Maybe you can help me :) Anyway, "im3w"
> is quite a mouthful, in your transliteration or mine.
Hehehehehe.... yes it is! But then again, I am not trying to *say* it either -
- I just want to know what it spelt like so I can go look it up in whatever
scholarly resource I need. I get the feeling that /im3/ is a generic word for
"tree" rather than a specific variety (based on its usage), but don't really
know for certain.
[snip]
Steve Whittet
In article <323384...@utoronto.ca>, t.sag...@utoronto.ca says...
>
>Steve Whittet wrote:
>
>[with much snippage]
>
>> The modern kurds or mountain people of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran
>> are the descendents of the Hatti, Hurrians, Mitanni,the Egyptians fought.
>
>Really now?! And just how did you happen to figure this one out? ;-)
>(Oooooh, what did I just ask...? ;) )
You asked a good question, for anyone who is really
interested check out one of the maps of kurdish territory
(there are some pretty good ones available on line)
and see what it implies for the spread of language...
"http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Etank/kurdish/htdocs/his/orig.html">
Exploring Kurdish Origins
by Mehrdad R. Izady (published in the Kurdish Life, Number 7, Summer 1993).
The question of Kurdish origins, i.e., who the Kurds are and where they
come from, has for too long remained an enigma. Doubtless in a few
words one can respond, for example, that Kurds are the end-product of
numerous layers of cultural and genetic material superimposed over
thousands of years of internal migrations, immigrations, cultural
innovations and importations. But identifying the roots and the course of
evolution of present Kurdish ethnic identity calls for greater effort. It
calls for the study of each of the many layers of these human
movements and cultural influences, as many and as early in time as is
currently possible. Presently, at least 5 distinct layers can be identified
with various degrees of certainty.
Lithograph. Naples 1818. [ "He was magnificently attired in the Koordish
taste: his gown was of a rich, flowered, gold Indian stuff; he had a superb
Cashmere shawl ornamented with gold fringe on his head, put on in a wild lo
ose manner; his upper dress was a capot, or cloak, of crimson Venetian cloth,
with rich gold fogs, or bosses, on it...I could see he was well aware of the
advantages of his person.", Narative of a Residence in Koordistan by Claudius
James Rich, Esq. Londa
n, 1863. --- The Kurdish Museum ---] </EM>
======================================================================
l. The earliest evidence thus far of a unified and distinct culture shared
by the people inhabiting the Kurdish mountains relates to the period of
the 'Halaf Culture' which emerged about 8000) years ago. Named for
the ancient mound of Tel Halaf in what is uow Syrian Kurdistan (west
of the town of Qamishli), this culture is best known for its easily
recognizable style of pottery which, fortunately, was produced in
abundance. Exquisitely painted, delicately designed Halaf pottery is
easily distinguishable from earlier and later productions. Judging from
pottery
In fact, taking Halaf pottery as a prime example, many archaeologists
now point out that shared pottery style is a simple but crucial tool in
helping to classify prehistoric cultures in the Middle East. Yet, while
shared pottery can imply shared culture, it can no more imply shared
ethnicity than identical rug designs today. For example, the Turkic
Qashqai, Luric Mamasani and Arab Baseri tribes of the southern
Zagros mountains all share similar rug patterns. Ethno-linguistically,
however, these three peoples share virtually nothing else. This fact
serves as a clear warning to those who would use shared artistic styles
as an indication of shared ethnicity. More prudently, pottery styles must
be taken in tandem with other evidence in order to make a case for
shared culture and ethnicity.
Wide-spread Halafian excavation sites have much more in common
than styles of pottery. Solid evidence has now emerged indicating
striking similarities in food, technology, architecture, ritual practices and
ornaments, all of which suggest something more substantive.
Archaeologist Julian Reade,
now a curator at the British Museum's Department of
Western Asiatic Antiquities has this to say: 'While we really
know little about how the inhabitants of a Halaf village
thought, let alone what language or languages they used for
thinking, and what levels of abstraction could be expressed
verbally, it seems likely they had comparable social
structures, sharing many of the same implicit values, and that
even those who did not travel regularly may have met from
time to time in religious or administrative centers." (Reade,
1991).
With the aid of these archaeological criteria, Reade as well as
Michael Roaf (archaeologist and former director of the
British School of Archaeology in Iraq, and now at the
University of California, Berkeley) have determined the
boundaries of Halaf culture. They coincide almost
exactlywith the area ethnic Kurds still call home: from
Kirmanshah to Adyaman, and from Afrin near the
Mediterranean Sea to northern areas of Lake Van. The
distribution of Halaf pottery and the distribution of ethnic
Kurds today are a near-perfect match. The single exception is
the Mosul-Tikrit region of the Mesopotanian lowlands which
also yields Halaf pottery. James Melaart, better known for his
excavation of Catal Huyuk, found many of the motifs and
composite designs present on Halaf pottery and figurines still
extant in the textile and decorative designs of the modern
Kurds who now inhabit the same excavated Halafian sites.
It is highly unlikely that the Halafian people constituted an
immigrant population. According to several demographic
studies (e.g., T. Cuyler Young, 1977; P. Smith, 1971;
Bridsell, 1957; and particularly, P. Smith and T. Cuyler
Young, 1982) the Zagros mountains were the site of
perennial population surplus and pressure from 12000 to
5000 years ago, which must have resulted in numerous
episodes of emigration. This population pressure in the
Zabros-Taurus folds was a consequence of successive
technological advances in domestication of common crops
and animals and resulted in a prosperous agricultural
economy and trade; therefore high population density. The
Halafian phenomenon is likely the result of a massive internal
migration that succeeded in culturally unifying the population
in Kurdistan.
The fact that Halaf culture spread so rapidly over such a
considerable distance across the rugged Kurdish mountains is
thought to have been the result of the development of a new
life style and economic activity necessitating mobility,
namely nomadic herding. All of the pre-requisite
technologies had been developed, and essential animals,
particularly the dog, had been domesticated by settled
agriculturalists. Halafian figures of dogs (ca. 6000 BC) with
upcurled tails unlike that of any specie of wolf, were
unearthed in Jarmo in central Kurdistan. They provide the
earliest definitive evidence of the development of man's "best
friend" and the herder's most prized protection. Nomadic
herding has since been a very mobile cornerstone of
Zagros-Taurus cultures and societies.
2. The Halaf cultural period ends with the arrival, circa 5300
BC, of a new culture, and quite likely a new people: the
Ubaidians. 'Ubaid Culture' expanded from the plains of
Mesopotamia into the mountains. The Ubaidians, or
protoEuphratians, as they are sometimes called, caused a
hybrid
culture to emerge in the mountains, comprised of their own
cultural heritage and that of the earlier Halaf. It predominated
in most of Kurdistan and Mesopotamia for the ensuing 1000
years.
Of the language or ethnic affliation of the Ubaidians we know
nothing beyond conjecture. However, it is they who gave the
names Tigris and Euphrates to the rivers of Kurdistan and
Mesopotamia, as well as the names of almost all of the cities
we now recognize as Sumerian. The cultural impact of the
Ubaidians on the mountain communities could have been
vast, though apparently it was not particularly deep.
=====================================================
3. By approximately 4300 BC, a new culture, and possibly a
new people, came to dominate the mountains: the Hurrians.
Of the Hurrians we know much more, and the volume of our
knowledge becomes greaterwith time. We know, for
example, that the Hurrians spread far and wide into the
Zagros-Taurus mountain systems and intruded for a time on
the neighboring plains of Mesopotamia and the Iranian
Plateau. However, they never expanded far from the
mountains. Their economy was surprisingly integrated and
focused, alongwith their political bonds, which ran generally
parallel to the Zagros-Taurus mountains rather than radiating
out to the lowlands, as was the case during the preceding
Ubaid cultural period. Mountainplain economic exchanges
remained secondaryin importance, judging by the
archaeological remains of goods and their origins.
The Hurrians spoke a language or languages of the
northeastern group of the Caucasian family of languages,
distantly related to modern Lezgian and, by extension, to
Georgian and Laz. The direction of their expansion is not yet
understood and by no means should be taken as having been
north-south, in other words, as an expansion out of the
Caucuses. (It may well be that it was the Hurrians who
introduced Caucasian languages into the Caucasus.)
For a long time the states founded by the Hurrians remained
small, until around 2500 BC when larger political-military
entities evolved out of the older city-states. Four polities are
of special note: Urartu, Mushku, Subaru and Guti/Qutil. The
kingdom of Mushku is nowbelieved to have brought about the
final downfall of the Hittites in Anatolia. Their name survives
in the city of Mush/Mus in north central Kurdistan of Turkey.
The Subaru, who operated from the areas north of modern
Arbil in central Kurdistan, have left their name in the
populous and historic Kurdish tribal confederacy of Zubari,
who still inhabit the areas north of Arbil. The name of Mount
Ararat is a legacy of the Urartu. The Qutils of central and
southern Kurdistan, after graduallyunifying the smaller
mountain principalities, became strong enough in 2250 BC to
actually annex Sumeria and the rest of lowland Mesopotamia.
A Qutil dynasty ruled Sumeria for 130 years until 2120 BC.
Two legendary emporia, Melidi and Aratta, served the
Hurrians in their inter-regional trade with the economies
outside the mountains. With much certainty, Melidi is to be
identified with modern Malatya, while Aratta is probably to
be identified with the rich Qutil archaeological site of Godin
Teppa near Kangawar in southern Kurdistan.
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the culture and
people of Kurdistan appear to have been unified under a Hur-
rian identity. The fundamental legacy of the Hurrians to the
present culture of the Kurds is manifest in the realm of religion,
mythology, martial arts, and even genetics. Nearly two-thirds
of Kurdish tribal, topological and urban names are also likely
of Hurrian origin: Buhtan, Talaban, Jelali, Barzan; Mardin,
Ziwiya and Dinawar, to name a few. Mythological and religious
symbols present in the art of the later Hurrian dynastics such
as the Mannaeans of eastern Kurdistan, and the Lullus of the
south, present in part what can still be observed in the Kurdish
ancient religion of Yazdanism, better known today by its
various denominations, such as Alevism, Yezidism, and Yar-
sanism (Ahl-i Haqq).
===================================
It is fascinatingto recognize the origin of many tattooing motifs
still used by traditional Kurds to decorate their bodies as
replicas of those which appear on Hurrian figurines. One such
is the combination that incorporates serpent, sun disc, dog and
comb motifs. In fact some of these Hurrian tattoo motifs are
also present in the religious decorative arts of the Yezidi Kurds.
========================================
<P>
By the end of the Hurrian period, Kurdistan seems to have
been culturally and ethnically homogenized to form a single
civilization which was identified as such by neighboring cul-
tures and peoples.
=========================
4. The portrait of a culturally homogenized Kurdistan was not
to last. As early as 2000 BC, the vanguards of the Indo-
European speaking tribal immigrants, such as the Hittites and
Mittanis, had arrived in southwestern Asia. While the Hittites
only marginally affected the mountain communities in Kurdis-
tan, the Mittanis settled in Kurdistan and influenced the na-
tives in several fields worthy of note, in particular the
introduction of knotted rug weaving. Even rug designs intro-
duced by the Mittanis and recognizable in Assyrian floor carv-
ings remain the hallmark of Kurdish rugs and kelims. The
modern mina-khani and chwar-such styles are basically the
same as those the Assyrians depicted nearly 3000 years ago.
=============================
The Mittanis seem to have been an Indic, and not an Iranic
group of people. Their pantheon, which includes names like
Indra, Varuna, Suriya, Nasatya, is typically Indic. The Mittanis
could have introduced during this early period some of the
Indic tradition that appears to be manifest in the Kurdish
religion of Yazdanism.
The avalanche of Indo-European tribes, however, was to come
about 1200 BC, raining havoc on the economy and settled
culture in the mountains and lowlands alike. The north was
settled by the Haiks, known to us as the Armenians, while the
rest of the mountainsbecame targets of settlement for various
Iranic peoples, such as the Medes, Persians, Scythians, Sar-
mathians and Sagarthians (whose name survives in the name of
the Zagros mountains).
By 850 BC, the last Hurrian states had been extinguished by the
invading Aryans, whose sheer numbers of immigrants must
have been considerable. They succeeded over time in chang-
ing the Hurrian language(s) of the people in Kurdistan, as well
as their genetic make-up. By the 3rd centuryBC, the Aryaniza-
tion of the mountains was virtually complete.
When the ethnic Medes and Persians arrived on the eastern
flanks of the Zagros around 1000 BC, a massive internal migra-
tion from the northern and central Zagros toward the southern
Zagros was in progress. By the 6th century BC, many large
tribes which we now find among the Kurds were also present
in the southern Zagros, in Fars and even Kirman. As early as
the 3rd century BC, the 'Cyrtii' ('Kurti') are reportedby Greek,
and later by Roman authors, to inhabit as much the southern
(Persia or Pars/Fars) as the central and northern Zagros (Kur-
distan proper). This was to continue for another millenium,
when early Islamic sources also enumerate tens of Kurdish
tribes in the southern Zagros. In time they were assimilated
into the local populations. In fact, this has been a source of
puzzlement for many modern writers who now find very few if
any Kurds in the southern Zagros. Unaware of the history and
extent of Kurdish historical migrations, they often draw the
wrong conclusion: that the term 'Kurd' was not an ethnic name,
but a designator of all nomads. This facile hypothesis is hardly
worthy of refutation since no proof beyond a single, vague
phrasc by a medieval writer, Hamza Isfahani, has never been
produced to support it.
<P>
It is surprising to most that among the Kurds the Aryan cultural
legacywas, and still remains secondary to that of the Hurrians.
Culturally, Aryan nomads brought very little to add to what
they found already present in the Zagros-Taurus region . As has
always been the case, cultural sophistication and civilization
are almost never associated with a nomadic way of life. In fact,
nomads are traditionally thought to be destroyers of sedentary
cultures, potential mortal adversaries in the struggle for pos-
session of land and political dominance.
The Aryan influence on the local Hurrian Kurdish people must
have been very similar to what transpired in Anatolia two
thousand years later when Turkic nomads broke in after the
battle of Manzikert. In time the Turkic nomads imparted their
language to all the millions of civilized, sophisticated
Anatolians whom they converted from Christianity to their
own religion of Hanafi Sunni Islam. Almost everyone in
Anatolia gradually assumed a new Turkish identity along with
Islam. This did not mean that the old legacy ceased to exist. On
the contrary, the rich and ancient Anatolian cultures and
peoples continued their traditional existence under the new
Turkish identity, albeit with the addition of some genetic and
cultural material brought over by the nomads.
<P>
Architecture, domestic and monumental, farming techniques,
herding practices, decorative arts and religion remained much
the same in Hurrian Kurdistan following Aryan settlernent,
while progressively the people came to speak an Iranic lan-
guage and to admit new deities into their earlier pantheons. No
abrupt changeis encountered inthe culture of Kurdistanwhile,
under Aryan pressure, this linguistic and genetic shift was
taking place. Nearly every aspect of contemporary Kurdish
culture can be traced to this massive Hurrian substructure,
with the Aryan superstructure generally quite superficial.
Even the Kurdish tactic of guerrilla warfare finds its roots
among the Qutils and was later used by the Median Cyzxares
in his Assyrian campaigns in 612 BC. In the Bisitun
inscription, Darius I also makes note of this battle tactic used
by the Kurdish mountaineers against his forces. He called the
guerrillas the kara (a cognate of guerrilla). 800 years later,
King Ardashir, founder of the Persian Sasanian dynasty, faced
the same defensive tactics by the Kurds. The term he used for
them is jan-spar which has a meaning almost identical with the
modern term,peshmerga.
<P>
While many hypotheses have been advanced to connect the
ethnic name 'Kurd' to that of the ancient Hurrian Qutils
(Hallo, 1971) or the Khardukhoi (Carduchoi) of the Greek
historian Xenophon (Cawkell, 1979), none have much merit.
Whatever the roots, there is evidence to push the origin of the
word 'Kurd' back at least to the early4th millennium BC, if not
earlier. Even though I have not personally seen the term used
by the old Mesopotamian sources, I was assured by my
colleague Piotr Steinkeller, professor of Akkadian and
Sumerian languages at Harvard University, of the accuracy of
reports of such usage dating back 3800 years. The Akkadian
term 'Kurtei' denoted an indeterminate portion or groups of
inhabitants of the Zagros (and eastern Taurus) mountains. On
the other hand, to their end in the 6th century BC, the
Babylonians loosely (and apparently pejoratively) referred to
almost everyone who lived in the Zagros-Taurus system a
"Qutil," including the Medes! But Babylonian records also
attest to many more specific subdivisional names such as the
Mardi, Lullubi, Kardaka and Qardu, the last two of which have
all been used frequently in the needless controversy over the
roots and antiquity of the ethnic term 'Kurd' and the question
of the presence of a general ethnic designator.
<P>
By the 3rd century BC, the very term 'Kurd' (or rather Kurt)
was conclusively established. Polybius (d. ca. 133 BC) in his
history reporting the events of 221-220 BC (History, V. 52),
and Strabo (d. ca AD 48) in his geography (Geography, V.
xi.13.2-3; VII. xv. 15.1), are the earliest Western sources of
which I am aware as having made mention of the Kurds with
their present ethnic name, albeit in Latinized form, Cyrtii the
Kurti. Historians Livy, Pliny, Tacitus and much later,
Procopius, also mention this ethnic name for the native
population of Media and parts of Anatolia in classical times.
Ptolemy inadvertently provides us with an array of Kurdish
tribal names when he records them as they appear as
toponyms designating their locations. For example,
Bagraoandene for the Bagrawands or Bakrans of Diyarbakir,
Belcanea for the Belikans of Antep, Tigranoandene for the
Tirigans of Hakkar, Sophene for the Subhans of Elazig,
Dersene for the Darsimis and Bokhtanoi for the Bohtans
(Bokhtans), etc. These tribes are still with us today.
<P>
The northern Zagros and Anatolia once teamed with a variety
of related groups who spoke Iranic tongues. About 2000
years ago, many, such as the Iranic Pontians, Commagenes,
Cappadocians, Western Medes and Indic Mitannis (like the
earlier Hurrian Mannas, Lullubis, Saubarus, Kardakas and
Qutils) had been totally absorbed into a new Kurdish ethnic
pool. They are among the many mountain inhabiting peoples
whose assimilation genetically, culturally, socially and
linguistically formed the contemporary Kurds. Kurdish
diversity of race,
tradition and spoken dialects encountered today point in the
direction of this compound identitv.
<P>
Reflecting on the gradual assimilation of one of these groups
into the larger Kurdish ethnic pool, Pliny the Elder (d. AD
79) tries to reconcile what appeared to him to be a name
change for a familiar people. Enumerating the nations of the
known world, he states, "Joining on to Adiabene (central
Kurdistan centered on Arbil) are the people formerly called
the Carduchi and now the Cordueni, past whom flows the
river Tigris..." (Natural Histor VI. wiii. 46).
<P>
These Carduchi mentioned by Pliny are the same people
whom Xenophon and his ten thousand Greek troops
encountered nearly three centuries earlier when retreating
through Kurdistan in 401 BC. Xenophon called them the
Kardukhoi. The name is the same as that of Kardaka (the
people who provided a portion of the Babylonian royal guards
before 530 BC), and the ,Qarduim mentioned frequently in
the Talmud.
<P>
From the time the Kurds are Aryanized until the 16th century
of our era Kurdish culture remained basically unchanged
despite the introduction of new empires, religions and
immigrants. The Kurds remained essentially the followers of
the ancient Hurrian religion of Yazdanism and spoke an Iranic
language that medieval Islamic sources termed Pahlawani.
Pahlawani survives today in the dialects of Gurani and Dimili
(Zaza) on the peripheries of Kurdistan. Only the loss of the
southern Zagros, via metamorphosis of Kurds into Lurs, and
the expansion of Kurds into the Alburz, Caucasus and Pontus
mountains are noteworthy events.
<P>
5. After the Aryan settlement, Kurdistan continued to receive
new peoples and cultural influences, none however stronger
than the Aryan influence in altering Kurdish cultural and
ethnicidentity. Large numbers of Aramaic-speakingpeople
never seem to have settled in Kurdistan, although through the
introduction of Judaism, and later Christianity, many Kurds of
central and northern Kurdistan relinquished Kurdish and
spoke Aramaic instead. It is fascinating to note in examining
contemporary Kurdish culture that Judaism appears to have
exercised a much deeper and more lasting influence on
indigenous Kurdish culture and religion than Christianity,
despite the fact that most ethnic neighbors of the Kurds
between the 5th and 12th centuries were Christians.
<P>
The role of the Arabs and the impact of Islam on Kurdish
society and culture is less difficult to survey. The Arabian
peninsula was experiencing a runaway population explosion
when the advent of Islam translated that pressure into a
massive outburst of Arabian nomads and brought about their
settlement of foreign lands. In Kurdistan Arab tribes settled
near almost every major town and agricultural center. By the
10th century, the Islamic historians and geographers report
Arabian populations living among the Kurds from the
northern shores of Lake Vanto Dinawar andfrom
HamadantoMalatya. These eventually assimilated, leaving
behind only their genetic imprint (as the
darker-complexioned city Kurds) and little else.
The same was true of the Turkic settlement of Kurdistan and
its cultural influence . Several centuries of Turkic nomadic
passage through Kurdistan, beginning with the 12th century,
rained havoc on the settled Kurds and their economy, as
Aryan migrations had done some 2000 years earlier. The
Turkic cultural legacywas in itself nil, but the forces of
internal change it unleashed within Kurdish society turned out
to be nearly as decisive as the Aryan invasion and settlement.
Kurdistan would surely have been Turkified under this
tremendous nomadic pressure and destructiveness, had it not
been for the Kurdish nomads, the Kurmanj, who switfly came
out of the Hakkari highlands to fill nearly every niche left
vacant by the agriculturist Kurds and less energetic nomads.
The Turkic nomads were primarily steppe nomads, and proved
less of a match for the Kurmanj mountain nomads in the
rough terrain of Kurdistan. Some Kurds were Turkified to be
sure; e.g., the tribes of Dumbuli, Barani, Shaqaqi and
Jewanshir. Conversely, many Kurdish tribes with Turkic
names (e.g., Karachul, Chol, Oghaz, Devalu, Karaqich,
Chichak) are in fact assimilated Turkish and Turkmen tribes
who left behind only their names and were in every other
respect Kurdified.
<P>
This massive tribal dislocation that could have subsided over
time took a new and more destructive turn by the advent of a
century-long holocaust in Kurdish and Armenian territories in
eastern Anatolia in the 16th century. The decisive turn for
massive nomadization of the Kurds was made by the long
Perso-Ottoman wars and particularly the
Safavids"'scorchedearth" policy. More important still was the
deadly economic blow brought about by the shift to sea
transport of East-West commerce which also commenced at
the turn of the 16th century. Together they heralded the
beginning of the end for much of the social fabric and
sophisticated culture of Kurdistan as it had existed since the
time of the Medes. The agriculturalist, urban based Kurdish
culture and society was to shift to a nomadic economy
under a newly assumed identity. The nomadized Kurdish
farmers eventually accepted Shafiite SunniIslam from
the Kurmanj nomads andbegan speakingthe vernacular of
Kurmanji a close kin to the old Pahlawani. In time the older
Kurdish society - religion and language notwithstanding
-was marginalized and physically pushed to the
peripheries of Kurdistan. At present, nearly three quarters of
the Kurds speak various dialects of Kurmanji and similar
numbers practice Shafute Sunni Islam. In a sense, the
"Kurmanj" assimilated the "Kurds" and in the process they
assumed the old ethnic name and inherited all that was left of the older
culture
.
<P>
There is, as should be expected, a strong correlation
between the practice of the ancient Yazdani religion and the
speaking of Pahlawani, as there is also a close connection
betweenbeing a Muslim and speaking Kurmanji. The shift
from the former to the latter identity in Kurdistan is
accelerating and seems very likely to totally submerge the
residual Pahlawani-Yazdani identity of the older Kurdistan.
Only a shrinking number of Kurds still speak Pahlawani in the
form of the dialects of Dimili (pejoratively known as Zaza) in
far northwestern Kurdistan in llurkey, and as Gurani, Laki and
Awramani in southern Kurdistan in Iran and Iraq. The old
religion of Yazdanism too is still practiced as Alevism,
Yezidism and Yarsanism (Ahl-i-Haqq). but these too are
shrinking in number.
<P>
With the introduction of modern communication systems
into Kurdish society, the process of cultural and ethnic
homogenization of the Kurds has inevitably accelerated. The
last step in the evolution of Kurdish cultural and ethnic
identity is near completion today. Kurdish ethnic identity is
thus destined to comprise Kurmanji-speaking, Shafiite
Muslim people, the last layer to be added to the many former
layers which, in combination, render the Kurds what and who
they are today: heirs to millenia of cultural and genetic
evolution of the native inhabitants of the Zagros-Taurus
systems.
<P>
Mehrdad Izady
<P>
Lecture, Haryard University, 10 March 1993.
</H2>
>
>
>> kbn = Byblos (with the determanitive for high mountain)
>
>/kbn; kpn/ "Byblos" is an Egyptian attempt to render the Semitic name of
>the city Gebel (Akkadian "Gubla"; Phoenician /gbl/; modern Arabic
>"Jubayl" (a tasghir (diminuitive) of "Jebel")). While the "hill"
>determinative [N25] is doublely appropriate due to the Semitic meaning
>of the city's name ('mountain'), it is only used here because /kbn; kpn/
>is a toponym (see below).
>
>> k3s = Kush in Nubia (with the determanitive for high mountain)
>> kbnt = seagoing ship
>
>Lit., a "Byblos" ship...
>
>> km = The Red Sea, Sinai, Seir (with the determanitive for high mountain)
>>
>> I don't think this word really adresses a type of wood, but rather
>> associations with some properties of trees; big, tall, hard, tough...
>> applying to men and ships and mountains equally well.
>
>
>The **"hill"** determinative [N25] was applied to almost *all* foreign
>toponyms in Egyptian regardless of the local topography. The "mountain"
>determinative [N26] is only rarely used for toponyms, and I can't think
>of a one outside of Egypt.
>
>
Stella Nemeth
pio...@umich.edu (Piotr Michalowski) wrote:
It is an interesting idea. Another subject to try to find books
about. <g>
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Steve Whittet
In article <512ji0$n...@sun.sirius.com>, ree...@sirius.com says...
>
>
>According to Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries by A. Lucas p429ff
>the following kinds of wood have been identified in objects from ancient
>Egypt.
>
>Foreign Timber:
This is quite a range of woods.
Some, like, Ash, Beech, Birch, Elm, Oak, Plum, Juniper, Maple and Lime
are associated with the decidious forests of Europe.
Cedar probably came from the mountains of Lebanon.
The coniferous Fir and Pine might have come from the Zagros mountains
Cypress comes from wet, humid, swampy areas
Hornbeam comes from stream banks in the north.
Ebony is an African wood
Yew is a European conifer (Taxus is the Yew bush I believe)
Liquidamber I don't know the origins of
Many of the Timbers listed as Egyptian, in particular
Poplar, Sycamore and Willow,are also common northern woods
found in a wide range of climes.
>--
>Greg Reeder
steve
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> >
> >
> > >
> > > You also stated that you believe my way of transliterating Egyptian is
> > > "phonologically misleading". There is nothing intentional in this, you
> > > know, but you are right. Yet the other system is no more helpful,
> > > because we have much less of an idea how Egyptian was pronounced than it
> > > was written.
> >
> > But, with all due respect, what is the point then of making up a
> > pronunciation? (snip)
>
> Troy does not mean, I am sure, to give the impression that I,
> personally, am making them up. For my spellings I check Budge and
> Gardiner and try to determine what's most reasonable. I have learned to
> read Coptic because I consult that language whenever possible. Where
> the vowels are absent, Coptic is often the best bet and, otherwise, the
> vowel "e" serves pretty well. Vowels are not the basis of any given
> word, anyway. Change them or substitute them and the word will still be
> understandable. If you use only the consonants, you will have the word
> wrong 100% of the time instead of just sometimes. That is also a point
> of view.
As you please. I follow the transliteration system used by Gardiner (and
others of his day), as do most other Egyptologists, with minor variations.
It may not *look* great, but at least we all know what the word is (and
that was my original point in questioning your reconstructions -- I
couldn't figure out what you meant all the time, and had to look up the
words' the English meanings in the index first and work backwards (not
always successfully either)).
[snip]
> > Not at all! `ayn is a general phoneme found in most Afro-asiatic languages,
> > Semitic and Egyptian included, but also Berber languages.
>
> I don't know about Afro-asiatic at all, but I do know about Semitic.
> They certain do have the "ayin" but, then again, they also have the
> hard, burring "r". Of course, we have not clear idea what ancient
> Hebrew speakers once employed for their "r" and in modern Hebrew it has
> become pretty weak, probably due to the Germans who revived it, with
> their deep-throated "r" sound.
The keyword here being, IMHO, "revived". Modern Hebrew is not of great
utility for determining the phonology of Semitic languages -- too much has
been losted (though I suppose Modern Hebrew spoken by Yemeni Jews might be
more useful than that of Germans ;-) ).
> I strongly feel, as I said, that the
> Egyptians did not have the strong, forward "r" and their vocalization,
> identified as "ayin", seems to have been heard by Hittites, Greeks and
> others as a sort of nasal sound, i.e. "Ozymandias" for User-Ma'at-Re.
> Perhaps the trouble was their unfamiliarity with this gutteral. As you
> can see, the "r" in User did not make much of an impression. Sure, the
> "ayin" might have been there, but with Egyptian, I wouldn't take
> anything for granted.
Hmmmm, I get the impression (perhaps wrongly), that you are confusing `ayn
with /r/; there is no `ayn in /wsr/ (your "user"). `ayn is a fairly strong
sound (unlike /r/) and is clearly used in Egyptian (as is demonstrated by
Semitic cognates and loanwords) -- though it does seem to fall out with
Coptic. Some Semitic loans in Egyptian with `ayn:
Egyptian /`yn/ (spring, well) from Semitic `ayn
Egyptian /`mq/ (valley) from Semitic /`mq/ (eg. Arabic `amq, Ethiopic
`emaq)
Egyptian /`nb/ (grape) from Semitic /`nb/ (eg. Arabic `inab)
But regarding the /r/, yes, by Late Egyptian it was not pronounced as can
be seen in the change in spelling for many words, Egyptian words in non-
Egyptian Languages, and in Coptic.
> BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
> gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
> spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
> That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
> it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
Nope, it is not. All three letters (/i3m/) are consonants NOT vowels,
including the so-called "alif"-vulture /3/! The early Egyptologists (Budge
among them) treated /3/ as the vowel "a" but this is now known to be wrong.
Your "yam" may very well have been pronouced */ya:Rm/ in Middle Egyptian
(assuming of course that /im3/, the form given in dictionaries, is *not*
the correct rendering). Other examples with Arabic cognates (other cognates
in other languages very possible):
b3q (bright, white) = Arabic baraq (shining, lusterous, sparkling)
bk3 (morning) = Arabic bakir (early); bukrah (early morning)
k3m (vineyard) = Arabic karm (vineyard, grapevines)
zb3 (flute) = Arabic zamr, zummarah (flute)
w3D (green) = Arabic waraq (foliage, greenery, leafage)
Moreover, the /i/ in /i3m/ need not be "y" either. Yes, sometimes it was:
Egypt. /imn/ (right) = Arabic "yamin". But it could also be a glottal stop
(hamzah): /idn/ (ear) = Arabic " 'udhn"
Anyhow, I gather from some of your other posts, you are tired of this
thread, so feel free to drop it if you want! :-) It's been fun.
Saida
Troy Sagrillo wrote:
>
> Saida wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Not at all! `ayn is a general phoneme found in most Afro-asiatic languages,
> > > Semitic and Egyptian included, but also Berber languages.
> >
> > I don't know about Afro-asiatic at all, but I do know about Semitic.
> > They certain do have the "ayin" but, then again, they also have the
> > hard, burring "r". Of course, we have not clear idea what ancient
> > Hebrew speakers once employed for their "r" and in modern Hebrew it has
> > become pretty weak, probably due to the Germans who revived it, with
> > their deep-throated "r" sound.
>
> The keyword here being, IMHO, "revived". Modern Hebrew is not of great
> utility for determining the phonology of Semitic languages -- too much has
> been losted (though I suppose Modern Hebrew spoken by Yemeni Jews might be
> more useful than that of Germans ;-) ).
I didn't mean to imply by any means that the accent lent to modern
Hebrew by German-Jews has any bearing on how the ancient language was
pronounced. I wonder about the usefullness of taking any clues from
Yemenite Jews, either. Their dwelling in an Arabian land for so long
gave them an Arabic accent, although my personal guess would be, too,
that the Yemenite accent is closer to the original.
>
> > I strongly feel, as I said, that the
> > Egyptians did not have the strong, forward "r" and their vocalization,
> > identified as "ayin", seems to have been heard by Hittites, Greeks and
> > others as a sort of nasal sound, i.e. "Ozymandias" for User-Ma'at-Re.
> > Perhaps the trouble was their unfamiliarity with this gutteral. As you
> > can see, the "r" in User did not make much of an impression. Sure, the
> > "ayin" might have been there, but with Egyptian, I wouldn't take
> > anything for granted.
>
> Hmmmm, I get the impression (perhaps wrongly), that you are confusing `ayn
> with /r/; there is no `ayn in /wsr/ (your "user"). `ayn is a fairly strong
> sound (unlike /r/) and is clearly used in Egyptian (as is demonstrated by
> Semitic cognates and loanwords) -- though it does seem to fall out with
> Coptic. Some Semitic loans in Egyptian with `ayn:
>
> Egyptian /`yn/ (spring, well) from Semitic `ayn
> Egyptian /`mq/ (valley) from Semitic /`mq/ (eg. Arabic `amq, Ethiopic
> `emaq)
> Egyptian /`nb/ (grape) from Semitic /`nb/ (eg. Arabic `inab)
>
> But regarding the /r/, yes, by Late Egyptian it was not pronounced as can
> be seen in the change in spelling for many words, Egyptian words in non-
> Egyptian Languages, and in Coptic.
Troy, if I can prounounce the "ayin", I am not going to confuse it with
an "r":) "User" has no "ayin". I was referring to the "r" sound that
was not heard by the Greeks. My point simply was: I don't trust the
idea of giving Semitic or perhaps Arabic pronunciation to ancient
Egyptian. If the Egyptian "r" and the Arabic "r" are not the same, why
should the Egyptian symbol that we read as "ayin" have necessarily been
pronounced in the Arabic way?
>
> > BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
> > gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
> > spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
> > That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
> > it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
>
> Nope, it is not. All three letters (/i3m/) are consonants NOT vowels,
> including the so-called "alif"-vulture /3/! The early Egyptologists (Budge
> among them) treated /3/ as the vowel "a" but this is now known to be wrong.
> Your "yam" may very well have been pronouced */ya:Rm/ in Middle Egyptian
What! The vulture is no longer an "a"? I daresay the people in
Ptolemaic times thought it was, as it is clearly visible (twice) in the
name of "Kleopatra". That ought to be a telling clue as to what the
glyph was used for or the Greeks would have adopted another closer one
for spelling out the name of the queen. What evidence, preceeding this,
makes linguists think the vulture was not an "a"???
> (assuming of course that /im3/, the form given in dictionaries, is *not*
> the correct rendering). Other examples with Arabic cognates (other cognates
> in other languages very possible):
>
> b3q (bright, white) = Arabic baraq (shining, lusterous, sparkling)
> bk3 (morning) = Arabic bakir (early); bukrah (early morning)
> k3m (vineyard) = Arabic karm (vineyard, grapevines)
> zb3 (flute) = Arabic zamr, zummarah (flute)
> w3D (green) = Arabic waraq (foliage, greenery, leafage)
>
> Moreover, the /i/ in /i3m/ need not be "y" either. Yes, sometimes it was:
> Egypt. /imn/ (right) = Arabic "yamin". But it could also be a glottal stop
> (hamzah): /idn/ (ear) = Arabic " 'udhn"
>
> Anyhow, I gather from some of your other posts, you are tired of this
> thread, so feel free to drop it if you want! :-) It's been fun.
There are two things (at least) that I never grow tired of
discussing--ancient Egypt and languages. Yes, it has been fun and I
continue to be available for further discussion unless you get me to the
point where I am speechless with astonishment at the turns Egyptian
linguistics are taking, Troy!
Saida
Troy Sagrillo wrote:
>
> Saida wrote:
>>
> > BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
> > gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
> > spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
> > That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
> > it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
>
> Nope, it is not. All three letters (/i3m/) are consonants NOT vowels,
> including the so-called "alif"-vulture /3/!
Troy, you and I can both be right on this one, according to Gardiner!
He says in his *Grammar* "The hieroglyphs "i" and "w" are consonant
signs, but the consonants represented by them being closely related to
the vowels "i" and "u" respectively, they exhibit peculiarities in their
employment which entitle them to be called "semi-vowels"."
The early Egyptologists (Budge
> among them) treated /3/ as the vowel "a" but this is now known to be wrong.
> Your "yam" may very well have been pronouced */ya:Rm/ in Middle Egyptian
> (assuming of course that /im3/, the form given in dictionaries, is *not*
> the correct rendering). Other examples with Arabic cognates (other cognates
> in other languages very possible):
>
> b3q (bright, white) = Arabic baraq (shining, lusterous, sparkling)
> bk3 (morning) = Arabic bakir (early); bukrah (early morning)
> k3m (vineyard) = Arabic karm (vineyard, grapevines)
> zb3 (flute) = Arabic zamr, zummarah (flute)
> w3D (green) = Arabic waraq (foliage, greenery, leafage)
>
> Moreover, the /i/ in /i3m/ need not be "y" either. Yes, sometimes it was:
> Egypt. /imn/ (right) = Arabic "yamin". But it could also be a glottal stop
> (hamzah): /idn/ (ear) = Arabic " 'udhn"
I misunderstood you before, Troy, about the sign "3" (happy now?) Did
you mean to say that the vulture could either represent an "a" or
something else that sounded like a cross between a very short "a", "e"
or "i"? By way of example, I give the Arabic "walad" (boy). I can
transliterate like this, with two "a's", but the second "a" is
pronounced so very short that it could almost be any short vowel. In
fact, Gardiner says "(The vulture) and the (little mouth) (it being "r"
for those who aren't sure) may be termed "weak consonants", since they
are very susceptible of change or omission; both tend to be replaced in
writing by (the reed or "i")." Yet, as I mentioned in another post,
this "alif vulture" was, in no uncertain terms used to write out the
name of Kleopatra where the "a's" were wanted. Hmmm...well, maybe you
can tell me what constituted a definite long "a" or "ah" in Dynastic
times.
Troy, having to do with the vowel "i", you gave me the Arabic "hamzah"
sound as an example. But that is the "i" sound before a consonant, in
this case "d". It is really not possible for us to know whether the
reed or "i" before a consonant (not the alif vulture, though) was
pronounced very short as in Arabic or longer. Yet before a vowel "i"
must really become "y".
Saida
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> >
> > Saida wrote:
> > >
> > > Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> > >
> > > > Not at all! `ayn is a general phoneme found in most Afro-asiatic languages,
> > > > Semitic and Egyptian included, but also Berber languages.
> > >
> > > I don't know about Afro-asiatic at all, but I do know about Semitic.
> > > They certain do have the "ayin" but, then again, they also have the
> > > hard, burring "r". Of course, we have not clear idea what ancient
> > > Hebrew speakers once employed for their "r" and in modern Hebrew it has
> > > become pretty weak, probably due to the Germans who revived it, with
> > > their deep-throated "r" sound.
> >
> > The keyword here being, IMHO, "revived". Modern Hebrew is not of great
> > utility for determining the phonology of Semitic languages -- too much has
> > been losted (though I suppose Modern Hebrew spoken by Yemeni Jews might be
> > more useful than that of Germans ;-) ).
>
> I didn't mean to imply by any means that the accent lent to modern
> Hebrew by German-Jews has any bearing on how the ancient language was
> pronounced. I wonder about the usefullness of taking any clues from
> Yemenite Jews, either. Their dwelling in an Arabian land for so long
> gave them an Arabic accent, although my personal guess would be, too,
> that the Yemenite accent is closer to the original.
The Yemeni Jews also happen to at least *claim* that they used Hebrew as a
living language, unlike the Germans. However, my point is that as Arabic
speakers, they are IMHO more likely to be closer to the original than any
German Jew. But this is a side issue, eh? ;-)
As I said, I was perhaps misunderstanding you -- and it seems so! Sorry. Yes,
actually, I agree with you in that I doubt that `ayn as pronounced in Egyptian
was identical to that of Arabic (heck, it varies in Arabic itself), but I
also firmly believe that the Egyptians did have a voiced pharyngeal fricative
("`ayn") in their phonological inventory. Now regarding the "r" -- we are
agreeing here. In Late Egyptian it had apparently been lost in pronunciation,
so the Greeks, et al., would not have heard it or recorded it (just as the
femin. /t/ (as in /m3`.t/ "ma`et") was not being pronounced and therefore not
recorded by non-Egyptians).
> > > BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
> > > gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
> > > spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
> > > That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
> > > it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
> >
> > Nope, it is not. All three letters (/i3m/) are consonants NOT vowels,
> > including the so-called "alif"-vulture /3/! The early Egyptologists (Budge
> > among them) treated /3/ as the vowel "a" but this is now known to be wrong.
> > Your "yam" may very well have been pronouced */ya:Rm/ in Middle Egyptian
>
> What! The vulture is no longer an "a"? I daresay the people in
> Ptolemaic times thought it was, as it is clearly visible (twice) in the
> name of "Kleopatra". That ought to be a telling clue as to what the
> glyph was used for or the Greeks would have adopted another closer one
> for spelling out the name of the queen. What evidence, preceeding this,
> makes linguists think the vulture was not an "a"???
That is absolutely correct. It is no longer the vowel "a" and never was.
Egyptian does not *normally* write vowels, just like ARabic, Hebrew, Syriac,
Aramaic, etc. The vulture /3/ is a consonant. The /i/ reed, and the /w/ chick
are also consonants. The *only* time that the /3/, /i/, or /w/ are written to
indicate vowels is in **non-Egyptian** words such as Kleopatra. Arabic is the
same -- alif, ya', and waw are all consonants, but are used as vowels in
foreign words. The Egyptians had a special system of writing foreign words
(primarily Semitic) called "group writing" or "syllabic orthography" --
"Kleopatra" is written is a very late, and much simplified, variety of this.
What makes linguists think this?? Well, here are some examples from my
previous posting (n.b., the Arabic words are *cognates* NOT loanwords):
> > b3q (bright, white) = Arabic baraq (shining, lusterous, sparkling)
> > bk3 (morning) = Arabic bakir (early); bukrah (early morning)
> > k3m (vineyard) = Arabic karm (vineyard, grapevines)
> > zb3 (flute) = Arabic zamr, zummarah (flute)
> > w3D (green) = Arabic waraq (foliage, greenery, leafage)
and to clench it:
`k3m = Semitic `Akram (a Semitic name written in Egytian)
y3mt = Semitic Yarmuta (a Semitic toponym written in Egyptian)
Since these are *Semitic* words (not cognates) written in Middle Egyptian with
the /3/ for the Semitic /r/, the Egyptians must have been hearing the "r" and
wrote it with the grapheme ("letter") most close to that sound in Egyptian --
in this case the /3/ vulture.
As you can see above, the Middle Egyptian /3/ (the vulture) is equated with
the Arabic /r/ (other Afro-asiatic languages could be subistuted, not just
Arabic -- it was the most convient for me). However, this pronunciation falls
out by Late Egyptian (and the trend apparently is well underway in Middle
Egyptian). By that point the /3/ has lost its phonetic value of /R/ and has
shifted into being a glottal stop (Arabic hamzah) -- and for this reason is
used as an "a" in foreign words in the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic Period.
Troy Sagrillo
Saida wrote:
>
> Troy Sagrillo wrote:
> >
> > Saida wrote:
> >>
> > > BTW, I still can't find anything better for "palm tree" than the "yam" I
> > > gave before. Why would I pronounce it like that? Despite its varied
> > > spellings, the clue is provided by the spelling *reed, vulture, owl*.
> > > That is very clear, no question. Where there is an "i" before a vowel,
> > > it must be pronounced "y". That is only logical.
> >
> > Nope, it is not. All three letters (/i3m/) are consonants NOT vowels,
> > including the so-called "alif"-vulture /3/!
>
> He says in his *Grammar* "The hieroglyphs "i" and "w" are consonant
> signs, but the consonants represented by them being closely related to
> the vowels "i" and "u" respectively, they exhibit peculiarities in their
> employment which entitle them to be called "semi-vowels"."
They are also called "weak consonansts"... ;-)
> The early Egyptologists (Budge
> > among them) treated /3/ as the vowel "a" but this is now known to be wrong.
> > Your "yam" may very well have been pronouced */ya:Rm/ in Middle Egyptian
> > (assuming of course that /im3/, the form given in dictionaries, is *not*
> > the correct rendering). Other examples with Arabic cognates (other cognates
> > in other languages very possible):
> >
> > b3q (bright, white) = Arabic baraq (shining, lusterous, sparkling)
> > bk3 (morning) = Arabic bakir (early); bukrah (early morning)
> > k3m (vineyard) = Arabic karm (vineyard, grapevines)
> > zb3 (flute) = Arabic zamr, zummarah (flute)
> > w3D (green) = Arabic waraq (foliage, greenery, leafage)
> >
> I misunderstood you before, Troy, about the sign "3" (happy now?) Did
> you mean to say that the vulture could either represent an "a" or
> something else that sounded like a cross between a very short "a", "e"
> or "i"?
No, I meant that in Middle & Old Egyptian the /3/ vulture is the phonetic
/R/ and not a vowel of any sort whatsoever (but this was discussed in the
other post).
> By way of example, I give the Arabic "walad" (boy). I can
> transliterate like this, with two "a's", but the second "a" is
> pronounced so very short that it could almost be any short vowel.
True, but in *written* Arabic, when someone took the the trouble of
vowelling the text, the second "a" is a fatah (short /a/), never anything
else.
> In
> fact, Gardiner says "(The vulture) and the (little mouth) (it being "r"
> for those who aren't sure) may be termed "weak consonants", since they
> are very susceptible of change or omission; both tend to be replaced in
> writing by (the reed or "i")."
Gardiner is right. And that change or ommission tends to become much more
prominate in later texts when the /r/ was falling out of pronunciation.
However, Gardiner, at least as far as I can see, seems to have been unaware
that the /3/ (vulture) was being used as an /R/ in Old and Middle Egyptian.
(the texts with Semitic loanwords in Egyptian which confirm this had yet to
be discovered).
> Yet, as I mentioned in another post,
> this "alif vulture" was, in no uncertain terms used to write out the
> name of Kleopatra where the "a's" were wanted. Hmmm...well, maybe you
> can tell me what constituted a definite long "a" or "ah" in Dynastic
> times.
I dealt with Kleopatra in the post you mention and the issue of Group
Writing (the special writing system for non-Egyptian words), so I will drop
it here. However, your question about "what constituted a definite long 'a'
or 'ah' in Dynastic times" *is* valid here. The answer is nothing -- vowels
(long or short) were *not* indicated in *standard* Egyptian orthography. For
non-Egyptian words, the *non-standard* Group Writing system I mentioned
seems to have indicated vowels to a certain degree. In Old and Middle
Egyptian Group Writing the vulture /3/ is used to render "r" and on occasion
"l" (as might be expected) -- the vowel "a" is not rendered at all. In Late
Egyptian Group Writing the /3/ *is* used to indicate "a" (as the /R/ had
been lost in pronunciation) -- this trend continues into Ptolemaic and Roman
practice. However, I must emphasise, with only a very few exceptions, this
practice is *only* for non-Egyptian terms and standard Egyptian does not
indicate vowels of any sort.
> > Moreover, the /i/ in /i3m/ need not be "y" either. Yes, sometimes it was:
> > Egypt. /imn/ (right) = Arabic "yamin". But it could also be a glottal stop
> > (hamzah): /idn/ (ear) = Arabic " 'udhn"
>
> Troy, having to do with the vowel "i", you gave me the Arabic "hamzah"
> sound as an example. But that is the "i" sound before a consonant, in
> this case "d".
No, hamzah is NOT a vowel either, not the "i" or any other -- it is a
glottal stop (the sound of the "h" in the English word "hour"). Arabic, like
every other Semitic language, *never* starts a word with a vowel. (However
to be fair, I really should have noted that the /'/ = the glottal stop.) And
just to be clear, I am *not* saying that the transliteration of Egyptian
/idn/ begins with a vowel "i", but with the glottal stop followed by an
unrepresented vowel of some sort ("a", "i", or "u").
> It is really not possible for us to know whether the
> reed or "i" before a consonant (not the alif vulture, though) was
> pronounced very short as in Arabic or longer. Yet before a vowel "i"
> must really become "y".
The problem is that you are treating the reed leaf (commonly transliterated
as /i/ with a hook instead of a dot on top) as the vowel "i" (or the
consonant "y"). Again, it is not a vowel; vowels were not written. What is
clear is that it very frequently is used to indicated a glottal stop (the
hamzah (aka, alif hamzatun) of Arabic, the aleph of Hebrew). Here are some
Semitic loans written in Egyptian -- the Egyptians were hearing the Semitic
glottal stop as their reed leaf:
Egyptian /ibi/ = Semitic loanword "father": Arabic 'ab, Ugaritic 'ab, Sabaic
'b (vowels unknown), Amorite 'abum, Ethiopic 'ab
/ibti/ = "to perish; destroy; go away": Ugaritic 'abd, Akkadian abatu,
Phoenician 'bd, Arabic 'abada (to run away)
/ixti/ = "sister": Ugaritic 'ukht, Arabic 'ukht, Akkadian ahatu (with a
rocker under the "h" for "kh"), Sabaic 'ht (read as 'kht)
As you can see the Egyptian /i/ is equated with a Semitic glottal stop (and
yes, it is even followed by a vowel (in those languages where we know the
vowelling, though it is not normally written)).
However, to get back to the original point, the /i/ could be used for both
the glottal stop or as /y/ -- we just might not know which the Egyptians had
intended in some words, and it may have varied as time marched on.
Saida
Well, I think Budge was still right with his "a", ya sahibi. The
vulture is still the "ah" sound, be it consonant or vowel, and I'll tell
you why. Your compelling examples do show a clear pattern. Every time
"3" appears in Egyptian, it ends up as "ar" in Arabic. That must mean
either that "3" represents "ar" or that it signifies a sound somewhere
between "aw" or "ah" that wound up being pronounced as "ar" by
"r"-loving Arabic speakers. Even if the vulture is really supposed to
be "ar", from what we already suspect about ancient Egyptian, they loved
their "r's" about as much as a public-school educated Brit, so it,
essentially, became "ah" and was very useful in writing the name of that
legendary gal, Kleopatra. BTW, "ah" can be turned into "r" just on
account of a sort of national habit. Ever hear an Englishman say the
name "Julia", for instance? Often, one may hear an "r" on the end of
it, where it most certainly doesn't actually belong. Well?
Saida
Saida: Hmmm...well, maybe you
> > can tell me what constituted a definite long "a" or "ah" in Dynastic
> > times.
Troy:
Whether one calls something a consonant or not doesn't really matter if
it has the sound of a vowel. In Hebrew, for example, words do begin
with an "i" sound, but it is represented by the "yod", which I suppose
you will call a consonant, such as in the word "Israel". However,
wherever there is an "aleph" following this "yod" or some of the dots or
dashes indicating vowels, the word will ALWAYS begin with the sound of a
"y".
Saida:
>
> > It is really not possible for us to know whether the
> > reed or "i" before a consonant (not the alif vulture, though) was
> > pronounced very short as in Arabic or longer. Yet before a vowel "i"
> > must really become "y".
Troy:
>
> The problem is that you are treating the reed leaf (commonly transliterated
> as /i/ with a hook instead of a dot on top) as the vowel "i" (or the
> consonant "y"). Again, it is not a vowel; vowels were not written. What is
> clear is that it very frequently is used to indicated a glottal stop (the
> hamzah (aka, alif hamzatun) of Arabic, the aleph of Hebrew). Here are some
> Semitic loans written in Egyptian -- the Egyptians were hearing the Semitic
> glottal stop as their reed leaf:
>
> Egyptian /ibi/ = Semitic loanword "father": Arabic 'ab, Ugaritic 'ab, Sabaic
> 'b (vowels unknown), Amorite 'abum, Ethiopic 'ab
>
> /ibti/ = "to perish; destroy; go away": Ugaritic 'abd, Akkadian abatu,
> Phoenician 'bd, Arabic 'abada (to run away)
>
> /ixti/ = "sister": Ugaritic 'ukht, Arabic 'ukht, Akkadian ahatu (with a
> rocker under the "h" for "kh"), Sabaic 'ht (read as 'kht)
>
> As you can see the Egyptian /i/ is equated with a Semitic glottal stop (and
> yes, it is even followed by a vowel (in those languages where we know the
> vowelling, though it is not normally written)).
>
> However, to get back to the original point, the /i/ could be used for both
> the glottal stop or as /y/ -- we just might not know which the Egyptians had
> intended in some words, and it may have varied as time marched on.
Written or not written, a language requires vowels. We have to use our
best judgment about the reed or reeds at the beginning of a word.
Sometimes, I have seen it before a name or a title, for instance, and I
would imagine it would correspond to the appellation "ya" used in
Arabic, but again, I am not eager to hitch the Egyptian wagon to the
Arabic star, and perhaps we start to imagine glottal stops where there
were only European-style vowels such as in modern Hebrew, which has even
gotten rid of the "ayin". As I have said previously in this thread,
just when you expect Egyptian to do the Semitic waltz all the way across
the floor, it breaks into a funny little dance of its own, having
nothing to do with anything Semitic.
All the same, as an independent student of Egyptian, I rarely have the
opportunity to discover the opinions of others much less the accepted
changes in the conventional wisdom, so I am glad that you are taking the
trouble to make these explanations.
Piotr Michalowski
In article <323868...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> writes:
or Troy? I am not sure.
>>
>> `k3m = Semitic `Akram (a Semitic name written in Egytian)
>> y3mt = Semitic Yarmuta (a Semitic toponym written in Egyptian)
>>
Just out of curiosity, what are the Egyptian references to y3mt and is the
interpretation as Yarmuta certain? Out of laziness, I have not checked it,
but would be grateful for references. Is this supposed to be the same as
the Ur III place name (Syrian) Yarmuti, which is one of the few Ur III Syrian
toponyms?
Stella Nemeth
Troy Sagrillo <t.sag...@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>The Yemeni Jews also happen to at least *claim* that they used Hebrew as a
>living language, unlike the Germans. However, my point is that as Arabic
>speakers, they are IMHO more likely to be closer to the original than any
>German Jew. But this is a side issue, eh? ;-)
This is the first time I've seen that particular Canadianism in print
in normal usage. I just had to check your headers to see if you were
from Canada. Sure enough. Toronto! I lived in Rochester NY (right
across the lake) for 10 years. It made me homesick. <g>
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Steve Whittet
In article <32348F...@clr.com>, Olice_...@clr.com says...
>
>Loren Petrich wrote:
>
>[Big snip]
>>
>> but there is enough known to exclude Ancient Egyptian as the
>> ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
>>
>
>I've been following this thread for quite a while, and I think
>that Steve and Sadia are only trying to point out the possibility
>of some English words *borrowed* from Egyptian. I don't think
>either of them has tried to claim Ancient Egyptian as the
>ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Just my 2 cents...
The discussion actually goes back a couple of years.
It began with the premise that the Greeks borrowed a lot of
the ideas we associate with "Classical Greece" from the
Egyptians.
There are elements of architecture such as the
"fluted Doric columns" which Hatshepset's architect
used in her mortuary temple which anticipate the
Greek orders of architecture by almost a millenium
The Platonic Dialoges closely follow the Egyptian ideas
of what was right and proper as illustrated by their
celebration of the Goddess Ma'at.
The Greeks used Egyptian unit fractions to make their calculations.
The Greek science often makes use of measurements which were
originally made by the Egyptians using Egyptian standards of measure.
It has been shown that the calculations of the earth's
circumference made according to Erathosthenes on the basis
of astronomical observations and measurements he claims to
have made himself actually agree with the measurements having
been made during the reign of the Hyksos for example.
The cultural, scientific, religious, architectural, engineering,
military, trade and natural philosophical jargon of the Egyptians
ought to have been borrowed along with the Egyptians social
stratification and concepts of order.
When we look at the linguistic comparisons it thus makes some
sense to look at the borrowed jargon as well as the words for
body parts and the counting numbers from one to ten.
As others have shown, there are enough matches to suggest there
was some influence, which is the point we wish to prove.
>
>
>Olice Certain
steve
Loren Petrich
In article <51edoa$6...@shore.shore.net>,
>>I've been following this thread for quite a while, and I think
>>that Steve and Sadia are only trying to point out the possibility
>>of some English words *borrowed* from Egyptian. I don't think
>>either of them has tried to claim Ancient Egyptian as the
>>ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Just my 2 cents...
That's pure excuse-making. Although English does have some words
of ancient Egyptian origin, Ms. Saida seemed to be overenthusiastic about
finding such words, though she did have the honesty to display several
non-matching Egyptian tree words and pronouns, and Mr. Whittet seems
capable of deriving just about *any* word from ancient Egyptian, while
using the most laughable semantic connections imaginable.
>It began with the premise that the Greeks borrowed a lot of
>the ideas we associate with "Classical Greece" from the
>Egyptians.
Including, presumably, their language :-)
>There are elements of architecture such as the
>"fluted Doric columns" which Hatshepset's architect
>used in her mortuary temple which anticipate the
>Greek orders of architecture by almost a millenium
So what if that's an imitation?
>The Platonic Dialoges closely follow the Egyptian ideas
>of what was right and proper as illustrated by their
>celebration of the Goddess Ma'at.
Absolute baloney. How does it follow Egyptian ideas as opposed to
ideas from elsewhere??? And how does it closely parallel some Egyptian
text? For one thing, nowhere do Plato's dialogues contain, as far as I am
aware, instructions to assert that one did not commit any of a long list
of offenses ("I did not pilfer Temple grain", "I did not talk too much",
etc.) when one was being judged. More seriously, there is no discussion
of rule by an allegedly divine monarch who is careful to keep the family
lineage pure by inbreeding.
>The Greeks used Egyptian unit fractions to make their calculations.
So? What would be interesting would be if they used the same
decompositions whenever there would be more than one possible decomposition.
>The Greek science often makes use of measurements which were
>originally made by the Egyptians using Egyptian standards of measure.
If one uses measurements derived from body-part sizes, one will
get approximately the same sizes, so that's a non sequitur.
>It has been shown that the calculations of the earth's
>circumference made according to Erathosthenes on the basis
>of astronomical observations and measurements he claims to
>have made himself actually agree with the measurements having
>been made during the reign of the Hyksos for example.
WHAT measurements?
>The cultural, scientific, religious, architectural, engineering,
>military, trade and natural philosophical jargon of the Egyptians
>ought to have been borrowed along with the Egyptians social
>stratification and concepts of order.
But it was NOT. Many of them rather transparent coinages from
existing words, words often with impeccable Indo-European pedigrees. JUst
to give ONE example, "pentagon" means "five-angle" in Greek, and the first
part is cognate with English "five", not to mention the corresponding word
in just about every other Indo-European language, and the second part with
English "knee", Latin "genu", etc. (>"location of bending"). Anyone with a
good dictionary, like the copy of the American Heritage Dictionary on my
hard disk, can *easily* find other examples, and I've done so myself,
though I prefer not to clutter this posting with them.
It may be possible that many of these words were
imitation-translations, such as an English-language purist calling a
pentagon a five-knee. But are they? One problem here is that such
translations are hard to distinguish from independent inventions.
>When we look at the linguistic comparisons it thus makes some
>sense to look at the borrowed jargon as well as the words for
>body parts and the counting numbers from one to ten.
WHAT "borrowed jargon"? Present some examples other than "ibis"
and "ivory" and so forth. And DON'T use ridiculous etymologies. Try to
look at some *real* ones before constructing your own. And I mean those
of present-day languages with a long paper trail, such as present-day
English.
>As others have shown, there are enough matches to suggest there
>was some influence, which is the point we wish to prove.
Influence or common ancestry? As in a common ancestor of Egyptian
and Indo-European being Nostratic. Something like *ne- for "we" or *wete-
for "water" is a possible example of that.
ay...@tip.nl
Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>>
>
>> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
>> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
>>
>> **** No, the r is still there....
>Hi, Aayko, welcome to the discussion--but hold on there! My theory is
>that the ancient Egyptian "r" was a very weak consonant--so weak that
>foreigners often did not even hear it, as we have seen in Akkadian
>transliterations of Egyptian names. Perhaps, when the Egyptians
>borrowed a word that contained an "r", they didn't even bother to
>include it.
***Yes, sorry. I only upload once a week, so I responded to your very
first posting, blissfully unaware what followed later...[like someone
else also making the 'ivory link'].
Your 'r' theorie is an interesting point! Can you give some more
examples?
It cannot have been 'weak' in every position?
As i understand you correctly, it worked both ways:
1) Egyptians didn't pronounce it in their own words and
names, so foreigners wrote down these spoken forms.
* Was 'nefer' also not rendered as 'nib' in Akkadian?
I vaguely remember from the Amarna tablets.
2) if the egyptians found an r in foreign words, in a position
it would have been weak in their eyes, they didn't bother to write it
down
* To add a certain toponym to your list:
The Semitic name for Crete was Kaptara/Kaftor,
while the Egyptians called it 'land of the Keftiu'. And the Semitic
form is really old [Akkadian], so I'm sure it didn't come from
Egyptian. Likely both came from a native Aegean form, and the
Egyptians dropped the 'r' . Which matches point 2 [=your last line]!
It seems possible to me that the name Kaftor much later, when Crete
was in decay, was 'transfered' to that island closer to the Middle
East - Cyprus - an easy mistake to make.
That island had always been called Alashia/Elisa. But the Greek called
it Kupros - can that be derived from 'Kaptara"? [with loss of 't'?].
This is personal speculation, mind you.
But i'm rather sure that 'copper' means 'the metal from Cyprus', and
not the reverse: Cyprus='island of copper'
[Like Loren said, cypres is from kyparissos, a Greek name borrowed
from a language before Greek [Luwian??]. so Cypress couldn't mean
'tree of Cyprus' . Still leaving the possibility that
Egyptian kebes is a loan from the same unknown tongue, with the drop
of r according to Saida's rule 2.]
Anyone has an opinion on these island names?
Somebody asked about the word abracadabra; some months ago i wrote a
long piece in a magazine about that; shall i post it? It has to do
with Gnostisism, not with Egyptian.
regards,
Aayko
ay...@tip.nl
pio...@umich.edu (Piotr Michalowski) wrote:
To barge in:
I know there is a mount Jarmuth named in Seti I's Beth Shean Lesser
Stele - in that text it is to be equated with a place in Israel [Josh
21:29). I have the hieroglypic writing of that name too, shall I trie
to transliterate it? :)
<i.i.rw.m3'.t.w> = Yaruma'atu?
So in this text it does have the 'r' !
Likely there were more places thus called - in semitic it just means
something like "hight".
Aayko
Saida
ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>
> Saida <sa...@PioneerPlanet.infi.net> wrote:
>
> >ay...@tip.nl wrote:
> >>
> >
> >> >cypress--kebes (make the "c" a hard one and substitute "p" for "b" and
> >> >you can get kebes out of cypress)
> >>
> >> **** No, the r is still there....
>
> >Hi, Aayko, welcome to the discussion--but hold on there! My theory is
> >that the ancient Egyptian "r" was a very weak consonant--so weak that
> >foreigners often did not even hear it, as we have seen in Akkadian
> >transliterations of Egyptian names. Perhaps, when the Egyptians
> >borrowed a word that contained an "r", they didn't even bother to
> >include it.
>
> ***Yes, sorry. I only upload once a week, so I responded to your very
> first posting, blissfully unaware what followed later...[like someone
> else also making the 'ivory link'].
> Your 'r' theorie is an interesting point! Can you give some more
> examples?
> It cannot have been 'weak' in every position?
I'd wondered where you'd gone, Aayko. If you are missing some of the
65-odd posts in this thread, perhaps you can find them on Dejanews. We
did discuss the "r", which I feel was always weak,entirely disappearing
at the end of a word as in British pronunciation.
> As i understand you correctly, it worked both ways:
> 1) Egyptians didn't pronounce it in their own words and
> names, so foreigners wrote down these spoken forms.
> * Was 'nefer' also not rendered as 'nib' in Akkadian?
> I vaguely remember from the Amarna tablets.
"Nib" was not "nefer" but "neb", Egyptian for lord, such as in
Nebma'atre, the throne name of Amenhotep III, to whom I think you are
referring.
> 2) if the egyptians found an r in foreign words, in a position
> it would have been weak in their eyes, they didn't bother to write it
> down
> * To add a certain toponym to your list:
> The Semitic name for Crete was Kaptara/Kaftor,
> while the Egyptians called it 'land of the Keftiu'. And the Semitic
> form is really old [Akkadian], so I'm sure it didn't come from
> Egyptian. Likely both came from a native Aegean form, and the
> Egyptians dropped the 'r' . Which matches point 2 [=your last line]!
>
> It seems possible to me that the name Kaftor much later, when Crete
> was in decay, was 'transfered' to that island closer to the Middle
> East - Cyprus - an easy mistake to make.
> That island had always been called Alashia/Elisa. But the Greek called
>
> it Kupros - can that be derived from 'Kaptara"? [with loss of 't'?].
>
> This is personal speculation, mind you.
> But i'm rather sure that 'copper' means 'the metal from Cyprus', and
> not the reverse: Cyprus='island of copper'
> [Like Loren said, cypres is from kyparissos, a Greek name borrowed
> from a language before Greek [Luwian??]. so Cypress couldn't mean
> 'tree of Cyprus' . Still leaving the possibility that
> Egyptian kebes is a loan from the same unknown tongue, with the drop
> of r according to Saida's rule 2.]
> Anyone has an opinion on these island names?
We discussed them, too. Take a peek in Dejanews, if you can.
>
> Somebody asked about the word abracadabra; some months ago i wrote a
> long piece in a magazine about that; shall i post it? It has to do
> with Gnostisism, not with Egyptian.
>
> regards,
> Aayko
Yes, Aayko, do please post it by all means!
Saida
Aayko wrote: (snip)
> So the word 'pendants' would seem more appropriate than 'loans'?
> Such clear terminology seems important - before you know it someone
> 'proves' with your examples that Egypt was an Akkadian colony :)
Before I know it someone will attribute your words to me :)
>
> Troy wrote:
> "Here are some Semitic loans written in Egyptian -- the Egyptians
> were hearing the Semitic glottal stop as their reed leaf:
> Egyptian /ibi/ = Semitic loanword "father": Arabic 'ab, Ugaritic 'ab,
> Sabaic 'b (vowels unknown), Amorite 'abum, Ethiopic 'ab
> /ibti/ = "to perish; destroy; go away": Ugaritic 'abd, Akkadian abatu,
>
> Phoenician 'bd, Arabic 'abada (to run away)
> /ixti/ = "sister": Ugaritic 'ukht, Arabic 'ukht, Akkadian ahatu (with
> a rocker under the "h" for "kh"), Sabaic 'ht (read as 'kht)
> As you can see the Egyptian /i/ is equated with a Semitic glottal stop
> (and yes, it is even followed by a vowel (in those languages where we
> know the vowelling, though it is not normally written))."
From what I have seen judging by how the later Egytpians wrote Ptolemaic
and Roman names in cartouches, ONE reed seems to be a glottal stop and
TWO a longer "i" (ee) sound. I am still sticking to the reed before a
semi-vowel (the vulture or the chick with the "e" otherwise taken for
granted) as a "y".
>
> Couldn't the /i/ not just be a 'Hamitic' trait, still sounding
> as 'y'? As it is so pervasive. Something like Grimm's Law?
> The Egyptians seem sloppy with their first consonants anyhow <g>. Or
> wouldn't you say that Egyptian /ib/ and Semitic /leb/ , both meaning
> "hearth", have a common origin?
At the end of a word, one would think it would be like a "y". I take it
you mean heart and don't forget the Arabic "qualb" as well. I don't
quite get what you mean by "sloppy". Can you give an example?
(snip)
Aayko
Saida
ay...@tip.nl
I'm a bit surprised by the use of the words "Semitic loans"
by Troy... i think the term 'loanword' is defined as
'being inserted from abroad at a later date', or something like that.
But the examples you name are so *basic*... not likely to be loaned
from foreigners. Like a word like 'father'...
Wouldn't most of them not rather be common AfroAsiatic
[Hamito-Semitic] heritage?!!
So the word 'pendants' would seem more appropriate than 'loans'?
Such clear terminology seems important - before you know it someone
'proves' with your examples that Egypt was an Akkadian colony :)
Troy wrote:
"Here are some Semitic loans written in Egyptian -- the Egyptians
were hearing the Semitic glottal stop as their reed leaf:
Egyptian /ibi/ = Semitic loanword "father": Arabic 'ab, Ugaritic 'ab,
Sabaic 'b (vowels unknown), Amorite 'abum, Ethiopic 'ab
/ibti/ = "to perish; destroy; go away": Ugaritic 'abd, Akkadian abatu,
Phoenician 'bd, Arabic 'abada (to run away)
/ixti/ = "sister": Ugaritic 'ukht, Arabic 'ukht, Akkadian ahatu (with
a rocker under the "h" for "kh"), Sabaic 'ht (read as 'kht)
As you can see the Egyptian /i/ is equated with a Semitic glottal stop
(and yes, it is even followed by a vowel (in those languages where we
know the vowelling, though it is not normally written))."
Couldn't the /i/ not just be a 'Hamitic' trait, still sounding
as 'y'? As it is so pervasive. Something like Grimm's Law?
The Egyptians seem sloppy with their first consonants anyhow <g>. Or
wouldn't you say that Egyptian /ib/ and Semitic /leb/ , both meaning
"hearth", have a common origin?
----
Sorry for the side-thread within the current one:
Steve wrote:
>> The modern kurds or mountain people of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran
>> are the descendents of the Hatti, Hurrians, Mitanni,the Egyptians fought.
Troy replied:
>Really now?! And just how did you happen to figure this one out? ;-)
>(Oooooh, what did I just ask...? ;) )
***I was surprised of the statement too. As it is 100% certain that
the Kurdic language belongs to the Iranian branch of the IndoEuropean
family. Every book will tell you so.
Of course the Kurds thus came from Iran at some moment in history,
perhaps 800 BC? [when Medes and Persians pop up in Assyrian texts].
At least they were already around ca. 400 BC, when the Greeks
refered to them as 'Karduchi' and 'Gordyaioi' - always locating them
just to the south of Lake Van.
Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
Aayko
Steve Whittet
>>The cultural, scientific, religious, architectural, engineering,
>>military, trade and natural philosophical jargon of the Egyptians
>>ought to have been borrowed along with the Egyptians social
>>stratification and concepts of order.
>
> But it was NOT. Many of them rather transparent coinages from
>existing words, words often with impeccable Indo-European pedigrees.
It wasn't just Egypt, Stephen Berlant tells us that in Sumerian
we have the word Lugal evolving into the Roman Legal and perhaps
the Greek Logos is on the same tree. I find the expansion from
the sense of a ruler as a great man, a land owner or landlord,
who made rules and laws, to the sense of a legal system with
written laws and contracts interesting.
I have seen a list of Sumerian IE cognates published in sci.lang.
Sumerian pictographs seem to have exact correspondence to similar
pictographs on the Phaistoes Disk from Crete and in Egypytian
Hieroglyphics.
> JUst to give ONE example, "pentagon" means "five-angle" in Greek,
So where do the Greeks get this from. Does the Greek language
itself have roots? What might they have been?
The Numbers in Greek The Numbers in Hebrew Egyptian
with Masculine with Feminine with with
1 Ena e a echad e a achat wa a
2 dhIo dhi shanyim h yi shtayim h yi snw
3 trIa shlosha shalosh hmt
4 tEsera era arba'a ar a'a arba a ra fdw
5 pEnde hamisha hamesh diw
6 Eksi ksi shisha hisha shesh hesh srew or sisw
7 eptA [s]epta shiv'a shiv'a sheva sheva sfh s h
8 oktO o to shmona mona shmone mone hmn hmn
9 enEa e ea tish'a, ish'a tesha esha psd s
10dhEka eka assara ara esser e er md
> and the first part is cognate with English "five", not to mention
> the corresponding word in just about every other Indo-European
> language, and the second part with English "knee", Latin "genu", etc.
(>"location of bending"). Anyone with a
>good dictionary, like the copy of the American Heritage Dictionary on my
>hard disk, can *easily* find other examples, and I've done so myself,
>though I prefer not to clutter this posting with them.
Thank you, we have done this more than once before
>
> It may be possible that many of these words were
>imitation-translations, such as an English-language purist calling a
>pentagon a five-knee. But are they? One problem here is that such
>translations are hard to distinguish from independent inventions.
There seem to be as many similarities as differences, six and seven
are good matches, five requires us to think analagously. A hand has
five fingers. An o[pened] Hand might well have had the meaning five,
so might fist. Fist and five appear to have more in common than fist
and hand. Pend has more in common with the word opened. An opened
hand would allow us to count the fingers. Is the etymology of the
Greek word five perhaps similar to the etymology of the word opened?
Do 'hamesh' and 'diw' also have a relation to a cognate of 'opened'
or is there yet another link in the chain?
>
>>When we look at the linguistic comparisons it thus makes some
>>sense to look at the borrowed jargon as well as the words for
>>body parts and the counting numbers from one to ten.
>
>WHAT "borrowed jargon"? Present some examples other than "ibis"
>and "ivory" and so forth. And DON'T use ridiculous etymologies.
Borrowed jargon might include words like "embalm", "incense",
"ebony", scribe or script...you need to look at industries
which were common to Egypt or the Near East, but less common
to the Greeks,
"caw" = container for papyri "caw r "
as the etymology of the word "coffer"
but there are also common words as well
an Egyptian phrase "m km n at" meaning
"in the twinkling of an eye"
as the etymology of the word "moment"
"3fry" = boil
as the etymology for "fry"
"3hw" = misery, trouble, illnes, injury, pain, sufferer
as the etymology of "ow" and "ouch"
"3sr" = roast
as the etymology of "sear"
"aqhu = battle axe, hew with an axe
"3tyt" = nurse
as the etymology of "teat" or "tit"
"3k3yt" = precise, accurate
as the etymology of accurate
>Try to look at some *real* ones before constructing your own.
"Middle Egyptian", Faulkner, p 1-6
> And I mean those of present-day languages with a long paper trail,
> such as present-day English.
"wnhr" = be skilled as the etymology of "winner"
"wr" swallow, great, greatness,
"wrhy" = anointer
as the etymology of "worthy"
"wht" = failure
as the etymology of "quit"
"whyrt" = dockyard as the etymology of "wharf"
"wsr" = strong, powerful, wealthy, influential
as the etymology of "visir"
"wts" = raise, lift up, (with the determinative of mast and boom)
as the etymology of "winch"(wts, wits, guitch,[hitch][cinch] winch)
>
>>As others have shown, there are enough matches to suggest there
>>was some influence, which is the point we wish to prove.
>
>Influence or common ancestry? As in a common ancestor of Egyptian
>and Indo-European being Nostratic.
Piotr doesn't seem to like that idea:), I have no problem with it.
Something like *ne- for "we" or *wete-
>for "water" is a possible example of that.
wa'b = pure (pouring water as the determanitive)
wa'bi = priest (pouring water as the determanitive)
"w3h" = flood, as the etymology of wave
"wdnw" = flood as the etymology of "sodden"
"waw" = wave of sea as the etymology of "water"
I think the Egyptian "watur" = ocean
as an etymology for "water" and
all using the root "wa" for water
and
"[n]uit" = goddess of moisture as the etymology of "wet"
>
>--
>Loren Petrich
steve
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
whi...@shore.net (Steve Whittet) wrote:
>It wasn't just Egypt, Stephen Berlant tells us that in Sumerian
>we have the word Lugal evolving into the Roman Legal and perhaps
>the Greek Logos is on the same tree.
Strange. Where the connection is unlikely in the extreme, not to say
preposterous, we have an unqualified "evolving into", and where the
connection is obvious and beyond doubt we see a "perhaps"...
>I have seen a list of Sumerian IE cognates published in sci.lang.
Yes, you may have.
>Sumerian pictographs seem to have exact correspondence to similar
>pictographs on the Phaistoes Disk from Crete and in Egypytian
>Hieroglyphics.
non sequitur: language is not writing.
>> JUst to give ONE example, "pentagon" means "five-angle" in Greek,
>So where do the Greeks get this from. Does the Greek language
>itself have roots? What might they have been?
Consult a Greek grammar and/or dictionary.
>The Numbers in Greek The Numbers in Hebrew Egyptian
> with Masculine with Feminine with with
>1 Ena e a echad e a achat wa a
Well no, you don't get Greek roots by dropping the consonants.
>"caw" = container for papyri "caw r "
>as the etymology of the word "coffer"
This must be some strange use of the word "etymology" that I wasn't
previously aware of.
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
m...@pi.net |_____________|||
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
>have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
>likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
>Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
Mitanni Indo-Aryan was already a dead language by the time of the
Hittites. Definitely no relation to the Kurds.
Loren Petrich
In article <52j6p9$n...@halley.pi.net>,
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <m...@pi.net> wrote:
>whi...@shore.net (Steve Whittet) wrote:
>>Sumerian pictographs seem to have exact correspondence to similar
>>pictographs on the Phaistoes Disk from Crete and in Egypytian
>>Hieroglyphics.
>non sequitur: language is not writing.
That's one of Mr. Whittet's favorite confusions :-) So if you see
him doing that again, I'd like to warn you that he's done it before many
times.
>>> JUst to give ONE example, "pentagon" means "five-angle" in Greek,
>>So where do the Greeks get this from. Does the Greek language
>>itself have roots? What might they have been?
>Consult a Greek grammar and/or dictionary.
Actually, my American Heritage Dictionary does rather nicely
here, although it is, of course, concerned with words that have gotten
into English (any comparable works for other languages?).
The penta part is from Greek pente "five", with numerous
Indo-European cognates (just about every other IE language), all from IE
*penkwe. The gon part is from go:nia "angle, corner", which is related to
Greek gonu, Latin genu, and English "knee", all from IE *genu ("knee" >
"angle").
However, I think that Mr. Whittet would find an Indo-European
derivation unsatisfying, since he is so desperate to prove that ancient
Egyptian was the ancestor of most of the languages of Europe.
>>The Numbers in Greek The Numbers in Hebrew Egyptian
>> with Masculine with Feminine with with
>>1 Ena e a echad e a achat wa a
>Well no, you don't get Greek roots by dropping the consonants.
And in Classical Greek, "one was heis.
[some other asinine WhittetLinguistics deleted...]
Steve Whittet
In article <52j6ra$n...@halley.pi.net>, m...@pi.netĚ says...
>
>ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>
>>Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
>>have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
>>likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
>>Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
>
>Mitanni Indo-Aryan was already a dead language by the time of the
>Hittites. Definitely no relation to the Kurds.
The modern Kurds are spread from India through Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Turkey and Russia. Compare the territory of the Kassites, a people
with Hurrian names and the territory of the Hurrians, in the 16th
century BC. If you look at the territory of the Hittites at the time
the Mitanni emerge it is far from having reached its widest extent.
Akhenaten marries a Mitanni princess some time before the Hittites
fight with Ramesses at the battle of Kadesh but the Hittites establish
Hatusas their capital as much earlier than Akhenaten. To speak of
the Mitanni language as dead by the time of the Hittites seems a
bit odd.
>
>
>==
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
steve
Stella Nemeth
m...@pi.net (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote:
>ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>>Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
>>have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
>>likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
>>Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
>Mitanni Indo-Aryan was already a dead language by the time of the
>Hittites. Definitely no relation to the Kurds.
I have a question. If Mitanni Indo-Aryan was a dead language by the
time of the Hittites, what did the Mitanni who fought the Hittites
speak at the time of their war?
As far as I can tell they were roughly contemporary cultures, with the
Hittites conquering the territory the Mitanni lived in roughly at the
beginning of the 19th Dynasty. There were still Mitanni princesses in
the Egyptian royal harems in the late 18th Dynasty. It generally
takes more than a generation for a language to die.
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Piotr Michalowski
>I have a question. If Mitanni Indo-Aryan was a dead language by the
>time of the Hittites, what did the Mitanni who fought the Hittites
>speak at the time of their war?
I think that there is a bit of terminological confusion here. There were no
people called Mitanni; that was the name of a state. It would appear from
their writings that they were primarily Hurrian speaking. In fact, the
longest Hurrian text that we have is a letter sent by Tushratta, the king of
Mitanni, to the pharoah and found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt. Some of the
rulers of Mitanni had Indo-European names. There was a long discussion on the
nature of these names and of IE loan words in Hurrian and the main agreement
these days seems to be that this was not a living language at the time, but
only remnants of previous contacts that certain Hurrian groups had with IE
dialects elsewhere. The analysis of these words seems to indicate that this
had nothing to do with the Anatolian branch of IE ("Hittite"). but with
eastern dialects. I believe that I noted this before, but I will again. The
classic statement of all of this is by I. Diakonoff, "Die Arier im Vorderen
Asien--Ende eines Mythos," Orientalia 41, 1972. In English one can read his
The Prehistory of the Armenian Peoples, Caravan Books, 1984. The knowledge of
Hurrian is now progressing rapidly as a result of the discovery at the Hittite
capital of a long Hurrian-Hittite bilingual literary text that provides much
new in terms of Hurrian morphology and lexicon. The discovery of about 2000
administrative texts--the first ones ever in the language--at an Anatolian
site is also going to give us new information, if the texts are ever
published!
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
S.NE...@IX.NETCOM.COM (Stella Nemeth) wrote:
>m...@pi.net (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote:
>>ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>>>Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
>>>have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
>>>likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
>>>Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
>>Mitanni Indo-Aryan was already a dead language by the time of the
>>Hittites. Definitely no relation to the Kurds.
>I have a question. If Mitanni Indo-Aryan was a dead language by the
>time of the Hittites, what did the Mitanni who fought the Hittites
>speak at the time of their war?
>As far as I can tell they were roughly contemporary cultures, with the
>Hittites conquering the territory the Mitanni lived in roughly at the
>beginning of the 19th Dynasty. There were still Mitanni princesses in
>the Egyptian royal harems in the late 18th Dynasty. It generally
>takes more than a generation for a language to die.
Hmm, I already feared I wasn't being very clear. The administrative
language of the Mitanni kingdom was Hurrian. The ruling class may
have used an Indo-Iranian language[*], judging by their names and
their gods' and some technical terms to do with chariots and horses.
I suspect the situation was parallel to that of the Visigothic Kingdom
of Spain. Despite the king being called Wamba, to quote the funniest
one, Gothic was very soon a dead language in Spain.
[*] there's a persistent myth, to which I succumbed above, that the
language was in fact specifically Indo-Aryan, this based on very
flimsy linguistic evidence and, mainly, lack of knowledge on
pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion.
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
whi...@shore.net (Steve Whittet) wrote:
>In article <52j6ra$n...@halley.pi.net>, m...@pi.net says...
>>
>>ay...@tip.nl wrote:
>>
>>>Of course, the Hatti and Hurri were not IndoEuropean, so the Kurds
>>>have nothing to do with these. But the Mitanni were Indoarian, so
>>>likely Steve means that the Kurds were a remnant of them.
>>>Could be, could be not, I wouldn't dare judge.
>>
>>Mitanni Indo-Aryan was already a dead language by the time of the
>>Hittites. Definitely no relation to the Kurds.
>The modern Kurds are spread from India through Iran, Iraq, Syria,
>Turkey and Russia. Compare the territory of the Kassites, a people
>with Hurrian names and the territory of the Hurrians, in the 16th
>century BC.
I see. That's why English and French are Celtic languages, I suppose.
>Akhenaten marries a Mitanni princess some time before the Hittites
>fight with Ramesses at the battle of Kadesh but the Hittites establish
>Hatusas their capital as much earlier than Akhenaten. To speak of
>the Mitanni language as dead by the time of the Hittites seems a
>bit odd.
The language of the Mitanni kingdom was Hurrian.
Alan M. Dunsmuir
>This must be some strange use of the word "etymology" that I wasn't
>previously aware of.
If you're new here, you have many treats in store. Steve is a veritable
Humpty-Dumpty with accepted terminology, as well as having lots of -
let's say 'provocative' - ideas about the spread of language, writing
and culture. (Mostly from the Sea-People (tm) to everybody else, but
Dilmun figures in it somewhere, too.)
--
Alan M. Dunsmuir
Stella Nemeth
pio...@umich.edu (Piotr Michalowski) wrote:
>In article <52jqhc$3...@sjx-ixn5.ix.netcom.com> S.NE...@IX.NETCOM.COM (Stella Nemeth) writes:
>>I have a question. If Mitanni Indo-Aryan was a dead language by the
>>time of the Hittites, what did the Mitanni who fought the Hittites
>>speak at the time of their war?
>I think that there is a bit of terminological confusion here.
Thanks for the explanation.
>.... The discovery of about 2000
>administrative texts--the first ones ever in the language--at an Anatolian
>site is also going to give us new information, if the texts are ever
>published!
<grumble> <grumble> <g>
Stella Nemeth
s.ne...@ix.netcom.com
Piotr Michalowski
>Hmm, I already feared I wasn't being very clear. The administrative
>language of the Mitanni kingdom was Hurrian. The ruling class may
>have used an Indo-Iranian language[*], judging by their names and
>their gods' and some technical terms to do with chariots and horses.
>I suspect the situation was parallel to that of the Visigothic Kingdom
>of Spain. Despite the king being called Wamba, to quote the funniest
>one, Gothic was very soon a dead language in Spain.
>[*] there's a persistent myth, to which I succumbed above, that the
>language was in fact specifically Indo-Aryan, this based on very
>flimsy linguistic evidence and, mainly, lack of knowledge on
>pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion.
Miguel, I would be a little careful here. It is true that we have two letters
in Hurrian from Mitanni to the Egyptian court, we really do not know what the
administrative language of the kingdom was. There is not a single
administrative text from this "kingdom" or, as some would have it, union of
tribal or political units. Even the name is uncertain, as the Hittite, Syrian
and Nuzi (east) sources use the terms Mitanni and Hurri, while in Assyrian
texts the term seems to be Hanigalbat. In one text there seems to be a
distinction made between Mitanni and Hurri, but generally today most scholars
think that these names all refer to the same complex historical political
phenomenon. Contrary to what is spread about, the Hurrians did not coem from
the Zargos, but, according to most, from the trans-Caucasian region, and this
might be reflected in the proposals of Diakonoff to link Hurrian/Urartean with
one of the Caucasian language families. I know that it makes little sense to
post bibiliographical information here, but since some people still read, I
might suggest the exhaustive and excellent study of Amir Harrak, Assyria and
Hanigalbat, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 1987, and the most recent survey of
current knowledge about the Hurrians by Gernot Wilhelm, in Amurru 1 (1996).
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
pio...@umich.edu (Piotr Michalowski) wrote:
>In article <52k07t$9...@halley.pi.net> m...@pi.net (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) writes:
>>Hmm, I already feared I wasn't being very clear. The administrative
>>language of the Mitanni kingdom was Hurrian.
>Miguel, I would be a little careful here. It is true that we have two letters
>in Hurrian from Mitanni to the Egyptian court, we really do not know what the
>administrative language of the kingdom was.
I was under the impression that there were some "administrative" texts
found in Boghazkoey as well, but I may be wrong (I've never seen the
Hurrian texts from Hatussas). As to the famous "horse-treatise", it
is said to have been written by "Kikkuli, a Hurrian from the land of
Mitanni", which doesn't prove anything either way [is that "Janssen, a
Dutchman from the Netherlands" or "Carrasquer, a Spaniard from the
Netherlands"?].