From: "Joanne Conman" To: Subject: AEL Miscellaneous Questions on Westcar Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 12:47:39 -0400 To the List: Does anyone know if the other stories and fragments, besides the ones involving Khufu, from the Westcar papyrus are online anywhere? I have read the fragment involving King Nebka translated by Erman, which refers to the magician in that story as "Ubaoner." In Erman's translation of the story of Snefru, the magician is referred to as "Zazamonkh." In Miriam Lichtheim's translation, the Nebka episode is not included. She refers to the magician in the Snefru story as "Djadja-em-ankh." Does anyone know the hieroglyphs used to write this character's name and the correct transliteration? I would like to know if anyone knows the hieroglyphs used to write Ubaoner's name and the correct transliteration of that name as well. Thank you, Joanne Conman ============================================================================== From: "Ramy Guirguis" To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk Subject: AEL COPTIC Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 10:50:09 PDT Hi there I would really like a clarification on the matter of the Coptic language: I'm just wondering how Egyptian the Coptic language is and how similar it is to early Egyptian.Looking forward to receiving a reply! THANK YOU ============================================================================== Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 19:22:18 +1000 To: Ancient Egyptian Language List From: mlds Subject: Re: AEL COPTIC >Hi there >I would really like a clarification on the matter of the Coptic language: >I'm just wondering how Egyptian the Coptic language is and how similar it is >to early Egyptian.Looking forward to receiving a reply! > THANK YOU One recent book is 'Ancient Egyptian. A linguistic introduction.' by A. Loprieno. It is a professional (=high powered) study, so not for the weak-hearted. Best wishes, Mike Dyall-Smith Melbourne, Australia ============================================================================== From: "Ramy Guirguis" To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk Subject: AEL Coptic Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 07:45:42 PDT Hi Cheryl Thanks for replying but I'm not still clear on this! Isn't it the Egyptian language with Greek borrowings ; I mean the language the Egyptians used to speak at that helenized time. And how about the claims that Coptic is the Egyptian language written in Greek script.Hope someone clarifies these points for me! Thanks ============================================================================== From: zhwangx-23@webtv.net (Phillip Bonner) Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 10:49:01 -0400 (EDT) To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk (Ancient Egyptian Language List) Subject: Re: AEL COPTIC Coptic is very similar to Ancient Egyptian. Coptic is written in a modified Greek alphabet. Perhaps it could be compared to Italian and Latin. Phil ============================================================================== From: zhwangx-23@webtv.net (Phillip Bonner) Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 14:27:31 -0400 (EDT) To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk (Ancient Egyptian Language List) Subject: Re: AEL Coptic Coptic is the same thing as late Egyptian. It happens to written in a modified Greek alphabet. Many of the symbols of Coptic were later borrowed by Cyril and Methodius when they invented the Old Slavonic alphabet, and are carried over into Russian. There are some borrowings from Greek too. Phil ============================================================================== From: Teresh000@aol.com Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 15:03:11 EDT Subject: Re: AEL COPTIC To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk In a message dated 5/26/00 2:10:50 AM Central Daylight Time, maryland3@hotmail.com writes: > Hi there > I would really like a clarification on the matter of the Coptic language: > I'm just wondering how Egyptian the Coptic language is and how similar it is > > to early Egyptian.Looking forward to receiving a reply! > THANK YOU >From Loprieno's book, I would say they are about as similar as Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) and Modern English: you can see the relationship, but a lot of changes have taken place. For one thing, many sound changes occured, mostly resulting in the loss of final consonants or even whole syllables. On the grammar side, where Ancient Egyptian relied on suffixes to express grammar, Coptic uses prefixed words or verbal compounds. Of course, Coptic is written in an alphabet borrowed from Greek, and also contains a lot of Greek loan words. -- Terry Donnelly http://www.geocities.com/weseb_2000 ============================================================================== Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 10:12:11 +0100 Subject: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... From: Robert Allan To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Although the distinction between coptic and Greek may be, for some, confusing it is distinct. However, we must remember that greek itself has been influenced by Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian and Semitic languages. Sorry to confuse, but this is a difficult issue ! Regards Robert Allan ============================================================================== Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 02:30:59 -0700 (PDT) From: Tim Cleary Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Dear Group, May I branch this discussion out a bit? From the little I know about Egyptian history, Egyptians, at least the urban and higher socioeconomic classes, would have come under heavy influence from Greek culture for quite a long time before Coptic became a written language. Is it possible that some of the substantial differences between older Egyptian phonology i.e. sounds, and the later Coptic can be explained by the influence of the Greek language? Arabic phonology seems to show a greater similarity to old Egyptian than does Coptic. I am particularly interested in the vowel sounds. Does anyone have knowledge of old Greek vowel sounds and a comparison with Coptic? Tim UAE ============================================================================== From: zhwangx-23@webtv.net (Phillip Bonner) Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 08:26:46 -0400 (EDT) To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk (Ancient Egyptian Language List) Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... When the Macedonians conquered Egypt they introduced the Greek alphabet as well as some Greek words, however the statement that the Greek language was heavily influenced by the Egyptian language is absolutely false. The ancient Greek language influenced many other languages including Latin, but there wasn't much so much influence in the other direction, and certainly not from Egyptian. Incidentally, the word Coptic comes from the town of Qebt. The word Egypt comes from the same source too. Phil ============================================================================== From: zhwangx-23@webtv.net (Phillip Bonner) Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 17:42:09 -0400 (EDT) To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk (Ancient Egyptian Language List) Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... Arabic phonology shows a greater similiarity to Ancient Egyptian than Coptic? No. That's not true. Egyptian Arabic does differ a little from standard Arabic in that j is pronounced as g. But this is a case of Egyptians changing the pronunciation of Arabic to fit their own linguistic habits. For example, the name Jamal is pronounced Gamal in Egypt. We don't know how vowels were pronounced in Ancient Egyptian. Coptic is the first evidence we have of vowels in Egypt.. Different dialects of Arabic pronounce the vowels all differently anyway. Vowels are much more variable than consonants. It would be logical to think that the Greeks in Alexandria might have influenced the native language of Egypt, however Coptic has many special letters to indicate Egyptian sounds that did not exist in Greek. Ancient Egyptian kh became sh in Coptic, but this isn't because of Greek influence because Greek didn't have any sh sound. I just picked up Cerny's Coptic Etymological Dictionary to pages 220-1. There are about 17 words. Only one is borrowed from Greek on these two pages. ouphaji, meaning liver, borrowed from Greek hepation, little liver. This random survey indicates a small amount of borrowing from Greek vocabulary; it also indicates that the Egyptians greatly altered the sounds to fit their own linguistic habits. It doesn't look like Greek influenced their phonology much at all. What Greek contributed was the alphabet. That's all. Phil ============================================================================== From: "Ramy Guirguis" To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 17:12:24 PDT Phil You cannot say that the Egyptian language had no influence on Greek , since history proved the presence of Greek settlers in the Delta region during the Pharaonic era as well as hundreds of Greek travelers and traders.. Another thing , the word Egypt comes from the Greek Aigyptos which is a corrupt pronounciation of Hykaptah (an Egyptian pharaonic capital). The term "COPT" comes from arabic "qibt" which is a corrupt pronounciation of "Aigyptos".Coptic in the written form was used by Educated Alexandrian Christians who could not speak Egyptian to preach Egyptian peasants in Upper-Egypt (who could not speak anything but Egyptian); the only way to communicate was to write Egyptian in Greek script so that the preachers can read and the Egyptians understand what was read out. I don't think your theory is right since Coptic was used by helinized Egyptian minority to communicate with the unhelenized Egyptian majority and vice versa. Tim , Vowels in any language are really similar ; so I don't see how you are comparing vowels in arabic to vowels in old Egyptian. Coptic was the language that helped the French Scientist Champollion encode hieroglyphics so if you're describing Coptic as being a corrupt helenized Egyptian dialect so eventually all your knowledge of ancient Egyptian would be corrupt as well.Another thing , I don't see how you're comparing ancient Egyptian and Arabic vowels knowing that both didn't include vowels in the written script.Modern Arabic is totally different than ancient bedouin arabic : Don't forget that arabic underwent a lot of changes since the majority of arabic-speaking people today are not from arab ancestry and they brought from their aboriginal languages their own influences. Let's take Egypt as an example , the arabic spoken in Egypt nowadays is totally different than the arabic spoken in any middle eastern arabic-speaking country: To be more precise , the Northern Egyptian arabic is different than the southern one : they're different in vowels and consonants. So you can't count on arabic as a figure since it's more corrupt than any other language. THANK YOU ============================================================================== Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 12:22:09 +0100 Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... From: Robert Allan To: Ancient Egyptian Language List A good discussion for those seeking further information on the 'tangled web of linguistic threads', should check out URL below: http://saturn.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/semitic.html Enjoy! ============================================================================== From: zhwangx-23@webtv.net (Phillip Bonner) Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 10:36:31 -0400 (EDT) To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.demon.co.uk (Ancient Egyptian Language List) Subject: Re: AEL Coptic and Greek and ... Coptic writing was not invented by Christian missionaries. Many Greeks settled in Egypt but virtually no Egyptians settled in Greece. The influence was all one-way. I challenge you to provide any proof at all that Egyptian influenced the Greek language. Can you name any references? Any words? Alexandria was a Greek-speaking city. At one time, a large fraction of the inhabitants of Egypt spoke Greek. Many Hellenistic thinkers and writers lived in Alexandria and wrote in Greek. Alexandria housed the largest Greek library, and maybe the largest library, in the world. Kleopatra was the only Ptolemaic ruler who even knew how to speak any form of Egyptian. When Egypt was in the Roman and Byzantine Empires, Greek was the official language, and to a small extent Latin. Egyptian was spoken by peasants in the hinterland who were illiterate in any language. This is what 1952 Encyclopedia Britannica says on page 410 of Volume 6: "Amongst the Egyptian natives, Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, survived the formidable inroads of Greek both in its pagan and Christian forms, and only succumbed at length to the overwhelming influence of Arabic, dying out finally in the 16th century. Early in the 2nd century A.D., pagan Egyptians, or perhaps foreigners settled in Egypt, essayed to write the native language for magical purposes in Greek letters with some necessary supplements borrowed from demotic. This 'Old Coptic,' as it is termed, was still almost entirely free from Greek loan-words, and its strong archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the fact that the literary language, even in its most 'vulgar' forms, moved more slowly than the speech of the people." The article goes on to say that Christians who translated the Bible from Greek did introduce many Greek words into what is called Christian Literary Coptic. So we actually have two dialects, Christian Literary Coptic, which was full of Greek words and even particles, and Old Coptic, which had very little Greek influence. I have in front of me Langenscheidt's pocket dictionary of Classical Greek. I picked pages 186 and 187 at random. Not a single word here appears to be borrowed from Egyptian, and there is no other trace of Egyptian influence. Some words like thalassa for sea are believed to be of non-Indo-European origin, but this was from an ancient Mediterranean language that had no connection with Egyptian. Egyptian was a member of the Afrasiatic Family, which extended across the north coast of Africa, into Arabia and, at best reached southeast Turkey and Lebanon. That's as close as it got to Greece, and it was the Semitic branch that came closest to Greece anyway. The Egyptian historian Manetho did write in Greek. Perhaps that got you confused. Phil ==============================================================================