Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:30:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Weben Banu Subject: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender To: Ancient Egyptian Language List I'm almost embarrassed that I have to ask this, except that I've never claimed to be anything more than an enthusiast and a student.^_^ I know that adjectives need to match gender and number with the nouns they describe, but what about nouns which are grouped together? For example, say we had a phrase "r n nTr," "the mouth of a god." If this were a goddess instead, would it be "rt n nTrt"? If it were two goddesses, would it be "rtj n nTrtj"? And so forth? Or would it still be "r n nTrt" and "rwj n nTrtj" because the mouth is a masculine noun? Thanks, Katherine ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:45:23 -0400 From: "Aurelio LaRotta" To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender Hi WB, No worries, features that do not occur in one's own language can be confusing (and English gave up its gender centuries ago). Ancient Egyptian is just like modern languages with gender distinction, that is to say adjectives, participles etc. describing a noun change, but the rest of the phrase like e.g. dependent nouns are not affected. So it's *nTr pn nfr*: this good god and *nTr.t tn nfr.t* (this good goddess - notice that the demonstrative pronoun changes, too), but if I add, e.g. rn pn wr (this great name) to it, it stays *rn pn wr n nTr pn nfr* and *rn pn wr n nTr.t tn nfr.t*. Now, the particle 'n' is an interesting case because it changes gender, too (although you do not always see that written), but you will find it as n.t if the first noun is a femine noun and as n.w if the first noun is in the plural form. So, to quote from Loprieno (*Ling. Intro*.), you'll find *n'.t n.t nHH* (city of eternity). This is because you can think of 'n' as an adjective/attribute belong to the first noun in a genitive construction: the city belonging to eterminty - and since the 'belonging' explains the city and not the eternity, it has the same gender as city (feminine in ancient Egyptian). Hope this helps? Best regards, Aurelio La Rotta ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:49:09 -0400 From: "Aurelio LaRotta" To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender Correction: [...] This is because you can think of 'n' as an adjective/attribute belong*ing* to the first noun in a genitive construction: the city belonging to *eternity* [...] :-) Best regards, Aurelio ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:55:35 +0200 From: marekw@pro.onet.pl To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender >I know that adjectives need to match gender and number with the nouns they describe, >but what about nouns which are grouped together? For example, say we had a phrase >"r n nTr," "the mouth of a god." If this were a goddess instead, would it be "rt n nTrt"? no, it should be "r n nTrt" If it were two goddesses, would it be "rtj n nTrtj"? And so forth? Or would it still be "r n nTrt" and "rwj n nTrtj" because the mouth is a masculine noun? for two goddesses should be "rwj n nTrtj" "r" - is masculine, so in this construction should have masc. endings "nTrT" - is feminine, and should have fem. endings I hope this help. There are genders in my native language, so it's no problem for me, but there are not articles - and it is problem for me ;-) BR Marek ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:19:34 +0000 (GMT) From: bert_hramm Subject: Re : AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Hi Katherine. The gender and the number of the subject will affect the preposition n: r(A) n nTr or r(A) n nTrt. This n preposition is used in genitive, and comes from the nisbe adjective n(y). Another exemple: to say "the legs of the god", egyptian will use a dual and say: rdwy nwy nTr. I hope my explications are clear enough. Bertrand ============================================================================== From: "Paul Wheeler" To: "'Ancient Egyptian Language List'" , Subject: RE: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:33:09 +0200 For me it is the second option. A noun keeps it's own gender and it's number depends of the sentence : one mouth for one godess, two for two, many for many... But still I am as for you just an enthusiast student... P. Wheeler ============================================================================== Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:46:06 -0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender From: msore@albawaba.com To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Aurelio said Ancient Egyptian is just like modern languages with gender distinction, Question. Is that a linguistically established fact or is that an assumption made by europeans? Should questions about gender be answered based on what happens in modern languages of the analysts? Or should they be answered empirically, with reference to the way gender works in related languages? In this issue, wouldn't it be useful to have in hand some linguistic concepts/tools like the idea of the "head" of a phrase, or the idea of phrasal syntactic categories? Yes, in answering these questions, it does matter how you assign a category to the /n/. That again should be an empirical question, based on behavior of that morpheme, not based on how it is translated into English or French or German, right? And in order to answer it linguistically, we would have to have (would we not?) a notion of what a grammatical category really is. matthew ============================================================================== Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:17:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Weben Banu Subject: AEL Coptic word for "eye" To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Hello! I'm wondering if anyone knows of a Coptic word for "eye" which might be descended from the word jrt. Based on a conversation on the list a long time back, it would seem that the syllabic division of jrt would be j*r*t, where * is an unknown vowel value. So to get more information, we would go to the Coptic word, right? To see if I have this right, the possible syllabic division for this word would be: jv-rVt jV-rvt jv:rVt jV:rvt Where V is a stressed vowel, v an unstressed vowel, and : a long vowel. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to a possible vowel reconstruction?^_^ Many thanks! ~Katherine ============================================================================== Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:07:28 -0400 From: "Aurelio LaRotta" To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender Hi Matthew, ** I have seen you ask questions about the relationship between the traditional treatment of the Ancient Egyptian language and general grammatical theory before, so I believe I see where your objections are coming from. I think you may have misunderstood my comment about Egyptian gender being similar to the treatment of gender in modern languages like say Spanish or Hebrew. The overall grammatical framework of AE is pretty different from the IE languages or even the Semitic ones, but certain features translate quite well, so if the reader (especially a beginner) happens to know something about gender in French this may help him/her to relate to what's going on in AE. Note: That's not an *a priori* assumption ("*gender in AE has to be the same as in Hebrew*") but an after-the-fact observation ("*looks like AE gender and Hebrew gender are pretty similar*"). You ask whether that's an established fact. I think we're on pretty safe ground here, as long as we take 'gender' in its traditional meaning from the IE/Sem languages. It's a whole different ballgame if you want to expand the term to include e.g. noun classes like in the Bantu-languages. If you stay within the traditional definition, you'll see that what we call nouns in AE (the traditional terms of potential AE grammarians not surviving) comes with implicit or morphologically expressed gender, that such gender is unchanged by context in nouns and that what we typically call adjectives and participles change gender and number when used as attributes (where morphologically possible). This is using the traditional terms, but I'd be surprised if a TGG analysis would find any fundamental differences here between say Egyptian and Hebrew. In comparison to the IE languages there are some minor differences: There is no AE equivalent of the IE *neutrum* and IE languages do not expand gender to the personal pronouns of the 2nd person, but that does not change the fundamental grammatical behavior. My treatment of n(j), however, was way too simplistic, thanks for pointing that out. I am not sure whether there's any true agreement on the genesis of this ubiquitous particle or even what grammatical class we should put it in. It clearly differs from everything else we'd call a preposition as it takes the gender/number endings just like nouns and adjectives. So, one solution was to postulate a nisbe of a preposition n and making it a participle meaning something like 'belonging'. That's just one out of many possible solutions and I am not sure how much this reflects the current state of Egyptology (it may be an obsolete theory). Another equally valid theory could, for example, be to interpret n(j) as a demonstrative pronoun used somewhat like the Classical Chinese zhi1 (object pronoun turned possessive particle). There may well be other solutions, so the one I presented may be a good mnemonic help but nothing else. Maybe somebody else can add to this? Best regards, Leo ============================================================================== Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:51:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Weben Banu Subject: Re: AEL A really basic question on nouns and gender To: Ancient Egyptian Language List I wonder sometimes how much anything of what we know about ancient, "dead" languages such as this one could be considered established fact- really, it blows my mind that we know anything about it at all. But from what little I have seen, there does seem to be linguistic evidence for gendered nouns- in Middle Egyptian at least, and from what I gather the evidence is more prevalent in Old Egyptian, which I have not studied. Those nouns which end in -t cause changes in the sentence around them- they are clearly treated differently from those nouns which do not. Adjectives have been seen to change to agree with plurality, and they also frequently change to agree with this phenomenon of nouns which end in -t. Nouns which end in -t have been seen to be used in reference to female subjects, where such gender is obvious and observable, and that those subjects which are not female have their own parallel forms which do not include the -t, so it has been extrapolated that the -t ending is a "feminine" suffix and that those adjectives which alter their form to agree with the -t suffix are being altered to agree with gender as well as plurality. It is interesting to note that this linguistic phenomenon is similar to what happens in the romance languages of Europe- being an American myself, and coming from a language which doesn't assign genders I always found the idea strange- and, to be perfectly honest, annoying.^_^ But it does seem to be there. This is an extremely simplified account, but perhaps someone with more experience can do a better job of explaining this than I have. ~Katherine ==============================================================================