Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:57:23 +0200 (CEST) From: Ugo Bessi To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Mereptah Hey, wait a minute! Is it possible that the egyptian di, to give, and the latin dare are totally unrelated? Really no common root in some pre-babelian language, say the nostratic? And the egyptian mut, the german mutter, the latin mater, the russian mat? Also the arabic is similar: umm al qasr, mother of fortresses, or umm al vsekh pobedah, mother of all victories (well, this actually...) Best regards, Ugo Bessi. ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:56:42 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question -- Original Message ---------- From: Aurelio LaRotta [snip] Your points are all well taken but I have to disagree here: >Note: m33-hr for 'mirror' fails this test because the final 'r' had >certainly gotten lost by the New Kingdom (as can been seen from NK >spellings like xpr with a phonetic complement 'pw'). If you are referring to "Hr" or "face" that is not necessarily so. I did find Coptic "hra" for "face" in one source, so it seems, unlike in the case of "xpr" [where the /r/ did become silent] /r/ was not the final phoneme to begin with. >The next test concerns simplicity (or parsimony, as an earlier >poster put it): One post linked Egyptian m33 and >Hebrew mar'a ('mirror'). But why go that far when there is a >perfectly natural derivation of mar'a from ra'a ('to see'): >derivations with m- are part of the normal verbal paradigm in Hebrew >and extremely common. There is another Hebrew term for "mirror" and that is "re'ee", a masc. noun, whereas "marah" is feminine. Anyway, the derivations with "m" in this case in Hebrew are all connected to "view", rather than see. I don't think there can be any doubt that Arabic "mariyat" [mirror] is connected to the Hebrew. I don't know why there is such a reluctance to allow a connection of the Egyptian word, transliterated "mAA" to this same pattern. First off, there is no clue in later Egyptian as to how "mAA" was vocalized, that I know of, personally, as it was no longer used in Demotic--therefore no Coptic equivalent. Then there is the "mArw [det. D4] itn", which Redford, for one, believes means "the viewing place of the Aten". Then Hannig appears to think that some people called the "MAA" are indentical with the "Maru"--or so I gather from his example, previously cited by me. Moreover, it makes no sense to me that the grapheme /A/ should have been written side by side in the same word if both the /A/s had the same value. /A/, after all, once had a different value than a place-holder for a vowel sound--and the value was "r", which was occasionally retained in Middle Egyptian. I am no longer referring to any etymology of "mirror"--just to "mAA" and its connection with Semitic. It may be that, in Egyptian, the distinction between "see" and "view" was not rigorous. Therefore, "mAA" [to view] and "mArw" [inf. or "viewing"]. During the Amarna period, we have some unusual spellings and they might indicate an actuality of pronunciation rather than the spelling conventions we might expect. I once even saw "imD" rather then "inD" [term in a greeting] in an Amarna context, as an example of eccentric spelling. Marianne Luban Author of "The Pharaoh's Barber" A mystery set in the court of Thutmose III http://tinyurl.com/5qqvzt ============================================================================== From: David New Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:02:24 +0800 Subject: AEL Old Egyptian Grammar To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk I have a photocopy of a chapter on OE grammar but I have no idea which book it came from. The chapter is titled "Summary of the Grammar of Old Egyptian" and runs from pages 95 to 101. Does anybody know which book this came from? David New ============================================================================== From: Carl Edlund Anderson Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Mereptah Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:59:35 -0500 To: Ancient Egyptian Language List On 21 Apr 2009, at 01:57, Ugo Bessi wrote: > Is it possible that the egyptian di, to give, and the latin dare are > totally unrelated? Really no common root in some pre-babelian > language, > say the nostratic? Quite likely. (I'm not sure of the phonetics of the Egyptian word, but the IE root behind the Latin would be *deH2-, and I'm not sure how one would explain the laryngeal in PIE and lack thereof in Egyptian if these words were really cognate.) But, in any case, there are a relatively limited number of sounds in the world's languages, and quite a lot of sound combinations that appear in any given language are likely to appear in similar sound combination in some other, unrelated language -- and at least a percentage of these coincidental similarities will, by accident, happen to belong to words in similar semantic fields. For example, one might be forgiven for thinking that Greek "theos" ("god"), was cognate with Latin "dius" -- but it isn't; the apparent similarity is accidental. Likewise, Latin "dies" (Spanish dia) and English "day"; not cognate, not related -- again, the similarity is accidental. And these examples are taken from languages that are, in fact, members of the same family (Indo- European), but nevertheless even words of superficially similar appearance and meaning may well not be cognate. Things are often more complicated than they may appear upon casual inspection. :) (I thought the post by Leo discussing the identification of cognates was very good.) > And the egyptian mut, the german mutter, the latin > mater, the russian mat? Also the arabic is similar: umm al qasr, > mother of > fortresses, or umm al vsekh pobedah, mother of all victories (well, > this > actually...) The use of (often doubled) /m/ sounds in words for "female parent" are extremely common in many languages, and these kinds of "nursery words" (as they are sometimes known "in the biz") are probably not evidence of a universally inherited "mother" word, but are probably the result of this kind of sound being an (relatively) easy one for human babies to make. There are numerous studies dealing with this topic. Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/ ============================================================================== From: David New Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:40:39 +0800 Subject: AEL OE Grammar To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Dear Ben, I'm afraid that I don't have a scanner but I can tell you what's in those few pages. All the information is already in Gardiner's or Allen's grammars (footnotes, obs. etc.). It's basically a list of differences between OE and ME, without commentary or examples.They list the variants of the genitive, relative adjective, pronouns, interrogatives, variants of the anomolous verbs (come, give, bring etc.), stative endings, participle/relative form endings and the negative verbs (including w and nfr - both described by Allen and Gardiner). David New ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:05:29 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Merneptah I wrote: 3. ra m mSrw; hnhn=i tw; iw=k Hr sA=i; wtz=i sH=k; awy=i xr=k; xnm=i nfrw=k; At r At aq=k 3. Ra in the evening. I lull you. You are under my protection. I support your mummy; I embrace your beauties. I have to make a correction. There is no "you are under my protection". The word for "protection" would not be written with the sign that is there and I had the wrong image in mind. It should be "you are upon my back". While an actual woman cannot have a child on her back and embrace it simultaneously, a sarcophagus can have the mummy on its "back" [the bottom] and still embrace it with its sides. Marianne Luban ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:19:59 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Merneptah ---------- Original Message ---------- From: Ugo Bessi >Hey, wait a minute! >Is it possible that the egyptian di, to give, and the latin dare are >totally unrelated? Really no common root in some pre-babelian >language, say the nostratic? And the egyptian mut, the german >mutter, the latin mater, the russian mat? Well, that is the Nostratic premise. Anyway, I think you accidentally commented under the wrong subject heading. It may be plain to some--but not to everyone, of course, why I pointed to this text. It really is a very interesting, unusual piece of writing, an address to the king of a gentle beauty. [hard to find a translation thereof] One would really have liked to know the author of this text--he must really have been a person of great feeling, in addition to being a very good writer. I'll give an example of the first few lines and maybe the grammar will elicit some discussion. If not, you'll still see what this is all about: 1. dwA wsir nsw (bA-n-ra-mry-imn) sA ra (mr-n-ptH-Htp-Hr-mAat) rnn Dt=f in mwt=f nit; inD Hr=k sA=i, wsir nsw nb tAwy 1. Praise to the Osiris king (name) son of the sun (name) and the eternal preservation of him by his mother, Neith; Greetings to you, my son, Osiris, king, lord of the Two Lands. Note: Hannig, p. 472, col. 1, gives the example "rnn=f Dt=f" as "seinen Leib umhengen" [preserving his body]. I see only one /f/ in the text after "rnn"--but it's possible it's meant to do double duty and it really should be "rnn=f Dt=f". 2. (name) sA ra (name); ink mwt=k At(y)t nfrw=k, iwr=i im=k tp dwAyt, s-ms=i tw m 2. (name) son of the sun (name) I am your mother, the protectress of your beauties; I am pregant with you in the early morning; I give birth to you as Note: "im" is "m" before a suffix. I have it as "pregnant with you" as I can see no alternative there. 3. ra m mSrw; hnhn=i tw; iw=k Hr sA=i; wtz=i sH=k; awy=i xr=k; xnm=i nfrw=k; At r At aq=k 3. Ra in the evening. I lull you. You are under my protection. I support your mummy; I embrace your beauties. Moment to moment you enter Note: I have "At r At" but I am not sure what is there or what it's supposed to convey exactly. It may mean "time after time", with the idea that, once the spirit of the dead king has made his nightly journey as Ra, he re-enters his sarcopagus, his "mother", who then lulls him to sleep once again. 4. im=i; qn=i sSm aSm=k; mwt=k im=i; 4. unto me; my embrace is the guide of your divine image, your mother [or coffin lid], namely myself... Note: I don't know why sSm as "guide" --but a very poignant declaration. Marianne Luban Author of "The Exodus Chronicles: Beliefs, Legends & Rumors from Antiquity Regarding the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt", Second Edition, = New and Revised (2008) ============================================================================== From: "A.K. Eyma" To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Mereptah Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:13:50 +0200 Ugo Bessi wrote:. >Is it possible that the egyptian di, to give, and the latin dare are >totally unrelated? **Yes. ;) The AE verb is rdy, the loss of r in many forms comes later. >And the egyptian mut, the german mutter, the latin mater, the russian mat? Also the arabic is similar: umm al qasr, mother of fortresses, or umm al vsekh pobedah, mother of all victories (well, this actually...) **Mother and father words -- in their childish / nursery word forms mamma and pappa -- are an universal thing, in which mother (and grandmother) words nearly always have a nasal (mama, nana), and father (and grandfather) words tend to have an oral front consonant (papa, dada, abba, tata), with or without reduplication (there are a few exceptions in the world's languages, but not many). I suppose that it's a biological thingie, mothers providing the yuM-yuM food and fathers getting the second easiest Prattling sound as leftover designation. ;)) Well, whatever it may be, M- for mother can thus not be taken to establish links between languages -- which removes your Arabic example from the equation. However, you likely throw in the t as well. But first realize that the German/Latin/Russian forms all go back on IE *mater (or the like). Also realize that the AE was not mut but mwt. So you would have IE *mater and AE *ma:wit (or the like), which is not very close at all. Despite the initial m, the Egyptian word is probably not a nursery word (of the above mama style), seeing its form; Vycichl thinks a participle of mwy ("to be moist", cp English. wet-nurse). I don't know. How things are in IE I will happily leave to others; do you have ma + ter (with same ending as in brother, daughter, ..?)? Best regards, Aayko Eyma ============================================================================== From: Carl Edlund Anderson Subject: Re: AEL Coffin Text of Mereptah Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:54:56 -0500 To: Ancient Egyptian Language List On 30 Apr 2009, at 06:13, A.K. Eyma wrote: > How things are in IE I will happily leave to others; do you have > ma + ter (with same ending as in brother, daughter, ..?)? In IE, the roots for many these kinship-term type words form a very archaic subgroup of r-stem nouns: *meH2ter-, *pH2ter-, *bhreH2ter-, *dhugH2ter- .... (also *yenH2ter-, "husband's brother's wife"!). There are other IE roots reconstructed for some of these terms, as well, some of which are "nursery words", like *m-H4em- ("mama") and *papa (also *atta, "father"). It may well be that nursery words like *m-H4em- ("mama") and *papa underlie the formation of the suffixed r- stems *meH2-ter- and *pH2-ter-. The function of this apparent *-ter- suffix is unclear. Some have sought to analyze it as having an agentive function, as clearly does the PIE *-tor- suffix, though these efforts have not met with much success. (And some speculate that *dhugH2-ter may be constructed from a root with the sense "extract milk" (cf. Sanskrit root duh-, "to milk or squeeze out, to extract") in combination with the *- ter- , but I am not sure that this analysis is widely accepted either.) There are fairly accessible discussions of some of these topics in works like Fortson's _Indo-European Language and Culture_, Mallory & Adam's _The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto- Indo-European World_, and Sihler's _A New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_ (which actually functions pretty well as a comparative PIE grammar). Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/ ============================================================================== From: "A.P. de Visser" To: "'Ancient Egyptian Language List'" Subject: RE: AEL Coffin Text of Merneptah Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:28:13 +0200 It would be fine if you could be willing to transliterate and translate the whole text.It might be helpful for those,like me who are not so experienced in reading this kind of live-texts.In this text there are rather many unclear signs,maybe because of the printing. Kind regards Bram de Visser ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:06:47 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: RE: AEL Coffin Text of Merneptah ---------- Original Message ---------- From: "A.P. de Visser" >It would be fine if you could be willing to transliterate and >translate the whole text.It might be helpful for those,like me who >are not so experienced in reading this kind of live-texts.In this >text there are rather many unclear signs,maybe because of the >printing. It would be instructive for me, also, and I am willing. But I'm quite sure I, too, will not be able to give a rendering without some errors so any input from others would be appreciated. Or, if others wish to do some lines, that would be great. Here is the URL once more for anyone who wants to print out the text and follow along. http://www.geocities.com/scribelist/sarc.html I or someone else will post a few lines at regular intervals. I left off on Line 4 at "mwt=k im=i" ============================================================================== From: Ahatnakht@aol.com Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:36:39 EDT Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk In a message dated 21/04/2009 19:09:14 GMT Standard Time, mluban@netzero.net writes: >Moreover, it makes no sense to me that the grapheme /A/ should have been written side by side in the same word if both the /A/s had the same value. /A/, after all, once had a different value than a place-holder for a vowel sound--and the value was "r"< Forgive me if I'm being dense, but why does it make no sense for them to have the same value? It is surely no different to any other geminating verb, eg. "qbb", where you also have to identical consonants side by side in the same word - and /A/ is a consonant, not a place-holder for a vowel. Mechthild Burton ahatnakht@aol.com ============================================================================== Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:12:01 -0500 From: Robert Myers To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question Hey, Folks; In Egyptian, we find words containing AA, aa, Aa, and aA, and I believe this does support Ms. Luban's assumption. It is my belief that when we find both a and A in the same word, logic would recommend that at least within that one word, the phonetic values are different. Conversely, when we find s and z or T and t in different words, they might actually represent the same sound in Middle Egyptian, though I am convinced that in Old Egyptian, being a new orthography, things were spelled precisely how they sounded, since clarity precedes fashion in a language. I think another factor we need to consider is that we are often assured that all monophonic glyphs are consonantal. Yet, I have really come to doubt this, and opt for the description at least of "semi-vowel". And, what makes no sense to one viewpoint might make sense to another. So, the pronunciation of the glyph depends heavily on the time frame. Sincerely, Bob ============================================================================== Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:23:31 -0400 Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question From: Aurelio LaRotta To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Hi Marianne, Thank you for your comments! Do you still have the source for 'hra' (face), ideally with an example sentence? I am aware of hra= as the bound form of ho, as in hrak (your face), hrau (their face) etc. but I haven't seen it in isolation. The preservation of the final [r] in the bound form (status pronominalis) is not surprising and parallels e.g. the otherwise silent [z] in French 'me*s* amis', but the appearance of hra in isolation or as the second part of a compound word would be something interesting indeed! Best regards, Aurelio ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:17:37 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: AEL mAA Just to show I'm not too much of a heretic with my belief about "mAA", I= refer you to Hoch's "Middle Egyptian Grammar", page 53: "m33 "to see", "to look at", "to regard" with prep. m "as" Perhaps cf. Sem. 'mr cf. Akkadian amaru "to see"; Ugaritic amr "saw" " Marianne Luban Author of "The Pharaoh's Barber" A mystery set in the court of Thutmose III http://tinyurl.com/5qqvzt ============================================================================== From: "mluban@netzero.net" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 22:56:53 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question --------- Original Message ---------- From: Ahatnakht@aol.com In a message dated 21/04/2009 19:09:14 GMT Standard Time, mluban@netzero.net writes: >>Moreover, it makes no sense to me that the grapheme /A/ should have been written side by side in the same word if both the /A/s had the same value. /A/, after all, once had a different value than a place-holder for a vowel sound--and the value was "r"<< >Forgive me if I'm being dense, but why does it make no sense for >them to have the same value? It is surely no different to any >other geminating verb, eg. "qbb", where you also have to identical >consonants side by side in the same word - and /A/ is a consonant, >not a place-holder for a vowel. Well, /A/ is certainly a consonant but some of the consonants became what was called "semi-vowels" ,that is, Coptic and the "group-writing" [transliteration of foreign terms] showed them to have, indeed, assumed "place holders" for vowel sounds. For example, /A/ seems to have had the value, by the New Kingdom of a long "a", "ow" and even "ee". /i/ became a glottal stop [short "a"] mostly and /w/ served as both a "w" and "oo". Probably even a short "o". Now perhaps you'll see why /A/ being written twice in a row differs from words like "qbb", whose elements need unwritten vowels in order to be pronounceable. But what would be the unwritten vowel between AA [even if one is a phonetic complement]? How can one be sure of the value of the second /A/? And how many words do you see where this phenomenon occurs? BTW, in the Middle Kingdom orthography the first sign in "mAA", which is U1, with /A/ was normally used to write the Semitic elements "mal" or "mar". Once again, we cannot really be sure how "mAA" in the "viewing" context was pronounced because Demotic no longer employs the term and therefore neither Coptic. Demotic writes "nw" for "see" and Coptic demonstrates the intervening vowel. Mechthild Burton ahatnakht@aol.com ============================================================================== Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:32:42 -0400 Subject: Re: AEL an etymological question From: Aurelio LaRotta To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Hi Mechthild, I agree, its not necessarily a problem. It would be a problem if one thinks of the double /3/ in m33 as a long consonant (as in Italian 'prodotto') and accepts [ ' ] as the phonetic value: some consonants are notoriously hard to double (for the same reason, aleph cannot be doubled in Hebrew, either). There is, however, no such problem if you assume that there was a vowel in between that separated the two /3/. As such, the variation between /m3/ and /m33/ in writing can then become an interesting indicator for the vocalization of different verb forms. Cheers, Aurelio ==============================================================================