From: "Nathalie Andrews" To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 19:25:16 +0100 > So whatever linguistic theory we apply, the resulting translation of > Ancient Egyptian is often no more than someone's best guess - and I > haven't seen > any translation (or grammar and dictionary) yet that has tried to claim > otherwise. And that, of course, is all the fun! I'm so glad you said that! I'm partway through my doctorate and it often still feels like I'm guessing, even though I rather hope I'm armed with a bit of knowledge by now! Sorry - I think I missed the first bit of this thread re the criticism. Gardiner is driving me up the wall. Would you recommend Loprieno to help me improve my grasp of grammar. I have to say, there is a point, even in the study of AE, where you do start to get a "feel" for the language. When I started, there were certain phrases which I would have in translation in front of me and, try as I might, I couldn't work out why the scholar had chosen that translation over another. Now that I've translated a number of chapters of the BoD, I feel like I have a more "instinctual" understanding. Sadly, instincts don't cut it in academic work, so I am going to need to analyse where exactly said instincts are coming from and make them explicit when I come to give my work in! Grammar may help..... Nat http://djedra.blogspot.com ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:14:45 +0800 (WST) From: gilbert To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar There are several books that would help you get a good grip on AE grammar, some of them being studied through AEL's daughtersite: Glyphstudy. I can recommend both James Allen's one (for really serious students) or the much more user friendly one, but not less serious, by James Hoch. Studiegroups on both authors have just started via Glyphstudy. Oh, BTW, they supersede Gardiner as new findings on AE grammar have since been discovered. Hope this helps. Gilbert ============================================================================== From: Ahatnakht@aol.com Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:02:10 EDT Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk I am only a keenly interested amateur student of Middle Egyptian, so can't claim as much knowledge as you will have being halfway through your doctorate. However, having learned more than one language (including Latin in the very far and distant past of my school days) I have experienced a variety of grammar books, and I personally would thoroughly recommend Loprieno for any serious advanced study of Egyptian grammar. His book is very comprehensive and in depth, and the way the different topics are organised make it very usable, as you can dip in an out of it at need. Apart from Hannig's Handw=F6rterbuch, I find it to be the most useful book on my Egyptian shelf at the moment :-) I also try to do as much background reading as possible of academic papers on Middle Egyptian. You will probably have access to a university library, but those who don't will find all the journals at the EES library. The first three volumems of Lingua Aegyptia are available as pdf's on-line, by the way (http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/lingaeg.htm) Mechthild Burton ahatnakht@aol.com ============================================================================== Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:49:33 +1200 Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar From: Teresa Ronayne To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Hi everyone, During my degree (some time ago - oh dear) I used Gardiner, as there wass no other reliable resources at that time. Now I use Allen to keep up with my grammar, but I would love to know more about the specifics of Gardiner which are now obselete. Does anyone have a link to such info, or can provide me with examples. Although I barely look at Gardiner now, I would find it interesting for nostalgia purposes. Thanks! Teresa ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:10:15 -0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar From: msore@albawaba.com To: "Ancient Egyptian Language List" Gilbert said, "Oh, BTW, they supersede Gardiner as new findings on AE grammar have since been discovered." I am curious as to how experienced egyptologists dealing with grammatical issues would describe this process of "discovery" of new "findings". Was that process a scientific one? A linguistic one? Was it based on data and analysis and argument? Were alternative explanatory theories considered and evaluated against data? Were the tools and standards from related discliplines (like linguistics, or semitic linguistics) considered? Or was it a process of construction of favorite approaches by people who tended (under professional pressures) to agree with each other? In other words, is the so-called "superceding" of Gardiner an empirical phenomenon, or a phenomenon of academic club-joining? Matthew ============================================================================== From: Muhammad Barker Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:43:44 -0500 To: Ancient Egyptian Language List I find that a later Egyptian grammar, (James P. Allen, "Middle Egyptian") is easier to use and relatively complete. I prefer it to other Egyptian grammars. Give it a try! I think there is also another recent attempt by someone named Hoch -- which I have not yet seen. Anybody have a reference to this? Prof. M.A.R. Barker Minnesota ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:04:39 -0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar From: msore@albawaba.com To: "f other Ancient Egyptian Language List" Nathalie said, "... instincts don't cut it in academic work, so I am going to need to analyse where exactly said instincts are coming from and make them explicit when I come to give my work in!" I am glad you said that. But let me offer several other perspectives on the need for translation (and other kinds of language study) to consider the benefits of science and linguistics. Instinct has a lot in it. Usually experts said to be using instinct are actually employing systems of rules and logics that have developed by trial and error, by learning, by cooperation with others, by thinking about the work. The logic of a good expert can often be researched OUT of the instinct and given formal standing. This kind of process in business and engineering is called expert systems analysis. Get a knowledge-based-systems engineer to sit down with a guy who can pick out the best place to drill a well, and in a few weeks you can write a set of rules that interact in formal ways with programmable logic to SIMULATE what the expert did by "instinct". I would gamble serious money that the best translators of ancient Egyptian ARE using some linguistics (of their own devising, or at a level of thinking that is not yet explicit). Making those judgments explicit would require knowing how language rule systems work generally. Another point is that there is POWER in linguistic rule systems that can be used to get artistic and translation processes to be more useful, more revealing. If a language mess is described as a language mess, then historians or religious studies experts may not be able to see deeply into the data. But if the language mess were given some transparency by formalization, experts in fields that depend on language data might be able to "see" farther, make stronger arguments, see patterns across problem sets, and recognize better the difference between good analysis and bad. A third point is that the formal tools of linguistics (hammered out and still under development after a thousand years) are useful for FRAMING PROBLEMS. The question raised earlier of what happened diachronically with dental phoneme (/t/, /d/, /th/, /dj/ and emphatic /D/ and /T/) is an example. How should the problem be STATED, and how should the data be arranged so that the solutions are more likely discovered? Doing that well requires linguistic knowledge. Because doing that well is a scientific and linguistic process. Another point is that linguistics and the lessons learned by a disciplined study of linguistics are useful in RECOGNIZING which past treatments are reasonable and which are unreasonable. If there is a treatment (for example the Standard Theory) which deviates significantly from anything a linguist would come up with, that should suggest taking a more critical view of it. Similarly, knowing what linguistics has to offer could help answer the question that is very often asked in egyptology - WHICH grammar is "better". A good scientific analysis of language patterns (whether done by an ethnographer, a folklorist, a collector of literature, or by translators) should result in something that is COGENT, compact, efficient. Finding core and powerful rules that account for lots of patterns efficiently is the goal of grammar writing in the linguistic sense. The result - if this approach were taken seriously - would be that students could learn from grammars that were shorter and more coherent. Instead of grammars that are voluminous and convoluted. Using serious lingusitic approaches would (on a higher level) have the end result of giving egyptology more credence, more respect in academia. There are academic fields that are not scientific. There are fields that rely on science to prune out bad ideas and forge ahead to more powerful theories. There are academic fields that resist consideration of other sciences, and then there are the more respectable fields which reach out to other disciplines to find tools. matthew ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:39:12 +0100 Subject: AEL tool for editing and rendering Ancient Egyptian texts and translations From: Mark-Jan Nederhof To: Ancient Egyptian Language List For some years now, I've been working on a tool to align hieroglyphic, transliteration and translation, and render them on the screen or on paper. The starting point is a set of simple data formats, which allow flexible use and reuse, for example combining an existing hieroglyphic transcription with a new translation in a chosen modern language, or comparing different translations in an easy way. For many reasons, the tool was not very attractive to most potential users, as it didn't run on Windows or Mac, and didn't come with a graphical user interface. After a year of almost complete reimplementation, I hope to have now solved the main problems. The tool runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. All editing can be done by graphical user interfaces. The software can be run as applet or run from a downloaded JAR file: http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~mjn/egyptian/texts/ I plan to make a demo (screen cast) some time, but for now, I hope the help pages will suffice. With software of this complexity, there are bound to be problems, and I would be interested to hear whether it does or does not work on particular machines. In advance, many thanks for your interest. Mark-Jan ============================================================================== Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:31:56 -0500 From: Robert Myers To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar Nathalie Andrews wrote: > Now that I've translated a number of chapters of the BoD, I feel like > I have a more "instinctual" understanding. Sadly, instincts don't cut > it in academic work, so I am going to need to analyse where exactly > said instincts are coming from and make them explicit when I come to > give my work in! Hi; Allen's grammar is full of good instincts. The excursi are amazing. His knowledge is voluminous, and he seems to me somewhat less of a base hugger than Hoch. I love the way that he (like Gardiner) always uses intellectually stimulating excerpts from real texts as grammatical illustrations. But, its greatness is also in his grasp of logic to justify and focus what he has perceived through more Einsteinian faculties. And, if he believes that a concept bears repeating for the sake of the student, he does so, rather than simply mapping the terrain, even though his work qualifies as a "reference grammar". I just started reading Risner's 300+ page effort to translate the word HkA into English. He cuts through a lot of old reasoning, and shows it to be encumbered with numerous notions based on ideas, filters, and biases outside of Egypt. It takes good instincts to skillfully explore an interior point of view, and good logic to express it, clearly. Risner's focus seems to be in explaining what he has noticed by astute observation, rather than allowing that focus to be scattered by the views of others. He addresses all those other concerns from a usually keener viewpoint than from which most arose. Sincerely, Bob ============================================================================== To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: AEL Study of Egyptian grammar Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:24:01 -0400 From: ahatnakht@aol.com Matthew, try Mark Collier's paper ?"Predication and the circumstancial sDm=f/sDm.n=f" (LingAeg 2 1992 pp17-65) as an example of the language discussion that has been going on in Egyptology for decades and see if that is what you are looking for! http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/pdfs/LingAeg_02-p17-65.pdf Tilly ? Mechthild Burton ahatnakht@aol.com ============================================================================== From: "Marianne Luban" Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:56:34 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: AEL How To Learn Middle Egyptian--If You Really Want To In a message dated 10/09/2009 09:09:09 GMT Daylight Time, djedra.nat@googlemail.com writes: >Sorry - I think I missed the first bit of this thread re the criticism. >Gardiner is driving me up the wall. Would you recommend Loprieno to help >me improve my grasp of grammar. No. Gardiner, in his grammar, uses actual texts for examples, to which the authors of newer grammars object because these might contain something unknown to the student at his level. Well...in the end, there is nothing to translate but those actual texts and maybe there is not much point in shielding the student from anything they might contain. Here is a method that really works: Go through a grammar of your choice to the end, do the exercises. Then choose a Middle Egyptian text and make sure it is one that really interests you. The minute you look at it, you wll see just how much you didn't learn from that grammar--whichever one you used. There isn't a one that's going to make the process easier. Also, make certain you have a translation of the same text in a language that you know. Read that and then put it away. But now you will have a good idea of what the text is all about and that will help you. It's not cheating. You are engaging in a very difficult task and anything that assists is just money in the knowledge bank. Transliterate the hieroglyphs as best you can. Refer to the translation again and probably that will help you to alter some errors in the transliteration. Put the translation away again and try to translate the text yourself, using both your transliteration and the original glyphs. You may have to refer to your dictionary, glossary, anything you can umpteen times. It doesn't matter because there's no better way. Look at the expert translation again and compare it to your own effort. Make whatever changes are necessary to your own translation--unless you think you're expert enough to disagree--and probably you won't. Put that expert translation away yet again and read those glyphs. They will make a lot more sense to you by this time and don't pick up that expert translation again unless you really get stuck. Better still, look up those words the meanings of which you've already forgotten. The more of the work you do yourself, the better, laborious though it will be. Repeat this as many times as necessary until you can read that text from beginning to end without having to consult anything even once. When you know what it says, you will have a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. How much did you actually learn? You won't find that out until you tackle the next text. Keep on using this method and, without being a prophet, I can guarantee you will, before the next century, not even want to look at an expert translation before you begin a new text. You will only do that after you've challenged yourself to get it right. That is--unless you give up on the whole endeavor. That's one of only two things that can happen. The alternative is that you will become hooked on Egyptian and want to keep on learning. Marianne Luban http://thetimetravelerreststop.blogspot.com/ ============================================================================== From: "Marianne Luban" Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:50:56 GMT To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Subject: Re: AEL Egyptian grammar People are going to have their favorite grammars or a combination thereof and everybody is capable of learning *some* Egyptian, read certain passages. But, if it seems to you that you are not learning Middle Egyptian as quickly as you think you should be progressing--just remember there is no such thing as "quickly". Egyptian is not Spanish. There is no simple alphabet to memorize, so it's not Greek, either. I don't want to discourage anyone but let's be practical. No one except those with a linguistic gift and great dedication is ever going to be able to learn even Middle Egyptian *well*--let alone be able to go on to other stages of the language. There is no grammar in existence or any hieroglyphic font program that will magically make it possible for just anyone to become proficient. Not even at the doctoral level. That's why there are philologists in the Egyptian language--like James Allen and Antonio Loprieno, to mention two--and other Egyptologists who are not really that expert in the language at all. They just get by, the same as some amateurs. And they have their own areas or periods of expertise. It takes years to memorize all those signs, years of looking at them over and over again through the practice of reading texts. . You do the same ones over and over until you know them well, can read them as easily as your native language. Then you go on to a new one. Knowing the rules of grammar is good, to have a basis in it, but constant practice is the key If you don't make time every day to translate or re-translate something, you will soon forget what you learned the same way you've forgotten your highschool French--from lack of use. It's a neverending process and few are willing to commit to that. There is no short cut to embedding Egyptian into your brain. Marianne Luban http://thetimetravelerreststop.blogspot.com/ ==============================================================================