Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:47:42 -0700 From: Stephen Fryer To: Ancient Egyptian Language List Subject: AEL [Fwd: [ANE] Hoch's Egyptian Grammar/SSEA E-mail] I thought this might be of potential interest to people on this list, -- Stephen Fryer Lund Computer Services ************************************************** The more answers I find, the more questions I have ************************************************** > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: [ANE] Hoch's Egyptian Grammar/SSEA E-mail > Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 21:53:30 +0100 (BST) > From: The SSEA > > HOCH'S EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR/SSEA E-MAIL > Students and others interested in purchasing "Middle > Egyptian Grammar" by James E. Hoch, please order it at > ssea@bigfoot.com or ssea.geo@yahoo.com. Please also > address all inquiries to those addresses as well. (Our > other e-mail addresses are inactive or under siege by spammers.) ============================================================================== From: MarianneLuban@aol.com Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 13:56:06 EDT Subject: AEL "Ghost Voices" Talking Better To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Previously, I had shown the list a summary I placed on a website of a situation where a British "medium" had supposedly began to talk in ancient Egyptian. It is at http://www.geocities.com/scribelist/ghost.html Spurious as the whole matter is, it continues to intrigue me. I don't really care, at this point, whether it was a hoax or not. All I want to know is just what this Ivy B. was saying. And she definitely *is* speaking Egyptian. There is no question in my mind about that at all. How she managed it, I can't say. Yesterday, on a dull evening, I took another look at the transcription of her speech. It was for me a kind of exercise in "code breaking". As I had concluded previously, wherever there is written "ee", it stands for the phoneme /A/ most of the time. /f/ seems to be "v" when it begins a word but actually "f" at the end when it is a masculine suffix. When I realized that "di" was Egyptian "iri" and not "rdi" that was very helpful to me. It is "neda" that actually seems to be "rdi". Unfortunately, my knowledge of the prepositions, compound or otherwise, and their various uses is not that secure. It is one thing to see what they mean when you have an actual hieroglyphic text before you, but it isn't so easy for me to try to guess in a transliteration such as Prof. Hulme made. The preposition "m" seems to be just pronounced "a" there. Of course, I still followed Hulme's translation of the utterings because, if it was his hoax, then he knew what should be there. If it isn't a hoax, by some uncanny chance, then the man was a genius for, I don't think that, in the 30's, so much was known about the vocalization of Egyptian as is now. The strange thing is, sometimes Hulme puts in (r) in an effort to make something the preposition "r" when it doesn't seem to me to belong there, so maybe even he was "guessing" at times. If it is a hoax on his part, why would he need to guess? At any rate, the other professor, Gunn, was dead (pardon the expression) wrong when he said this transliteration was unrelated to the Egytian language. Either he knew nothing about phonology or he just gave it the most cursory look and dismissed it out of hand. If even I can make out some of the phrases in nearly their entirety now that I have a better understanding of the "code", then it's Egyptian. Yesterday, I worked on about ten of the beginning phrases. If you want to see what I have gotten out of them, have a look. If, from what I have shown, you, yourself, now have a better clue, you are welcome to comment, correct, and/or help me to go on. I think it would be a fun exercise for the list. There is no need to speculate any further on whether the "experiment" was genuine or not. We have already done that. It is just a matter of "breaking the code". Marianne Luban ============================================================================== From: "Szelog, Mike" To: 'Ancient Egyptian Language List' Subject: RE: AEL "Ghost Voices" Talking Better Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 15:27:17 -0400 If, in fact, this is actual Egyptian, it should be somewhat intelligible to a speaker of Coptic even though it may be older Egyptian. I will forward this to a few people who are fluent Coptic speakers (all are deacons in the Coptic Christian Orthodox Church) and see what, if anything, they can make of it - I'd be curious to see if any of it makes sense to them! Mike S ============================================================================== From: MarianneLuban@aol.com Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 11:27:10 EDT Subject: Re: AEL "Ghost Voices" Talking Better To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk In a message dated 10/18/2003 3:10:05 AM Pacific Daylight Time, Mike.Szelog@CITIZENSBANK.com writes: > > If, in fact, this is actual Egyptian, it should be somewhat intelligible to > a speaker of Coptic even though it may be older Egyptian. It's Egyptian, alright. I worked on a few more phrases last night. However, what's there is pretty far removed from Coptic, although someone who knows Coptic well might recognize a word or two. > > I will forward this to a few people who are fluent Coptic speakers (all are > deacons in the Coptic Christian Orthodox Church) and see what, if anything, > they can make of it - I'd be curious to see if any of it makes sense to > them! Don't be surprised if it doesn't, though. Marianne Luban ============================================================================== Subject: Re: AEL "Ghost Voices" Talking Better To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 21:51:55 -0700 (PDT) From: "Mark R." Another way to "break the code" (literally):-- As a amateur cipher buff and someone who has occasionally worked on encryption software, it occurred to me that a frequency count of the phonemes might be helpful in deciding if this phonetic transcription is likely to represents spoken Ancient Egyptian, or indeed any other natural language. The first step would be to prepare a frequency count of phonemes in the transcript. This could be compared to known frequency of phonograms in actual written Egyptian texts from different periods, for example, from the 18th Dynasty. You would be attempting to find 1-to-1 mapping (or failing that, an n-to-m mapping where n and m are low) of spoken phonemes to written phonograms, which would result in a readable "plain text". Unfortunately, more data (a longer transcript) would be needed to insure a reasonable chance of success (statistically significant result). Perhaps the phono-discs can be located? That would also eliminate the dependency on the accuracy (and possible bias) of the 1930's transcription. The advantage of the frequency count method is that it does not rely on extensive historical reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian phonology. Indeed, it is largely a mechanical procedure, only requiring guesswork as to which glyphs may have been silent or may have been pronounced the same in the given period. Unless I am mistaken, more and better evidence is available on this score than on the actual phonetic values for Middle Egyptian: more is known about the likely relationships between phonemes, both synchronically and over time, then about absolute phonetic values at any point in time until one gets close to Coptic. While someone would still have to look at the final result (the "deciphered" Egyptian phonogram plain text) to see if it was in fact readable as 18th Dynasty Middle Egyptian, the opportunity for experimenter bias and subjectivity would be much less than for a direct translation of spoken Egyptian, which would have to rely on linguist reconstruction of the historical phonology and on guesswork. By the way, this technique is similar to how cryptanalysts attack an unknown cipher text, except that normally such plain texts originate as writings using known alphabets rather than as ad hoc phonetic transcriptions of speech. But the principle is the same. Indeed, today when a cipher text message of unknown type and language is intercepted, statistical tests are first applied to determine if it is randomly distributed data (or "one-time pad" cipher) or contains information, next to determine if it is a code or a cipher, and finally to determine the language in which the plain text is likely to have been written, e.g., English, German, Russian, etc. As you might imagine, these statistical tests have been developed to a very high degree by the agencies concerned--although I doubt if even the NSA has any data on Middle Egyptian. A paper on the unique problems of AE language ciphers would stand a very good chance of breaking new ground, even without the ghost story. :-) Mark Ryan ============================================================================== From: MarianneLuban@aol.com Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 12:35:41 EDT Subject: Re: AEL "Ghost Voices" Talking Better To: AEgyptian-L@rostau.org.uk In a message dated 10/19/2003 1:28:57 AM Pacific Daylight Time, mgryan@cruzio.com writes: > Unfortunately, more data (a longer transcript) would be needed to insure > a reasonable chance of success (statistically significant result). Perhaps > the phono-discs can be located? That would also eliminate the dependency > on the accuracy (and possible bias) of the 1930's transcription. ******Thank you for all your interesting comments. However, I must clarify that I rather oversimplified the matter when I wrote that it was an exercise in "code-breaking" because a code is something that is invented to conceal what is actually there and, if I understand it correctly, "#" always represents "a" , as an example, and should occur with a dependable frequency. This transliteration is not that dependable, of course, because it is supposed to represent human speech. I could say, "be" and "bee" in the same few phrases, but unless someone had even a passable knowledge of English, nothing could help him to understand what I might be talking about. Egyptian is no different. Words sounded alike, too. I have no choice but to rely on the transliteration and the translation, although here and there I am now suspecting it on grammatical grounds (even though I am far from secure in Egyptian grammar). Only an expert is. You know how it goes: reading French is not all that difficult (for me) but writing a text in correct French is far more difficult. I can read Middle Egyptian passibly well, too, but now I have to actually write Egyptian phrases. That is the problem. The problem of knowing how certain words may have been vocalized is not so great. I have been studying that for a long time. Hoch's book on Semitic words in Egyptian texts has been invaluable in this effort. Even though it really represents syllabic writing on the part of the Egyptians, it makes one understand how sometimes certain Semitic phonemes were written in Egyptian graphemes due only to how they were perceived by the ear. And that is what Dr. Hulme apparently did, too, (even though the possibility exists that he coached Ivy B. in how to say the words in the first place). But, then again, ask yourself how easy it would be for anyone to remember how to speak correctly, at any great length, a language that meant nothing more to her than gibberish. Yes, it has been done in films like "The Mummy", but one notices that it is a matter of only a few phrases at a time, not continuously. And so one must wonder, also, how the recording of Ivy B. was made. Did it have continuity--or were only a few phrases recorded at a time? I don't know. > > The advantage of the frequency count method is that it does not rely > on extensive historical reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian phonology. > Indeed, it is largely a mechanical procedure, only requiring guesswork as > to which glyphs may have been silent or may have been pronounced the same > in the given period. Unless I am mistaken, more and better evidence is > available on this score than on the actual phonetic values for Middle > Egyptian: more is known about the likely relationships between phonemes, > both synchronically and over time, then about absolute phonetic values at > any point in time until one gets close to Coptic. ****Well, Hulme certainly doesn't *appear* to have had any great difficulty figuring it out! That is another suspicious part of all this, in my opinion. If it is not a hoax, then it would be a wonderful achievement on his part--a thing quite apart from being able to comprehend any written text, because it is a well-known fact that, when it comes to written ancient Egyptian, which utilizes only consonants, what you see its far removed from what was spoken. Beginners who utilize Budge's dictionary are led to believe that it was vocalized as he gives it there, using the default vowel "e", but now, looking at the phrases on my website, they know otherwise. If nothing else, this should serve as an eye-opener to anyone on the list who is new at this---because Hulme's transliteration is very possible, indeed, phonologically, judging from everything we already know about Egyptian pronunciation. If he was a hoaxer, then he was also a prodigious scholar of phonology. No question about that at all. > > While someone would still have to look at the final result (the > "deciphered" Egyptian phonogram plain text) to see if it was in fact > readable as 18th Dynasty Middle Egyptian, the opportunity for experimenter > bias and subjectivity would be much less than for a direct translation > of spoken Egyptian, which would have to rely on linguist reconstruction > of the historical phonology and on guesswork. ****Yes, if it is a true experiment, then guesswork would be involved. However, over the ages, the Egyptians, themselves, (putting Coptic aside) gave clues as to how their language was pronounced by the spelling variations they provide in the different phases of the language. For example, what was at one time written as "pr" (house, etc.) was later written "pi". Other contemporary foreign sources give their own clues. Even the Bible is known to inform, writing out for us "Ha zp" (the first year of a king's reign) as "asphoui" in the Book of Daniel or giving "Zaphanat" as the literal Egyptian translation of the Semitic name Joseph in Genesis or "zpA n nTr" meaning, in both cases, "God has made (him) to thrive". So the text on the website is no true "code" in a literal sense, even though the same vocalizations with the same meaning occur more than once. It is a question of recognizing the Egyptian words when they appear and then to recognize them again. Sometimes, I see that what is transliterated as a single word, may be actually more than one, especially when prepositions are involved. I also suspect that some words transliterated by Hulme in the same way are not the same word at all--and he indicates this in his own translation due to his knowledge of the Egyptian language. Often, his translation is literal, as many translations of even written Egyptian must be, as English does not say things in the same way the Egyptians did. In all, the text on the website is a challenge and it is making me brush up on my own Egyptian knowledge in a hurry. So that is good, at least. There is the opportunity to learn something here, I think, and I am sorry if any people on the list more knowledgeable than I am may be reluctant to get involved because "ghosts" are connected to this or some spurious aspects are present. All that can be set aside and the opportunity to teach is also present. This is not "radical" or "weird" stuff at all. If Hulme should, for instance, write "xpr" as "heira", (as he seems to do at least once in the text) that cannot be unexpected at all, because it has already been shown in the Amarna Letters (at least) that this was pronounced as "hur". And so on and so forth. Marianne Luban ==============================================================================