6 ms·

Some of this is mistaking just how much we know of Egyptian phonology, which is actually very little. For some proper names, we have more context into how they

Some of this is mistaking just how much we know of Egyptian phonology, which is actually very little. For some proper names, we have more context into how they may have actually sounded based on transscriptions into Greek and Latin. But for every other word, we flat out have no idea on vowel sounds, because they were not written. Because of this, a couple sounds known as semivowels are sometimes transcribed as if they were vowels. For instance, in mother, the second glyph of a chick (𓅱) is marked as a U, but would be more appropriately be W. Same with the reeds (𓇋), which are sometimes marked as I but are rather Y. (And, in this article, apparently also FE...) I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language. Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa EDIT: Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation for how the article arrives at feathav using the same signs. I'll just link the most comprehensive one: https://www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-of-Middle-Egyptian https://www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-of-Middle-Egy... When you search, the relevant entry is the "plants 12" result.

dogma1138 9y ago
Specifically old Egyptian. Demotic and Coptic Egyptian is much better understood with the latter being still in use today. What most people think of Egypt is actually fairly recent history people tend to refer to events which usually happened during or around the Ptolemaic Kingdom period, by that time the Egyptians have already lost the ability to read or speak the language of the old kingdom and today we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids as far as time goes. Heck even if we take the biblical exodus story as a historic event then the pyramids were already ancient by the time Moses was stuttering let my peeps go. As for the article I don’t exactly understand it’s premise they open with Sanskrit and Persian having shared history with European languages but as both are indo-European languages why is this surprising? AFIAK this was known and acccoeted even in the 19th century.
- posterboy 9y ago
  Perhaps the old egyptain was never a coherent language. The pharaohs of the first dynasties are known to have united egypt, perhaps only then having created the opportunity for a united language to begin with, because it's reasonable to assume fragmented language beforehand. This means slow diffusion and many substrata of dialects and mutually almost incomprehensible variants as we still have (I don't know how bad it is in America but some German Dialects are incomprehensible). And Egypt isn't just the Nile that makes travel and exchange easy. E.g. nomads held key positions in trade and could hide a long time ignoring local struggles because they had domain knowledge in the desert, but also alienating themselves and their language. This increases the chance for a fragmented language continuum (a continuum of continua if you will, kinda fractal). You think the pyramids are old? To the contrary, the north African Sahara is speculated to be as young as 5,400 years (although I remember reading something north of 100'000; indeed, it is not certain, probably fluctuating on and off for periods of time, too). I think that the pre-desert is the archetype of the reed fields, the paradise of the Egyptian mythology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaru -- to top that off, could the tree of knowledge be symbolic for the rain forest that was in the Mediterranean basin before it flooded a handful of million years ago or afterwards as it swelled on and off further along? The article is too conservative? The article makes a few points about the wider Danube valley being central to early PIE civilization and industry. Which resonates very well with me. There is no certain PIE homeland hypothesis but this fits with the Krugan hypothesis.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Egypt went though several desertification periods some of which caused the collapse of the old kingdom this isn’t exactly a new discovery. When the pyramids were built the Sahara has already existed but it didn’t creep that far up north as it did today.
posterboy 9y ago
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that the phonetics would be one if not the most important feature. The article points out: "Here we investigate how deeply the roots go and how the system, its cosmology and language are intertwined with our own:". The symbolism is important and the table presented in TFA is amazing at that. > I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language. The t/d in * m?t- is more significant than that, whereas the p in pt is less significant across world wide languages. I'm just missing a node to Proto-Afro-Asiatic. > Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words. Please compare Punic [zayin] (Phoenician letter 工 = S - weapon) and Chinese [工] ("gon" etc., whence mandarin 工具 - tool). Obviously both are related to metal tools, perhaps a spade stuck in the ground symbolizing mining for ore, craft, and metal tools all in one sign, and in a different interpretation the outflow of molten metal from a primitive furnace. Once you have horses, trade is a matter of weeks or months. Metal working spread slowly, and with it the words. I don't know if asia discovered smelting independently, though, I'm just hypothesizing. The difference is that "mother" is a much older idea and the m- in principle a reference to the sound of suckling. [zayin]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet [工]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%A5 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%A5. PS: > EDIT: Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation Well, it is rather close to pt (stone), which in turn is close to Pth as in the name of the god. So there is an element of veneration (stone old anyone?) that isn't present in good ol' papa (just as some languages use different personal pronouns in different registers of speech). This link is strong as pater is still used in a religious sense. or comparing as/at: turkic "ata" (father) and "at" (horse, perhaps also venerated), which is the metaphorical head (cf. capital, cattle, aleph as god and head of the alphabet, A being a top-side-down bull head symbol). I Norse as "As" is a god again (whence "asgard"). As is also a singular unit in Latin for either a single dot on a dice (whence poker ace; we also still speak of faces of a die), or prominently as the nomination of roman pennies, which incidentally have the head of a god on its observe side which is hence colloquially called heads. Oh and isn't head somewhat rhyming with "it"? Egyptian [hr] seems to exhibits the same dualism, even if the different etymologies aren't clear (xal is mentioned, but not ħər - chief, free, noble [2]). The language as a whole over time is highly self modifying, and the result is like gene code really really tightly compressed from a really small seed expanding with exponential growth. There's certainly more to this, computational methods are gaining ground with time but archeology is a game against the time. There's a baseline to human language in most of it's dimensions. So while I don't know if the concept of parenthood was fundamental to evolution (I mean I guess so, but in what time frame), but one thing is clear if modern apes reveal any clue, the first phoneme was a skreek: "Ah Ah Ahh" (or "it it it" or something) -- cf. <https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook! [hr]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%B8%A5r#Egyptian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%B8%A5r#Egyptian [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asiatic/%C4%A7%C9%99r https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asi... PPS: At that I find funny how Morse-code, as in mono-phonetic strictly rhythm based speech, is comparable to language, and how by extension of the concept, many concepts rely on ordering and a representation in numbers. So I'm curious how important maths skills were to the development of language. Basically, human speech uses a highly variable non linear numeral system to code messages. The idea of an assembly language as intermediate to spoken language reminds me of Chomsky's universal grammar. The foundations of logic must be "univalent" simply because the brain structure has to adhere to it, geometrically, combinatorially, categorically, etc. p. p. Basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule

dogma1138 9y ago

Specifically old Egyptian. Demotic and Coptic Egyptian is much better understood with the latter being still in use today. What most people think of Egypt is actually fairly recent history people tend to refer to events which usually happened during or around the Ptolemaic Kingdom period, by that time the Egyptians have already lost the ability to read or speak the language of the old kingdom and today we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids as far as time goes. Heck even if we take the biblical exodus story as a historic event then the pyramids were already ancient by the time Moses was stuttering let my peeps go. As for the article I don’t exactly understand it’s premise they open with Sanskrit and Persian having shared history with European languages but as both are indo-European languages why is this surprising? AFIAK this was known and acccoeted even in the 19th century.

posterboy 9y ago
Perhaps the old egyptain was never a coherent language. The pharaohs of the first dynasties are known to have united egypt, perhaps only then having created the opportunity for a united language to begin with, because it's reasonable to assume fragmented language beforehand. This means slow diffusion and many substrata of dialects and mutually almost incomprehensible variants as we still have (I don't know how bad it is in America but some German Dialects are incomprehensible). And Egypt isn't just the Nile that makes travel and exchange easy. E.g. nomads held key positions in trade and could hide a long time ignoring local struggles because they had domain knowledge in the desert, but also alienating themselves and their language. This increases the chance for a fragmented language continuum (a continuum of continua if you will, kinda fractal). You think the pyramids are old? To the contrary, the north African Sahara is speculated to be as young as 5,400 years (although I remember reading something north of 100'000; indeed, it is not certain, probably fluctuating on and off for periods of time, too). I think that the pre-desert is the archetype of the reed fields, the paradise of the Egyptian mythology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaru -- to top that off, could the tree of knowledge be symbolic for the rain forest that was in the Mediterranean basin before it flooded a handful of million years ago or afterwards as it swelled on and off further along? The article is too conservative? The article makes a few points about the wider Danube valley being central to early PIE civilization and industry. Which resonates very well with me. There is no certain PIE homeland hypothesis but this fits with the Krugan hypothesis.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Egypt went though several desertification periods some of which caused the collapse of the old kingdom this isn’t exactly a new discovery. When the pyramids were built the Sahara has already existed but it didn’t creep that far up north as it did today.

posterboy 9y ago

I think you are making the mistake of assuming that the phonetics would be one if not the most important feature. The article points out: "Here we investigate how deeply the roots go and how the system, its cosmology and language are intertwined with our own:". The symbolism is important and the table presented in TFA is amazing at that. > I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language. The t/d in * m?t- is more significant than that, whereas the p in pt is less significant across world wide languages. I'm just missing a node to Proto-Afro-Asiatic. > Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words. Please compare Punic [zayin] (Phoenician letter 工 = S - weapon) and Chinese [工] ("gon" etc., whence mandarin 工具 - tool). Obviously both are related to metal tools, perhaps a spade stuck in the ground symbolizing mining for ore, craft, and metal tools all in one sign, and in a different interpretation the outflow of molten metal from a primitive furnace. Once you have horses, trade is a matter of weeks or months. Metal working spread slowly, and with it the words. I don't know if asia discovered smelting independently, though, I'm just hypothesizing. The difference is that "mother" is a much older idea and the m- in principle a reference to the sound of suckling. [zayin]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet [工]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%A5 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%A5. PS: > EDIT: Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation Well, it is rather close to pt (stone), which in turn is close to Pth as in the name of the god. So there is an element of veneration (stone old anyone?) that isn't present in good ol' papa (just as some languages use different personal pronouns in different registers of speech). This link is strong as pater is still used in a religious sense. or comparing as/at: turkic "ata" (father) and "at" (horse, perhaps also venerated), which is the metaphorical head (cf. capital, cattle, aleph as god and head of the alphabet, A being a top-side-down bull head symbol). I Norse as "As" is a god again (whence "asgard"). As is also a singular unit in Latin for either a single dot on a dice (whence poker ace; we also still speak of faces of a die), or prominently as the nomination of roman pennies, which incidentally have the head of a god on its observe side which is hence colloquially called heads. Oh and isn't head somewhat rhyming with "it"? Egyptian [hr] seems to exhibits the same dualism, even if the different etymologies aren't clear (xal is mentioned, but not ħər - chief, free, noble [2]). The language as a whole over time is highly self modifying, and the result is like gene code really really tightly compressed from a really small seed expanding with exponential growth. There's certainly more to this, computational methods are gaining ground with time but archeology is a game against the time. There's a baseline to human language in most of it's dimensions. So while I don't know if the concept of parenthood was fundamental to evolution (I mean I guess so, but in what time frame), but one thing is clear if modern apes reveal any clue, the first phoneme was a skreek: "Ah Ah Ahh" (or "it it it" or something) -- cf. <https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook! [hr]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%B8%A5r#Egyptian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%B8%A5r#Egyptian [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asiatic/%C4%A7%C9%99r https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asi... PPS: At that I find funny how Morse-code, as in mono-phonetic strictly rhythm based speech, is comparable to language, and how by extension of the concept, many concepts rely on ordering and a representation in numbers. So I'm curious how important maths skills were to the development of language. Basically, human speech uses a highly variable non linear numeral system to code messages. The idea of an assembly language as intermediate to spoken language reminds me of Chomsky's universal grammar. The foundations of logic must be "univalent" simply because the brain structure has to adhere to it, geometrically, combinatorially, categorically, etc. p. p. Basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule