28 ms·

I hope you're not indicating the table corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphs with modern words, because that is by far one of the worse sections. It's an embodimen

I hope you're not indicating the table corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphs with modern words, because that is by far one of the worse sections. It's an embodiment of confirmation bias. Let's look at arm, which uses English as it's example. Ok, well obviously English didn't exist contemporarily with Egyptian, so let's go backwards. Proto-Germanic gives armaz, which isn't super surprising since anatomical terms are tend to be relatively stable. But PG began developing in Scandinavia around 750BC, still too early for old Egyptian. So let's go back to PIE, where we get the root h₂(e)r-, "to put together". So when we drive back to the contemporary language, we lose the connection to the meaning. And when we look at the development of that root into child languages, we get many related forms, with the arm branch only being one of them. We also get words like Latin armentum, relating to draft and herd animals. Or artus, relating to being close or dense. Or Greek ἁρμόζω, related to putting together. (Ancient Greek tends to be more conservative towards PIE.) We also get a lot of derivitives starting with R, because A derived from the PIE combination h₂e. So when the E was dropped in PIE forms, R tended to be the kept form. The final point being, that if there actually was such a strong symbolic influence that it managed to survive thousands of years to make it to modern English, you wouldn't expect all these other forms to have also developed using the same rules that led to arm. And that's where the bias comes in; ignoring all these other developments consistent with the exact same pattern that led to English arm. raoulduke already addressed the comments regarding attempting to extend it without taking into account my prior note regarding transcription of Egyptian. Morse code is an encoding, not a language. The same string of Morse code could, theoretically, represent two different meanings depending on which language was actually encoded. That's like trying to prescribe some sort of attributes to language by looking at ASCII. It's meaningless; they're artificial constructs with mathematical patterns because they were constructed with mathematical patterns...

posterboy 9y ago
> That's like trying to prescribe some sort of attributes to language by looking at ASCII Which is a fruitful approach [1]. That said, I doubt everything else you wrote, too. I can't make sense of your comment. > The final point being, that if there actually was such a strong symbolic influence that it managed to survive thousands of years to make it to modern English, you wouldn't expect all these other forms to have also developed using the same rules that led to arm. I'm not quite sure which "same rules that led to arm" you are talking about, but If you mean sound laws, then it is quite obvious that "such a strong symbolic influence" might lead to a sound law in the first place. Not just "Arm" but a bunch of symbols. You probably don't speak German so let give you another hint: An archaic German name for the eagle is "Arn" (now "Adler"). Coincidence? The symbolism is quite strong with this one, as the figure of the German parliament and incidentally the Egyptian hieroglyphs are heavy on ornithology, too. And it is notable that other PIE languages derive arm not from latin "bracchium" (from greek ...), hinting at a more complicated case and indeed, perhaps Egyptian influence (why not). However I'm sure you'd find the difference between h₃érō (>arn) and h₂er- (>arm) appreciable. I don't so much, because you would just have to go a few more steps back, perhaps, to find a common root. There is an insurmountable amount of theories and you dare to arm chair a hazard guess that Egyptain as root would be out of the question base on hypothetical sound laws that are in no small part based on the assumption that Egyptian couldn't have played a role in it. That, my friend, is circular reasoning (and appeal to authority). bʰer- ("to bear, carry") fits the usage of arms anyway, and I'm sure an eagle carrying away a bunny is an impressive sight, too -- but I'm rambling. Still, there's more: Bird wings are like arms, aren't they? Ancient Greek pterón* -- there's er in it, that's good enough for me, pashto has wozzar; Persian has bal, Latin ala -- still close enough -- and Somali has baal ... not too distant to Vol as in French "voliere" (aviary), from Latin volo (I fly), from weǵʰ (to bring transport). Zazaki (according to wiktionary), literally has per* (wing) as metaphor for arm. Sanskrit has pakṣa, Punjabi has paṅkh, Urdu has pankh, too, but Punjabi has also par. Maori has parpau. This is most likely of pre-PIE origin, I think. There's also navajo atʼaʼ; Quechua: raphra, rapra, likra, Kannada: rekke, Malayalam: ചിറക് (ml) (ciṟak). I rest my case. Obviously I am just picking the translations that I deem a fit and obviously there are gaping holes in my argument. I'm writing an internet comment, after all, not a dissertation. So I can reasonably lean a bit out of the window and try to read from cracked pots. I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps. Anyhow *bʰer- would explain bracchium, somewhat, disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law (Which, given nationalism and racism isn't all that far fetched, but still a far cry from a natural law). Although, wiktionary doesn't have the translations to Egyptian for either of these words and I haven't installed a proper font to read the table from the article, so I'm kind missing the point? > Greek ἁρμόζω, related to putting together compile<collect<carry [1] Zhang, Lecun "Byte-Level Recursive Convolutional Auto-Encoder for Text". https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01817 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01817
- jdmichal 9y ago
  You are still making the same mistakes propagated by the article in the first place and warned against by myself regarding Egyptian transcription and modern "pronunciation". I suggest you maybe educate yourself better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy... "The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by a few specialists in the language. For all other purposes, the Egyptological pronunciation is used, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology In this following quote, note the move from /tut/ to /tawat/, due to the transcribed U actually being W, because only consonants were written. "For example, the name twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn is conventionally pronounced /tuːtən.ˈkɑːmən/ in English, but, in his lifetime, it was likely to be pronounced something like [taˈwaːt ˈʕaːnxu ʔaˈmaːn]." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica... The bottom line is that we don't even know whether the Egyptian word for "arm" had an /a/-like sound. The symbol is actually the Egyptian "ayin" (ꜥ), not "A". In the same way, the vulture is "alef" (ꜣ), not "A". Also, this is all ignoring the tendency in the area to simplify writing systems through acrophony, in which the logographic symbol is converted to a phonetic one via its initial phonology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony > I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps. This is actually an anti-argument for you. This aligns with the same type of argument for "mama"- and "papa"-like sounds throughout the world: That the sound originates from onomatopoeia or a similar link and not through linguistic influence or origin. > ... disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law... You're misunderstanding the causality here. We call them laws precisely because they accurately explain the sound changes. Same as we describe physical laws because they explain the physics we witness. Not the other way around. "[Grimm's law] establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law My final statement on this is that, as far as I can tell, this entire thought process is nothing but the pigeon-hole principle as played out in linguistics. There are only so many productive sounds and many languages. Of course there will be some that look similar by sheer coincidence, especially when one takes such a flexible stance on phonetics and meaning when attributing links.

posterboy 9y ago

> That's like trying to prescribe some sort of attributes to language by looking at ASCII Which is a fruitful approach [1]. That said, I doubt everything else you wrote, too. I can't make sense of your comment. > The final point being, that if there actually was such a strong symbolic influence that it managed to survive thousands of years to make it to modern English, you wouldn't expect all these other forms to have also developed using the same rules that led to arm. I'm not quite sure which "same rules that led to arm" you are talking about, but If you mean sound laws, then it is quite obvious that "such a strong symbolic influence" might lead to a sound law in the first place. Not just "Arm" but a bunch of symbols. You probably don't speak German so let give you another hint: An archaic German name for the eagle is "Arn" (now "Adler"). Coincidence? The symbolism is quite strong with this one, as the figure of the German parliament and incidentally the Egyptian hieroglyphs are heavy on ornithology, too. And it is notable that other PIE languages derive arm not from latin "bracchium" (from greek ...), hinting at a more complicated case and indeed, perhaps Egyptian influence (why not). However I'm sure you'd find the difference between h₃érō (>arn) and h₂er- (>arm) appreciable. I don't so much, because you would just have to go a few more steps back, perhaps, to find a common root. There is an insurmountable amount of theories and you dare to arm chair a hazard guess that Egyptain as root would be out of the question base on hypothetical sound laws that are in no small part based on the assumption that Egyptian couldn't have played a role in it. That, my friend, is circular reasoning (and appeal to authority). bʰer- ("to bear, carry") fits the usage of arms anyway, and I'm sure an eagle carrying away a bunny is an impressive sight, too -- but I'm rambling. Still, there's more: Bird wings are like arms, aren't they? Ancient Greek pterón* -- there's er in it, that's good enough for me, pashto has wozzar; Persian has bal, Latin ala -- still close enough -- and Somali has baal ... not too distant to Vol as in French "voliere" (aviary), from Latin volo (I fly), from weǵʰ (to bring transport). Zazaki (according to wiktionary), literally has per* (wing) as metaphor for arm. Sanskrit has pakṣa, Punjabi has paṅkh, Urdu has pankh, too, but Punjabi has also par. Maori has parpau. This is most likely of pre-PIE origin, I think. There's also navajo atʼaʼ; Quechua: raphra, rapra, likra, Kannada: rekke, Malayalam: ചിറക് (ml) (ciṟak). I rest my case. Obviously I am just picking the translations that I deem a fit and obviously there are gaping holes in my argument. I'm writing an internet comment, after all, not a dissertation. So I can reasonably lean a bit out of the window and try to read from cracked pots. I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps. Anyhow *bʰer- would explain bracchium, somewhat, disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law (Which, given nationalism and racism isn't all that far fetched, but still a far cry from a natural law). Although, wiktionary doesn't have the translations to Egyptian for either of these words and I haven't installed a proper font to read the table from the article, so I'm kind missing the point? > Greek ἁρμόζω, related to putting together compile<collect<carry [1] Zhang, Lecun "Byte-Level Recursive Convolutional Auto-Encoder for Text". https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01817 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01817

jdmichal 9y ago
You are still making the same mistakes propagated by the article in the first place and warned against by myself regarding Egyptian transcription and modern "pronunciation". I suggest you maybe educate yourself better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy... "The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by a few specialists in the language. For all other purposes, the Egyptological pronunciation is used, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology In this following quote, note the move from /tut/ to /tawat/, due to the transcribed U actually being W, because only consonants were written. "For example, the name twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn is conventionally pronounced /tuːtən.ˈkɑːmən/ in English, but, in his lifetime, it was likely to be pronounced something like [taˈwaːt ˈʕaːnxu ʔaˈmaːn]." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptological_pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica... The bottom line is that we don't even know whether the Egyptian word for "arm" had an /a/-like sound. The symbol is actually the Egyptian "ayin" (ꜥ), not "A". In the same way, the vulture is "alef" (ꜣ), not "A". Also, this is all ignoring the tendency in the area to simplify writing systems through acrophony, in which the logographic symbol is converted to a phonetic one via its initial phonology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony > I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps. This is actually an anti-argument for you. This aligns with the same type of argument for "mama"- and "papa"-like sounds throughout the world: That the sound originates from onomatopoeia or a similar link and not through linguistic influence or origin. > ... disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law... You're misunderstanding the causality here. We call them laws precisely because they accurately explain the sound changes. Same as we describe physical laws because they explain the physics we witness. Not the other way around. "[Grimm's law] establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law My final statement on this is that, as far as I can tell, this entire thought process is nothing but the pigeon-hole principle as played out in linguistics. There are only so many productive sounds and many languages. Of course there will be some that look similar by sheer coincidence, especially when one takes such a flexible stance on phonetics and meaning when attributing links.