A matter of the Egyptian heart

The Egyptians placed a lot of importance on the heart and it was believed to be the seat of the mind and the soul. In the English-speaking world, we usually treat "heart" as a symbolism of the feelings but for ancient peoples around the Mediterranean, it was instead the seat of reason and essence. They didn't realize yet the significance of the brain in that regard and of the bodily organs that Egyptian mummifiers traditionally preserved in their sacred rites, the brain wasn't one of them.

Considering how central the heart was to the ancient Egyptian perception of the soul, one would think we'd know how to pronounce the word by now. In hieroglyphs, it's represented only in consonants and we write this in standard orthography as ỉb. This unfortunately gives the false impression that we should just assume a pronunciation of /ib/. Indeed, Antonio Loprieno does reconstruct */jib/ and compares it directly with Semitic *libb- assuming in turn an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction of *lib (see Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic reconstruction [1995], page 31). So isn't that our answer?

I'm beginning to think it isn't. For one thing, this reconstruction could only work for the earliest stage of Egyptian before all instances of word-initial *y- were nullified in the language. Since the reed leaf symbol came to represent a glottal stop as a result, by the time of Middle Egyptian, we could only have had *ib at best. So isn't this our answer then?

To be honest something still seems off. The related Cushitic branch seems to instead point to *lub- with a rounded back vowel. If we derived an expectation of the Egyptian form from that piece of external data, we'd arrive at *ub, not *ib! Adding to the difficulty is that Coptic has replaced the word for "heart" with a completely different word, hēt (from ḥȝty). No clues there.

So what can we rely on to decide the matter? I finally came across the Hebraicized name Ḥophraˁ, the name of a pharaoh of the sixth century BCE. The original Egyptian form is represented in hieroglyphic writing as wȝḥ-ỉb-rˁ. It suggests that ỉb was at that point pronounced like the -oph- in Ḥophraˁ, causing me to want to side with the Cushitic reconstruction. Therefore *ub seems far more sensible than Loprieno's *(y)ib.

I'm curious about this word lately and want to get it right because of the parallel Proto-Berber form reconstructed as *ulβ. I wonder then if this might suggest that Proto-Berber had coloured the prothetic vowel with the original quality of the root vowel now lost between the two surviving consonants. If so, I have no clue how to account for the *i in Semitic *libb- however. The Semitic vocalism of the root now becomes the outlier.

Reconstructing Egyptian n(n)egation

This is what Antonio Loprieno says about Ancient Egyptian negation on page 127 of Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction (1995):

"From an etymological point of view, nn is presumably the result of the addition of an intensifier to the nexal nj, much in the same way in which similar predicate denial operators developed in Indo-European languages: Latin non < *ne-œnum 'not-one,' English not, German nicht < *ne-wicht 'not-something,' etc."

From the immediate sound of it, I'd gather that Loprieno's use of "presumably" introduces a theory that the author himself considered possible but unverified. (The direct comparison with Latin non is naturally not to suggest that Egyptian and Indo-European negation are somehow related.) However this comparison still strikes me as awkward, perhaps because the direct comparison of the intensifying -n of Latin non with a merely implied suffix *-n in Egyptian nn is just *too* conveniently similar to me.

I also question that this transliterated nn properly reflects the intentions of the Egyptian scribes to write two instances of actual /n/. The simultaneous use of a negation nj suggests another interpretation to me. I find that in a wide number of languages, a negational morpheme will have both full and reduced variants which may share a common etymology. In French, for example, there is both unbounded non (when answering questions or negating adjectives, for example) and the reduced form ne used before verbs (normally with added pas, plus, guère or jamais after the verb, of course).

So can I get away with imagining something like Middle Egyptian *anī with reduced *ani behind spellings nj and nn respectively? How have others reconstructed this word? In this view, the terminating -n in the latter transliteration would not be actually phonetic but rather the byproduct of the lenient rules of the Egyptian writing system in how speech sounds are expressed. Consider that the Egyptian writing system evolved not just pragmatically as a writing system but also as a kind of sacred art form with much room for artistic creativity. As we see by how negation was often written (see image above), the second glyph (water symbol) may simply be meant to reinforce the /n/ already represented by the double-arms. And when we find, for example, the negational double-arms followed by not one but two water symbols, does this really prove two literal /n/'s? Or is it meant as a clever rebus showing a "dualized" /n/, thereby to be read nj (nb. the dual marker happened to be -j)?

Loprieno does in fact confess back on page 125:

"[...] the second one shows the same logographic sign accompanied by the phonogram n /n/ [...] and is conventionally transliterated nn, although it probably exhibited just a single /n/; [...]"

When I think about it more, these choice of glyphs to write negation in hieroglyphs is likely to have come about simply to disambiguate from the word 'of' which was already written as a single n. In actual speech, the difference between words 'of' and 'not' then should depend only on the choice of accompanying vowels surrounding the single /n/.

If so, Loprieno's example of Latin non and the suggestion of an alleged intensifying suffix amounts to a bit of a distraction from a likelier reality, as far as I can piece this together so far.

UPDATES
(2011 June 20) I repaired a teensy error I just noticed in my post, "the masculine dual marker happened to be -j", which I corrected to "the dual marker happened to be -j" since technically the masculine dual in all was properly -wj while it was -tj in the feminine dual.

How many fingers do you see?

Phoenix recently relayed a story told him by his teacher of Berber which was in turn recounted to him by an aged Morrocan professor about an interesting coincidence between the names Crete, Kos and Samos and the Berber numbers for 'three', 'four', and 'five'. This fun game of telephone may remind one of how Plato got his hands on the whole Atlantis scoop and how things got blown totally out of proportion thereafter.

Lest anyone take the hearsay seriously, I should stamp out that notion quickly. It's merely an idle novelty of factlessness, of course. I'm not sure about the real origins for the name of Crete or Kos offhand. However, I can manage to cut off one of these pernicious tentacles of ignorance by referring to dear Strabo who had long ago alluded to a connection between the name Samos and words for 'high' (Strab., Geo. 8.3.19) which, it turns out, are Semitic. Given its history, the naming of Samos is attributed therefore to Phoenicians and not to the counting proficiency of the Berber.

A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system, part 2

(Continued from A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system.)

In my view, long-range comparative linguists who think that they have to make a really long list of highly tentative cognates to impress people are a dime a dozen. What seperates the wheat from the chaff is how structured and attentive to detail a theory is. A theory without a structure isn't a theory; it's nothing more than a tale heard at a local pub. Publishing drunken tales still doesn't make them theories.

So this is why I encourage people who are interested in this topic to first explore the Nostratic pronominal system because it's safe to say that if the premise of Nostratic has any truth to it, there should be an underlying pronominal system that explains the interrelationship of pronominal systems of later language groups that Nostratic is said to have begotten. We should be starting with these questions instead of putting the cart before the horse and comparing look-alike words by pure, directionless whim. Knowing how these pronominal systems are related to each other goes a long way to understanding the evolution of Nostratic and to finding more credible sound correspondences.

Now since this is all at the level of entertaining conjecture, I'll just spit out what I think, like the drunken bar patron that I am. Grab yourselves a drink too, my buddies! There is one interesting, recurring feature in Nostratic language groups that I notice: a suppletive system involving two very unrelated forms for each person. So for example, in Indo-European we have two sets of pronominal endings in use: the *mi-set (*-m, *-s, *-t) and the *h₂e-set (*-h₂e, *-th₂e, *-e). The former set was used for imperfective forms and the latter for perfective forms in most IE languages while in Anatolian it seems that verbs were inherently part of either a mi- or hi-conjugation class. We see in Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut languages a shared theme of subjective-objective conjugation and again there are two different sets of endings that seem to be quite ancient (e.g. Hungarian 1ps -m & -k, 2ps -d & -l). Bomhard believes that Dravidian is also a Nostratic language but Dravidian uses quite different pronouns in the first and second person from the other Nostratic languages (*yān, *nīn) forcing him to reconstruct extra Nostratic pronouns just to account for them. In Afro-Asiatic languages, yet again, we apparently have two different sets (Middle Egyptian *anāka "I" > Sahidic Coptic anok versus Middle Egyptian *anāna "we" > Sahidic Coptic anon).

So I figure the best way to explain that is to propose a suppletive absolutive-ergative system for Nostratic as follows (note that my intention is to conjecture for the sake of discussion):

	ergative	absolutive
1ps	*nu (> *mu)	*hu
2ps	*tu	*nu
3ps	*ca	*ʔi

These pronouns might have optionally bore the suffix *-n for uncertain reasons. Absolutive pronouns are used for the agent of intransitive verbs and patients of transitive verbs while ergative pronouns are used for the agents of transitive verbs. As a result, we would expect to see the ergative and absolutive pronouns eventually attached to verbs as affixes in a new subjective-objective conjugation as I believe could have happened in a hypothetical ancestor of Indo-European, Altaic, Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut and Dravidian. In Indo-European, a subjective-objective system could eventually evolve into the mi- and hi-classes of Anatolian IE because some verbs by nature are more apt to be either subjective or objective. It appears that an extra element *-e has been added to this absolutive set at an early stage of PIE, perhaps to use it for transitive verbs by marking it with a dummy object (nb. PIE *i- "he, she, it" and *e "here, there"). The same system can evolve into a contrast of imperfective and perfective as well because there is an implicit nuance of modal differences when dealing with subjective and objective conjugation as in the Siberian language called Nenets. Verbs lacking objects tend to convey a perfective sense^[1]. The PIE 2ps in *-s can be explained by softening of final *-t in word-final position and the 3ps in *-t can be attributed to the attachment of the demonstative stem *to- to an originally vowel-final form long after. In boreal languages like Uralic-Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan, the subjective-objective system could have evolved into *-m versus *-ɣ and 2ps *-t versus *-n. This system also helps to explain what would have happened in Dravidian. Simply put, Dravidian could have opted to generalize the absolutive pronouns for both agents and patients of actions and thus PDr *yān < *yan < *ʔin < *hun "I (abs.)" and PDr *nīn < *nin < *nun "you (abs.)".

NOTES
^[1] See Pedersen, Zur Frage nach der Urverwandtschaft des Indoeuropäischen mit dem Ugrofinnischen, Memoires de la Société Finnoougrienne 67, pp.311-315, Helsinki. He discusses the derivation of PIE's so-called "perfective" endings from a pre-IE intransitive conjugation. Also Abraham/Kulikov (eds.), Tense-Aspect, Transitivity and Causativity (1999), pp.21-42, Amsterdam. Kulikov shows a relationship between imperfectives and transitives (and conversely between perfectives and intransitivity) using similar data from Yukaghir and Aleut.

A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system

I'm sure I must have hinted before that I hate when some treat long-range theories (like Nostratic, North Caucasian, Dene-Caucasian, or whatever far-away proto-language) as if they're written in stone. A person with a level head recognizes these ideas for what they are, idle conjectures requiring many ammendments before something more substantial can be made of them. However, I'm not against conjecture as long as it's fully differentiated from facts or well-substantiated theories. I also think there is an important difference between sharing conjectures for discussion on a blog or in a forum versus wasting trees to write a manifesto of your pseudolinguistic doctrine for you to enforce on disbelievers.

As much as I sound like a conservative fart for downplaying long-range comparison, I'm actually quite interested in it. It's just that I haven't read anything serious enough for me to go "wow!" yet and as I learn more, the errors in books start to become more apparent. Overall, I'm the most impressed (in a very moderate sense) by the Nostratic hypothesis as presented by Allan Bomhard who proposes that Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Eskimo-Aleut, Elamite, Dravidian, Sumerian, Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic language families come from a parent language dated to about 15 000 BCE in a period following the last ice age. He wasn't the first to come up with this century-old theory but he had a few different takes on it. For now, Nostratic is not an established theory because it doesn't present enough evidence to prove its claims, but it doesn't hurt to suggest further improvements that may help to inspire discussion and, just maybe, progress.

When looking through Allan Bomhard's Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996) or The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship (1994) co-authored by Allan Bomhard and John Kerns, one thing that I noticed was how many pronouns are being reconstructed without a clear structure. This is but one of a number of serious gaps in this theory just waiting to be resolved. The reconstructions presented by Bomhard and Kerns are always cited ad nauseum in ablaut pairs (e.g. *ma-/mə-) which of course serves no other purpose than to make the book twice as long. Since the ablaut patterns are said to be regular, there is no need to cite the second pair of each reconstruction any more than it is necessary to cite the Indo-European root *bʰer- as *bʰer-/*bʰor-/*bʰēr/*bʰr̥- each and every time. So I will dispense with irrelevancies and cite only the first pair of each of their reconstructions below.

First off, Bomhard and Kerns, on page 3 of The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship, show us this list of pronouns in the 1st and 2nd persons: *mi "I" [1ps], *tʰi "you" [2ps], *ma "we" [1pp.inclusive], *wa "we" [1pp] and *na "we" [1pp]. Immediately after are "notes" which are hampered either by irrelevancies or false information. For example, it suffices to say that Indo-European (IE) has a 1ps enclitic pronoun *me, 1ps genitive *mene, verbal 1ps thematic secondary ending *-m and verbal 1pp ending *-mes, the last being nothing more than a 1ps element with the plural ending *-es. So indeed there is ample evidence of an underlying 1ps pronominal root *me- in the deepest recesses of IE's prehistory. It's development in IE's Celtic branch however is wasteful rambling since it's obviously immaterial to Nostratic reconstruction and *me is well established in all other branches of IE even without the consideration of Celtic. Basing an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction solely on Chadic is bad practice known as "reaching". The so-called Etruscan imperative endings cited (-ti, -θ, -θi) are without substantiation, if not provably false altogether, despite ad hoc claims made by some prominent Etruscologists such as Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante. The belief that these endings are imperatives are based on ad hoc comparisons with Indo-European imperatives in *-dʰí (e.g. *h₁sdʰí /ʔəsdí/ "be!").

These aren't all the first and second person pronouns that are suggested by Bomhard and Kerns (see here). False comparisons are made between an underlying Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut 1ps ending in a velar stop on the one hand and Indo-European *h₁eǵoh₂ (cited as *ʔekʼ-) on the other^[1]. Some fun pronoun splicing of random data from the Afro-Asiatic family and presto changeo, yet another 1ps pronoun, *ʔa-. Then don't forget Bomhard's 1st person pronoun *ʔiya, supposedly proved by evidence from Chadic.

So in the 1st person alone, we now have five claims: *ʔa-, *ʔiya-, *ma-, *na- and *wa-. I'll discuss this more later.

(Continue reading the sequel: A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system, part 2.)

NOTES
^[1] Read my views on the etymology of PIE's nominative 1ps pronoun in The origin of Indo-European ego.

Thoughts on Nostratic, Semitic 'seven' & neolithic trade

Numbers in protolanguages are one of those things that intrigues me for some reason and there are tonnes of things to talk about on this subject alone. Particularly when discussing prehistory. Allan Bomhard reconstructed a Nostratic root *sab- for "seven" (see Bomhard/Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship, 1994. p.361) which, I believe I've stated before, I don't buy for a second.

As much as I think it's worthy to reconstruct protolanguages and even to think seriously about long-range comparative linguistics, I'm not in favour of loose and ill-informed etymologies. This is one of those badly reconstructed items that needs to be undone since it's a fact that Proto-Semitic (PSem) *sabʕatum is reconstructed as a valid, masculine form of the numeral "seven" and it's also a fact that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) "seven" is *septm̥. It's self-evident that Indo-European had borrowed this word from Proto-Semitic peoples sometime before 4000 BCE since the word in Indo-European is unanalysable while in Proto-Semitic, the word is known to be formed from the numeric root *sabʕ- This speaks volumes about a widespread neolithic trade between speakers of both Indo-European and Semitic languages, not to mention a network of other protolanguages.

However, little else is said about this and IEists seem too busy with other things than to explore how the Pre-Indo-European dialects sat within the context of prehistoric society and the budding Mediterranean economy of the 7th and 6th millenia BCE. I seem to be one of the few even mentioning any of this at all. And I can't fathom why because it's a fascinating story.

Well, it turns out that our Jewish siblings at Forward are also aware of this fun linguistic factoid. They offered a funny article in December 2005 about the false Hebrew etymology for the word "British" in Is British Ish Brit?. After explaining how real linguistics words and renouncing these eyeball etymologies, they then mention:

"Yet even the invention of wine came at a relatively late stage of human development. There are some Hebrew-English word connections that may go back further. Take, for example, Hebrew sheva, “seven”: While its resemblance to the English numeral might appear a pure coincidence, there are reputable linguists who think that it isn’t and that sheva and seven’s oldest ancestors, conjectured Proto-Semitic sab`atum and conjectured Proto-Indo-European septm, may owe their similarity to contact as much as 10,000 years ago between early Indo-European and Semitic speakers in or near the eastern Mediterranean."

Yep, and it's very correct. For those not caught up on the subject of neolithic languages, you may be forgiven if your mind may stray and start envisioning a crazy dialogue between Indo-European and Semitic traders:

Indo-European guy: So tell me, Ariel, do you have the bottles of wine my village requested?
Semitic guy: Yes, Hans, right on schedule. Straight from a village in Turkey. But oy! Was it ever a pain in the tokhes sailing down the Danube today. The winds were blowing and my sail almost broke off. Took me almost sab`atum days to get here just from one of your local villages upsteam! But listen to me, don't I sound like a pitshetsh. Forgive me, how was your day?
Indo-European guy: Say, what was that you said? Septm, what does that mean?
Semitic guy: Oh, I said, sab`atum, you know, the numeral after... how you say... sweks?
Indo-European guy: Ah yes! Hahaha. You know, Ariel, your word is so much better than our word. I'm tired of saying "five plus two" all the time, so from henceforth I shall say septm like you.
Semitic guy: Haha, wonderful, however you're pronouncing it all wrong. What's with you crazy Indo-Europeans and your inability to pronounce a simple pharyngeal?
Indo-European guy: Haha, let's talk more over a cup of medhu.
Semitic guy: Say what now?

Putting jokes aside, Indo-European speakers were undoubtedly a varied lot of people, differing from region to region in appearance, customs and dialect. Same too for Proto-Semitic speakers. Somewhere in the middle they met.

And now to offer my theoretical explanation of events that transpired. My personal suspicion is that a fair amount of Proto-Semitic (PSem) vocabulary was adapted into Pre-Indo-European sometime between 6000 and 5500 BCE because of a network of neolithic trade going on. The Semitic numeral for "seven" would have had stress accent on the first syllable: *sábʕatum. It was then adopted into Pre-Indo-European (Pre-IE) as *séptam. You see, being that Pre-IE speakers didn't have pharyngeals in their language, the sequence -bʕ- just sounded like a strange-sounding "p". The second "a", being unstressed in PSem, was probably pronounced as a short schwa and thus explicably inaudible to some Indo-European ears. PSem *a would have been a front vowel like the "a" in "cat" in order to explain its change to *e in Pre-IE.

Over time, the stress accent in Pre-IE eroded unstressed syllables, producing *séptm̥. This later changed to *septm̥ when the accent shifted to the last syllable to match the accent pattern of the neighbouring numeral *oḱtō "eight". This explains why a reduced syllable with only a nasal vowel came to have accent. Yet then why did they borrow the numeral and why is this same Semitic numeral also borrowed in other protolanguages like Proto-Kartvelian^[1]? I think this was simply a matter of religious connections that are lost to us. Later Babylonians associated certain numbers with deities and I suspect that a precedent existed in the neolithic, revolving particularly around the numerals "six" and "seven". These numbers must have symbolized someone or something that was widely thought to be important enough to extend beyond the many cultures and languages of Eastern Europe and the Near East. So this is why I think that the significance of these numerals was a matter of early religious beliefs.

So when you consider the potential for many of these Indo-Europeans to have been borrowed during the neolithic from Proto-Semitic, it makes many of Bomhard's reconstructions questionable, particularly those based solely on data from Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European. On the other hand, I wonder how many of Bomhard's "Nostratic cognates" could be reinterpreted as evidence for Semitic loans in IE. These are all things that make me go hmmmm...

NOTES
^[1] Proto-Kartvelian *šwid- "seven". According to Klimov (Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages, page 251), "a closer relationship of Akk. šibit 'seven' is quite evident".