Mai Samih discovers how ancient Egyptian expressions and traditions have survived to the present day
Today’s Egyptians have inherited from their Pharaonic ancestors not only their distinguished civilisation, but also certain traditions and words from their hieroglyphic vocabulary.
Hanging an image of a blue glass eye or a metal hand, called a khamsa wa khemesa, on the wall to protect people from the evil eye is an ancient Egyptian habit. The same is true of the belief that a cat has nine lives. According to the ancient Egyptian religion, cats are the sun god Ra’s incarnation and share some of his characteristics, among them having nine lives.
In the version of Arabic spoken by Egyptians today more customs and traditions can be discovered. This is well illustrated in a book entitled The Origins of Slang Words in the Ancient Egyptian Language by Sameh Maqqar. The author has based his work on books by renowned Egyptian and foreign Egyptologists, including The Ancient Egyptian Language by Abdel-Halim Noureddin, professor of ancient Egyptian at Cairo University, and Egyptian Grammar by the British Egyptologist E A Wallis.
Maqqar’s book uncovers, through many ancient Egyptian words, the characteristics of the ancient Egyptians, together with the kinds of lives they lived.
According to Maqqar, a modern Egyptian is given his share of the language used by his forefathers in the cradle. This is exemplified in the early vocabulary used by Egyptian children today. For example, embo (I’m thirsty) is the Egyptian slang children use to communicate their thirst. It is derived from the combination of two ancient Egyptian words eb (I want) and mo (water) and changed to its current form for ease of pronunciation.
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Sunday, November 29, 2015
What Is Coptic and Who Were the Copts in Ancient Egypt?
A short history of ancient Egyptian language
By Megan Sauter
What is Coptic, and who were the Copts in ancient Egypt?
The Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Even though it looks very different from texts written in Old Egyptian using hieroglyphs, the two are related. In his article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Leo Depuydt gives a short history of the development of ancient Egyptian language and shows where the Coptic language fits in that timeline, as well as answering the question: Who were the Copts.
What Is Coptic?
The Coptic language developed around 300 C.E. in Egypt. It is Egyptian language written using the Greek alphabet, as well as a couple of Demotic signs. This script was much easier to learn than the earlier writing systems used in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts.
Coptic was the lingua franca of Egypt when Egypt was predominantly Christian. Many assume that the Coptic language was developed primarily to spread Christianity, but Depuydt disagrees. He supports the great Belgian Coptologist Louis Théophile Lefort’s theory that the Coptic language was created by another group—the Jews.
By Megan Sauter
What is Coptic, and who were the Copts in ancient Egypt?
The Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Even though it looks very different from texts written in Old Egyptian using hieroglyphs, the two are related. In his article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Leo Depuydt gives a short history of the development of ancient Egyptian language and shows where the Coptic language fits in that timeline, as well as answering the question: Who were the Copts.
What Is Coptic?
The Coptic language developed around 300 C.E. in Egypt. It is Egyptian language written using the Greek alphabet, as well as a couple of Demotic signs. This script was much easier to learn than the earlier writing systems used in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts.
Coptic was the lingua franca of Egypt when Egypt was predominantly Christian. Many assume that the Coptic language was developed primarily to spread Christianity, but Depuydt disagrees. He supports the great Belgian Coptologist Louis Théophile Lefort’s theory that the Coptic language was created by another group—the Jews.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Bilingual Notaries in Hellenistic Egypt: A Study of Greek as a Second Language - A Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.01.39
Marja Vierros, Bilingual Notaries in Hellenistic Egypt: A Study of Greek as a Second Language. Collectanea hellenistica, 5. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012. Pp. 291. ISBN 9789065691033.
Reviewed by Sofía Torallas Tovar, CSIC, Madrid; Univ. of Chicago
The study of languages in contact is a relatively recent development which has based its progress mainly on field work performed with actual speakers of living languages. This field of linguistics has provided an invaluable theoretical frame to apply to the languages of the ancient world or corpus languages for which the absence of live speakers leaves the researcher only with the written sources. Egypt – especially Graeco-Roman Egypt – provides the perfect laboratory to experiment on language contact in antiquity, not only because it was a multilingual society with specific sociolinguistic characteristics which can be described and thus allow a more accurate evaluation of the sources, but also because it is virtually the only place in the Mediterranean where an enormous amount of documents written on papyrus have been preserved thanks to the climatic circumstances. Multilingualism in the papyri started to receive attention in the 1950s, 1 although it was later, starting in the 1980s when when more extensive work was undertaken, especially by Peremans and Remondon. Initial results on linguistic aspects of this situation of contact needed to be narrowed down, for the bulk of documents belonged to too wide a geographical and temporal span. Working on specific archives, where the speakers can be better defined (as bilingual speakers, native Egyptians, monolingual Greeks, etc.) introduces a better organisation into the field. As Katelijn Vandorpe comments, in her essay “Archives and Dossiers,” (in R.S. Bagnall, The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, Oxford University Press, 2009: 216), “Where unrelated texts are like instant snapshots, archives present a coherent film of a person, a family, or a community and may span several months, years or decades.” And I may add that the archives provide a more complete and defined picture of the linguistic situation within these families or communities.
Marja Vierros, Bilingual Notaries in Hellenistic Egypt: A Study of Greek as a Second Language. Collectanea hellenistica, 5. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012. Pp. 291. ISBN 9789065691033.
Reviewed by Sofía Torallas Tovar, CSIC, Madrid; Univ. of Chicago
The study of languages in contact is a relatively recent development which has based its progress mainly on field work performed with actual speakers of living languages. This field of linguistics has provided an invaluable theoretical frame to apply to the languages of the ancient world or corpus languages for which the absence of live speakers leaves the researcher only with the written sources. Egypt – especially Graeco-Roman Egypt – provides the perfect laboratory to experiment on language contact in antiquity, not only because it was a multilingual society with specific sociolinguistic characteristics which can be described and thus allow a more accurate evaluation of the sources, but also because it is virtually the only place in the Mediterranean where an enormous amount of documents written on papyrus have been preserved thanks to the climatic circumstances. Multilingualism in the papyri started to receive attention in the 1950s, 1 although it was later, starting in the 1980s when when more extensive work was undertaken, especially by Peremans and Remondon. Initial results on linguistic aspects of this situation of contact needed to be narrowed down, for the bulk of documents belonged to too wide a geographical and temporal span. Working on specific archives, where the speakers can be better defined (as bilingual speakers, native Egyptians, monolingual Greeks, etc.) introduces a better organisation into the field. As Katelijn Vandorpe comments, in her essay “Archives and Dossiers,” (in R.S. Bagnall, The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, Oxford University Press, 2009: 216), “Where unrelated texts are like instant snapshots, archives present a coherent film of a person, a family, or a community and may span several months, years or decades.” And I may add that the archives provide a more complete and defined picture of the linguistic situation within these families or communities.
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