Revisiting the lily

Looking back at my personal notes and some previous online conversations concerning the common words for 'lily' or 'flower' that spread across the Mediterranean, I believe there's still some unfinished business.


A conflict arises

Under Hittite alel-, Jaan Puhvel lists off related forms in a multitude of languages showing that this word must have been an important "culture word" since olden times. I surmised and still surmise that Egyptian is the one ultimate source behind all of this. I eventually reasoned to myself that the Ancient Egyptian feminine noun written only as ḥrr.t was once pronounced *ḥalūrat (~  *ḥarūrat) guided in part by the Coptic forms with vowels explicitly written in a Greek-based alphabet.

Everything seemed fine until I started to question when exactly Egyptian *ū evolved into *ē and how. Foreign texts from the Amarna period seem to suggest that a vowel-sound like *ū must still have been spoken at about 1350 BCE. The cuneiform inscription labeled EA 368 records the numeral mu-ṭu (the Egyptian word for 'ten'), leading therefore to Callender's *mūḏaw (whose orthography I simplify to *mūḏu). Clearly the eventual change to *mēḏ- (Sahidic Coptic mēt) hadn't yet taken place.


The Minoan perspective

Meanwhile, the hypothetical Minoan loan *aléri 'lily' had emerged out of the illuminating conversations I had with Minoan Language Blog's Andras Zeke. With the former Egyptian form I've attempted, I can't sensibly explain the connections Zeke had alluded to between a certain Cretan Hieroglyphic plant glyph known as CHIC 031 and its later derivative Lin AB 27 which has been given the value of RE. (See John Younger's The Cretan Hieroglyphic Script: A review article in Minos 31-32, 1996. It's mentioned in the middle of page 397.) A Mycenaean loan from Minoan can cleanly explain later Classical Greek λείριον (léirion) 'lily' and so this serves to doubly assure the term *aléri.

Surely the phonetic value of CHIC 031 and Lin AB 27 reflects the actual Minoan word for a flower or lily but to get *aléri out of *ḥalūrat, I would have to assume that the word was loaned only by the **closing of the 2nd millennium BCE** when the Egyptian vowel shift in question must have taken place! Ironically this is when the Minoan language was also becoming extinct (if not already moribund as the Achaeans swept through). It could never explain the said Cretan Hieroglyph dated to as early as the 17th century BCE.

Ground control, we have a problem.


Everything's coming up roses (or Egyptian lilies)

This all seems remedied however if I simply ammend the Egyptian 'flower' term to *ḥalīrat. Given that, the Egyptian term must be borrowed into Minoan around or before 1700 BCE. Minoan *aléri would acquire a new specialized meaning of 'lily' as well. The Cretan hieroglyphic lily symbol is subsequently created, understandably employed to write LE ~ RE ("l" and "r" not being distinguished in both Linear A and Linear B scripts) since this is afterall the stressed syllable of the surmised word. Sahidic hrēre should also be accounted for in the same way that Egyptian *rīʕa 'sun' likewise produces rē.

At any rate, this is one confusing little word but who knows what new weeds I might yet dig up in this untamed flower garden.

New info on 'lily'

After my last post just beforehand I ended up finding a slew of more 'lily' loanwords and relevant info. A new pattern is starting to reveal itself that adds to what I previously said. Previously I justified a Minoan reconstruction *léri (Lat lilium, Gk leirion) with *e rather than a possible alternative *ai and this is helped along by the Greek geographical name Lerna which may specifically attest to *e if meaning '(Place) of Lillies'. If this turns out to be off the mark, nonetheless ne'er a critic can question the power of my imagination.

But check this out now:

• Hittite alel 'flower'
• Egyptian ḥrr.t 'flower'

Despite displaying a more generalized meaning 'flower', the words may very well be related to 'lily' as many argue^[1]. But exactly how? The curse here is the persistent ignorance and avoidance of establishing Egyptian vocalism in words. The chic thing to do is simply write the consonants and leave any mention of vowel reconstructions to stuffy academics who publish obscure works well beyond the hands of the general public, hidden somewhere in some journal perhaps rather than out in the open in general references which opt to err on such a safe side as to shun any informative position altogether on the etymology, assigning it nebulous catch-all phrases like "from Pre-Greek" or "from an unknown Mediterranean source". WHY??? What on earth is wrong with being accurate? Aside from Adolf Erman's casual attempt of *ḥréret, I see no other mention online of what the vowels in this particular word may be. All these purely consonantal transcriptions do is mire everything in artificial mystery. Let's piece this together ourselves then.

In the Sahidic dialect of Coptic, the word has become ϩρⲏρⲉ with its feminine termination -ⲉ securely from Middle Egyptian *-at /-aʔ/. Its letter eta may be traced back ultimately to Old Egyptian *ū but, somewhere in the second millenium BCE, Loprieno educates us that it had already become *ē^[2]. This points me then to an original *ḥarūrat becoming *ḥarērat /ħə'ɾe:ɾəʔ/ at precisely the time we need to source the lurking Minoan term with just a slight modification: *aléri. I had missed the unaccented initial vowel so common in Minoan and which must reflect the Egyptian first syllable /ħə/. This then establishes the Hittite form as a borrowing directly from Minoan and which in turn implies that specialization to 'lily' came after this time. Lerna can now point to earlier *Alérina without problems considering Diktē < *Adíkituna.


UPDATES
(2010 Apr 13) Correction in "In the Sahidic dialect of Coptic, the word has become xrere [...]". Should be hrēre, a plain /h/. Thanks to fiosachd. And upon closer inspection, unaccented *a in Egyptian should be /ə/, not /a/. As I say, it's nice to be accurate.
(2010 Apr 14) Chuck Coleman corrects further: /hrerə/ (eta = short /e/ in Coptic). Upon reading further, this may indeed be more accurate and yet it dangerously strays us off topic. Ergo, all indication of Coptic phonetics in my above account has been eradicated in order to return to the main matters: 1) the etymology of 'lily', and 2) the vocalism of ḥrr.t 'flower' in the 2nd millennium BCE.


NOTES
^[1] Brown, Israel and Hellas - Vol. 3 (2001), p.46 (see link); Puhvel, Hittite etymological dictionary - Vol. 1 Words beginning with A (1984), p.33.
^[2] Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction (1995), p.38 (see link).

Loprieno on Middle Egyptian Vocalism

After reading Loprieno's version of Middle Egyptian in Ancient Egyptian, I have some reservations. While there is no doubt that his book is chalked full of knowledge and facts about the Egyptian and Coptic languages, I can't help but think that the vowels in Middle Egyptian could be reconstructed a little better. In some cases, his reconstructions even seem a little, dare I say, implausible. For one thing, it seems to me that there is no point in reconstructing anything but a schwa for all unstressed vowels. Evidentally, based on Coptic evidence, unstressed vowels must have fell together anyway as confirmed by John Collender who writes that this event happened before the Late Egyptian period. Also, it seems to me that long vowels as predicted by Coptic might be explained on the phonetic level rather than the phonemic, based largely on the structure of the Middle Egyptian syllable (i.e. long vowels in open syllables; short vowels in closed syllables).

So, for the past few months now, I've been pompously pondering on how I would reconstruct Middle Egyptian more precisely. Quite frankly, I can't say that I'm anywhere near an expert in Egyptian linguistics yet. However I do understand how languages work and I can't resist exploring new ideas. We can compare Loprieno's version of the Egyptian numerals from “one” to “ten” as exemplars of what dissatisfies me about his reconstructions and what my own mind is instinctively concocting for better or worse.

	Loprieno (1995)[1]	My attempt	Sahidic Coptic
wˁ.w 'one'	*wúʕʕuw	*waʕ [wæʕ]	oua
sn.wy 'two'	*sinúwway	*səna(ʕ)wi [sə'næʕwɪ]	snau
ḫmt.w 'three'	*ḫámtaw	*ḫámətə ['xɑ:mətʰə]	šomnt
fd.w 'four'	*yifdáw	*fədá [ɸə'dɑ:]	ftoou
dỉ.w 'five'	*dī́yaw	*díyə ['dɪjə]	tiou
sỉs.w 'six'	*sáʔsaw	*sisá [sɪ'sɑ:]	soou
sfḫ.w 'seven'	*sáfḫaw	*sáfḫə ['sæɸxə]	šašf
ḫmn.w 'eight'	*ḫamā́naw	*ḫəmánə [xə'mɑ:nə]	šmoun
psḏ.w 'nine'	*pisī́jaw	*pəsíjə [pə'si:ɟə]	psis
mḏ.w 'ten'	*mū́jaw	*mújə ['my:ɟə]	mēt

I presume that Loprieno reconstructs *yifdáw '4' (and likewise John Callender reconstructs *yAssáw '6') based on Coptic --afte and -ase as in mNtafte '14', mNtase '16', jwtafte '24' and jwtase '26'. However, I wonder if this might be the result of an intrusive vowel inserted before the Coptic period, perhaps to avoid accentuation on the final syllable of a compound word since, coincidentally, it appears that both 'four' and 'six' must have had accent on the ultima in Middle Egyptian. Perhaps along the lines of: *mujə-fədá > *mujə-ftá > *mujáftə > Sahidic mNtafte. What's more, if the word 'four' is etymologically related to Hausa huɗu as is commonly understood then it's rather unlikely to me, based on both this and the Coptic reflex, that there was a prothetic syllable in this numeral and probably also in the word for 'six' for the same reason.

Then again, I admit I might be missing some important fact or another so if someone can please explain why Loprieno reconstructs things the way he does, don't be shy to post me a contrarian comment. On topics like these, I rather enjoy academic disagreements over and above homogeneous consensus.

NOTES
^[1] Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian (1995), p.71 (see link).

Egyptology and the modern world without time

So I've been obsessed with Egyptian for a while, noticing some interesting things about how the Egyptians represented words. It's not as simple as it first looks. Basically, Ancient Egyptians used pictographic symbols to spell out sounds like 's' or 'm', to represent entire words as a whole, and to signal what kind of word something is (ie. as 'determinatives'). So the word 'sun' can be spelled out as [rˁ] (for actual *rīʕa) with an accompanying determinative symbol to both describe the word (and perhaps also to delimit one word from the next somewhat), or it can be conveyed with the sun symbol itself followed by a single stroke to tell the reader that the symbol is to be read as a full word instead of a sound.

At first it all appears simple enough until you realize that Egyptian scribes were sometimes so ingeniously creative in exploring multiple ways of writing the same word that it's hard to tell sometimes whether a particular symbol in a particular sentence was really meant as a sound, an entire word or just a type of word.

To illustrate, take the word for 'father'. Sometimes people will tell you it was spelled [ỉtf] and sometimes [ỉt]. The later forms of this word in Coptic dialects show no trace of the supposed 'f' (Sahidic eiwt; see A Coptic Dictionary by Walter Crum, p.86). The sound 'f' in Ancient Egyptian is written as a horned viper. It turns out that since 'fathers' in the plural is also written out simply as three horned vipers, and since it's clear that the word is not really *[fff], we should probably understand the trailing 'f' not as a sound, but as a determinative conveying fatherhood somehow. Thus the true word for 'father' should be understood as simply [ỉt] despite the occasionally added horned viper glyph, thereby corresponding to both Coptic and Old Egyptian representations of the word lacking the 'f'. Anyone who continues to say that the word is really [ỉtf] should be slapped with a salami sandwich on rye.

Egyptian hieroglyphs never cease to fascinate me but all of these interesting cases of misreadings make me ponder more on how deceiving outdated books are, such as that of Sir Wallis Budge called An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary. You can see the various Egyptian representations of the word 'father' here as it was represented in a similarly ancient book by Erman and Grapow called Ägyptisches Handwörterbuch. As you can see, the word is often spelled various ways without 't' making it clear that the word couldn't in reality have contained the sound 'f'. There are many misreadings like these commited eons ago that deserve a footnote commentary yet are absent in these republished books, whether online or in print. Yet it seems to me that it's this up-to-date information like the above factoid that is more educational to the general public than continually dishing out outdated sources for empty profit.

At that thought, my cynical mind starts analysing what "Information Age" really implies and its relationship to the concept briefly mentioned in the movie Matrix, that of a world without time. In some ways perhaps, it's a world of misinformation, previously four-dimensional, flattened into a three-dimensional one that pales in comparison, a universe that no longer distributes what is currently known to the general public because the masses no longer care about truth.

And then I chuckle at my internal, nihilistic musings while sitting in the café as usual, sipping my coffee, in solitude and deep reflection.

Coptic online

I do fear that mycopticchurch.com who offered up a searchable Coptic dictionary (Sahidic dialect) is now no more (UPDATE May 26/07: Sweet joy of joys, a miracle! The site has returned to us). It's been many days since I've tried to access the site, only to see a blank "Page Not Found" screen. I know that they had been asking for donations from generous benefactors but perhaps between atheists, non-Christians and sectist Christians, no one felt enough love. Sad.

Thankfully though there are other websites, just not as web-friendly and searchable, like A Coptic Dictionary by Walter Ewing Crum, originally published in 1939.

I've been looking at Coptic recently because I've been turned on to the problems of the Middle Egyptian vowel system. I'm just sick and tired of staring at Sir Wallis Budge's fake vowels in Egyptian notation. I don't want to see made-up words like maat anymore (written vowellessly as [mȝˁt] in Egyptian), but rather *maʔūʕat (as reconstructed by John Callender) and also seen in the Amarna rendering of [nb-mȝˁt-riˁ] as Nimmuria (for *Nib-*Maʔūʕat-Rīʕa) during the Middle Kingdom.

I'm also sick and tired of seeing multiple and wildly differing versions of Egyptian words. A perfect example of this can be seen in some numerals. Sometimes people cite [ỉfdw] as "four", others just [fdw]. The word "seven" is represented in Budge's books as sekhef (nope, that's not a typo) even though it's [sfḫ] to everyone else. Some reconstruct *saɹsaw for "six" (à la Schneider) and some reconstruct *yassaw (Callender), but Budge publishes sås! And there's little to go on but things like Sahidic Coptic siou which fails to show the second "s". So something is obviously stinky and fishy. I have a hard time believing that something can remain a mystery like Middle Egyptian vocalism for a hundred years, despite a wealth of information to glean from, without these so-called mysteries being artificially propped up for the sake of commercialism.

Since I have my own Etruscan database (678 entries) with handy comments to myself on each word, I expanded my personal system to include Middle Egyptian (80 entries thus far). I found some interesting stuff and juicy contradictions along the way. I will share these ideas with you in the near future.