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Egyptian And! Coptic Phol10logy Della R 430 Walt Leslau Bibliography Chapter 22 Afework, G. J. 1905. Gram'matica della lingua amarica. Rome: Tipografia Egyptian and! Coptic PhOl10logy della R. Accademia dei Lincei. Antonio Loprieno Armbruster, C. H. 1908. Initia amharica: An introduction to spoken Am­ University of California, Los Angeles haric. Part I, Gramn1ar. Cambridge: Cambridge lJniversity Press.. Cohen, Marcel. 1936. Traite de langue amharique CTravaux et menl0ires de 22.1. Introductiol1 l'Institut d'ethnologie 24). Paris. Institut d'ethnologie. At the present state of our knowledge, a discussion of Egyptian and Coptic . 1939. Nouvelles etudes dJethiopien'meridional. Paris: Champion. phonology must be addressed primarily as an issue of diachronic, rather [Anlharic, pp. 1-371.] than synchronic linguistics. While it is possible to recognize regular patterns Dawkins, C. H. 1969. The Fundamentals ofAmharic, rev. ed. Addis Ababa: of sound change in the history of the Egyptian language as a whole, includ­ Sudan Interior Mission. (1st ed., 1960). ing in many cases its Afroasiatic antecedents, the synchronic systelTIS of pho­ Guidi, Ignazio. 1889. Grammettica elementare della lingua amarica. ROIne: nological oppositions at any given time in the four millennia of the Tipografia della R. Accademia dei Lincei. productive history of this language often defy a clear analysis. Furthermore, Hartmann, J. 1980. Amharische Grammatik. (Aethiopistische Forschungen the dynamic models of historical phonology tend to hide many uncertainties 3). Wiesbaden: Steiner. behind the regularity of a reconstructed paradigm, conveying the misleading Les~au, Wolf. 1995. Reference Grammar of Amharic. Wiesbaden: Harras­ impression that for eacp' of the different phases of the language (Early Egyp- sowitz. , tian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptlan, Coptic) we are indeed able to estab­ Ludolf, Hiob. 1698. Grammatica linguae amharicae. Frankfurt aJm Main: lish a discrete phonological system. Prostat apud Johannen David Zunnerum. The phonetic realities underne~th the abstract phonological reconstruc­ Podolsky, Baruch. 1991. Historical Phonetics ofAmharic. Tel Aviv: author. tions are even more elusive: the traditional pronunciation and transliteration Praetorius, Franz. 1879. Die amharische Sprache. Halle: Waisenhaus. of many hieroglyphic phonemes rest upon hardly anything more than schol­ arly conventions, and even for the relatively well-known Coptic, in V\rhich ~ ~~ ~',> (Pn.AL~ll·) ptmN l,.O <T' {i of 'A fr-f fll (!\- ((f-..\'CLl.{b (NCr 'THf Egyptian sounds are rendered in a Greek-based alphabet, it is difficult to vl)t.lI\Nlf 112 cb f'f.£l) RY "v~ J "' 1<1\ '1 &: assess reliable phonetic values for'some of the Greek signs and of the De­ ",cc(1 r-'l (~~ 1\0 \A r tl\._ br 71 (l Tor' ()~N (eLj motic graphemes that were added to the Greek alphabetic set. ~1- In fact, the main reason for the'difficulties in reconstructing the phonol­ \1 ogy of Ancient Egyptian lies in the very nature of the writing systems: I-liero­ glyphs, Hieratic, and Demotic repltesent the mere consonantal skeleton of a word (and sometirnes only a portion thereof), followed by indicators of lexi­ cal classes, the so-called"determinatives." Semivocalic phonen1es are rarely indicated, vowels practically never. As for Coptic, in which vowels are in­ deed rendered, one should not underestimate the methodological difficulty inherent in the widespread assumption of a phonological or phonetic iden­ tity between a sp~cific Coptic sigri and its original value in the Greek sys­ tem-an identity which is by no means unquestionable. 431 432 Antonio Loprieno ~gypT:lan ana lJOprlC l~rJunUtugy "t,J,J Therefore, the reconstruction of the phonological inventor .ld of the which' one can both 1 .t the contemporary Egyptian pronunciation as J phonetic values i~ any period of the history of Egyptian is bound to remain ~:·/saltepnalri:lal and observe the correspondence Eg. <s> II Akk. <8>, both of highly hypothetical: it can only be approached through a heuristic procedure which were probably realized as [s] or as a sound very close to it (at least in in which three dimensions are checked against each other and mutually veri­ som.e dialects).4 fied (cf. § 22.2): the reconstruction of Afroasiatic prehistory, l the informa­ tion drawn from contemporary sources in other (mostly Semitic) languages 22.2.3. Egyptian renderings offoreign wordsJ with a better investigated phonology (Hoch 1991), and the laws of phono­ especially ofNorthwest Semitic origin logical evolution leading froln older Egyptian to Coptic.2 This criterion represents the symmetrical counterpart to tIle preceding one: it provides an insight into the phonology of contemporary Egyptian 'Nhile at the same time offering the possibility of verifying scholarly assumptions on 22.2. Heuristic criteria Semitic phonology. E.g., Northwest Sem. ~l- soper 'scribe' =:;> Eg. <tu-pa-r>. In spite of these difficulties, the study of Egyptian phonology has achieved The relevance of this piece of evidence is twofold: on the one hand, it raises significant progress since the initial studies of the late 19th century, both in questions about the phonological status and the phonetic realization of Eg. the assessment of consonanta1 values and in the reconstruction of vocalic lei, which is the palatal phoneme usually transcribed 1 by Egyptologists, phonemes and prosodic rules. To achieve this goal, scholars rely on four pro­ while on the other, it can also be used to shed some light on the value of the cedures of linguistic reconstruction.3 phoneme lsi (samekh), which originally must have been an affricate [is] in Semitic (cf. Faber 1990: 627; Hoch 1991: 484£.; Faber 1992). 22.2.1. Comparative Afroasiatic linguistics Egyptian is a language of the Afroasiatic phylum, and the presence of estab­ 22.2.4. The evidence provided by Coptic lished etymological correspondences offers a fundamental source for the re­ The latest stage in the development of Egyptian provides the broadest basis construction of phonological values. E.g., since Eg. <q3b> corresponds to for the study of the phonology of older periods of the language as well. E.g., Sem. qrb meaning 'interior part', one can confidently establish that Eg. <q> Eg. <w'b> 'pure', 'to be pure', 'prie$t' appears in Coptic in the lexemes =Iql and that <b> =Ib/. OyaaB 'holy', oYOlT 'to be pure', OyHHB 'priest'. This evidence enables us to reconstruct three different vocalization patterns underlying the saIne graphic 22.2.2. Contemporary transcriptions in foreign languages reality of hieroglyphic Egyptian: the stative )1- wif'baw 'he is pure', the infini­ Many Akkadian texts, especially from the archive of el-'.Amarna (15th-14th tive ~l- wa'db 'to become pure', and the noun ~. wI'ab 'priest'. At the same tilne, c. B.C.E.), contain Egyptian words, names, and short phrases in cuneiform this piece of evidence raises questions of consonantis.m, i.e., the fate of the transcription. Although the phonology and the grapherrlics of Al<kadian are phoIleIne III and the reason for the alternance B vs. 11 in the Coptic forms as themselves by no means fully decoded, these transcriptions provide a valu­ opposed to <b> in both cases in their Egyptian antecedents. able insight into the contemporary pronunciation of Egyptian.. E.g'~1 Eg. In the practice of Egyptian phonological reconstruction, these four as­ <stpnr'> 'the-one-whom-(the-god-)Ra-has-chosen' (royal name of :King pects appear constantly combined: while each of them, if considered individ­ Ramses II) appears in cuneiform. as sa-te-ep-na-ri/e-a, a form on the basis of ually, proves largely inadequate in order to determine a synchronic stage, together they convey a relatively homogeneous picture of the fundamental 1. Suggestions for the reconstruction of the phonological evolution from Afroasia.tic to Egyptian are presented by Schenkel 1990: 48-57; Kammerzell 1992; and Zeidler 1992. laws of Egyptian phonological development. What follows in the next para­ 2. The most complete description of these rules and of the patterns of Egyptian vocalization graphs (§ § 22.3-6) is a tentative historical phonology of Egyptian fronl its is found in Osing 1976: 10-30. Afroasiatic roots to alphabetic Coptic. Transcriptions from Egyptian and 3. Cf. Schenkel 1990: 23-28. This book presents the most up-to-date and compact picture of Egyptian phonology (pp. 24-93). I shall make specific references to it only in the rare 4. See Faber 1990: 627ff.; 1992. For dialectal differences in the case of AIde scf. von Soden cases in which my analysis differs from Schenkel's in a significant way. 1969 § 30. 434 Antonio Loprieno ngypuan ana ,,"-,uPrlC rnonology LfJ) Semitic follow the established conventions in these respectiv ~lds and are language', cf. Sen~ rgz (AI'. lag"aza 'to speak enigmatically', JHebr. l'z 'to rendered in italics; transliterations of graphemes without reference to their speak a foreign language'); AA ~"" oupp 'fly' > Eg. 'if} ~:·/')uffvjl > Coptic aq, cf. phonological status are indicated in angle brackets «x»; phonemes (/x/) and Sem. ~"" cjbb (Akk. dubbum, Ar. cjubab, Hebr. z~b{jb). tentative phonetic values ([x]) are represented according to IPA conventions. (b) AITIOng the liquids, the original opposition between nasal ~:. 11, latera.! At this point, a methodological warning is in order: in the case of Egyp­ ~"" 1, and vibrant ~""Tunderwenta profound reorganization, not yet fully under­ tian (and of many other 'philological' languages known only through writ­ stood in its specific details, in which a role was also played by dialectal va­ ten records), the distinction between the phoneme as the distinctive minimal rieties. AA ~:~n and ~"'r were kept as Eg. In! and IR/-the latter being the unit of the language (/x/) and the often much larger inventory of sounds ([x]) phoneme conventionally transcribed 3 by Egyptologists and traditionally representing its physical realizations is heuristically less practicable than for taken to be a variety of glottal ~top 17./, but in early Egyptian probably a languages with a better-·known p~onological structure: while scholars can "uvular trill,,;9 Eg.jnk ~:-/ja'nak/ (I(ammerze1l1991b: 201), Sem.
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