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Middle Egyptian via French & English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 35 16 June 2012 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm always looking for good excuses to use my French. But, like everybody else here, I
occasionally suffer from fits of wildly impractical wanderlust. And what's not to like about Middle Kingdom Egyptian? Hieroglyphs, an enormous and ancient literature, writing carved into everything, incredible exhibits in the Louvre? I'd love to have some modest A1/A2 skills in Egyptian—enough to decipher some phrases here and there, and to slowly plow through harder stuff with a grammar and a glossary. But more than anything, this is Yet Another Excuse to Use My French. So I'd love to "ladder" this language through my French for the most part, falling back to English resources only where they're seriously awesome. Has anyone tackled Middle Egyptian? What resources did you use? Here's what I found after an hour or two of searching: Assimil : L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. This has really enthusiastic reviews (here and elsewhere), and I loved Assimil : New French with Ease. Plus, I can reinforce my French while goofing around with another language, so what's not to like? More stuff in French, including, believe it or not, L'Egypte ancienne Pour les Nuls. There are also some nice bilingual French / Egyptian readers. Middle Egyptian by James P. Allen. This sounds like a pretty hairy grammar workbook, which dumps all kinds of technical detail on you in giant lumps, but it has generally good reviews. It sounds like it might make a good reference book. Also, does anybody have any good advice for studying (1) dead languages, (2) Semitic languages, or even (3) dead, Semitic languages with ideographic writing systems? I figure that this is going to make French look like a cakewalk, but then again, my ambitions are far more modest—this is just a whimsical hobby, not a lifelong project. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 35 16 June 2012 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Whenever I want to start to research something obscure, I usually go to wikipedia first. The pages are quite valuable for their bibliographies and external links. The English page on Egyptian Hieroglyphics has a few links that may be of interest: Glyphs and Grammars which shows some resources in English and French.
The French wikipedia page lists this book- Grammaire de l'égyptien hiéroglyphique : du moyen empire au début du nouvel empire by Jean-Claude Groyon ISBN9782913033108 published 2006 Hiéroglyphe égyptien Wikipedia FR This looks to be fascinating and a lot of fun too! Edit: How to Learn Dead Languages Ancient Egyptian Language Discussion List @Hampie is learning ancient Akkadian- he would be a good person to help you. Edited by iguanamon on 16 June 2012 at 5:03pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 3 of 35 16 June 2012 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have, I have! But I'm busy now, so I'll write an answer later on!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 4 of 35 16 June 2012 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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The problem with all languages is that all of them except from Latin perhaps, are not just diglossia suffering but
rather triglossia or more. A dialect during one time becomes prestigious and they try to imitate that, with varying success, and after a while it's nothing like it once was and nothing like the language they probably spoke. Sooner or later they also write more profain' stuff in the way they're speaking, but most often keeping both living among the scribes. Middle Egyptian is Middle kingdom and New kingdom scribes trying to write old kingdom egyptian. Just imagine how much English has changed during the time span of 800 years and compare it to the time duration in which middle egyptian was used. Thus, it's not something you read in bed before you go to sleep, but rather at your desk with a reference grammar and a dictionary by your side. I'm afraid to have to say this, but, you'll have to learn grammar should you want to learn dead languages. The sphere in which they're mostly study is higher academia where everyone who learns language does it for the purpose of scholarly work and thus grammar is important, thus they never wait to teach it as they do with modern languages. You'll have to learn what a suffix and a prefix is, but that's not that hard, and you'll need to remember a lot of names of the verbal morphology. Egyptian morphology is nicer to you than that of say Akkadian, though it still contain stuff called participles, statives, verbal adjectives, etc. etc. Egyptian is not a Semitic language per se, it's related to them however. Some words have a very very similar look, e.g. the pronoun I that is jnk /jānak/ in Egyptian and anāku in Akkadian. The same goes for the clitic pronounce, a feature they both there, where there are some very close resemblances. Other words look totally different, some grammar are very very different and many cognates are actually loan words from West semitic. Ideographic writing systems are not, in this area of the world, as ideographic as one might think. They very often spell words out phonetically and most ideograms get phonetic compliments. In the case with egyptian they sometimes spell out the entire word around the logogram thus making the writing somewhat redundant (but it was seen as intellectual I presume). Crocodile in egyptian is MWT, but it might be spelled m-MWT, or MWT-t, or m-MWT-wt even! In Akkadian we're not as fortunate, but, with a dictionary and a sign list you can almost always guess the right meaning from context. My knowlege of Egyptian is not good, but, let me give an example of a sign that can be a sucker. Originally it was a picture of a mountain and it can have the following meanings and sounds ^KUR determinative for foreign contries, not transcribed KUR logogram for the noun šadû, mountain KUR logogram for the noun mātu, land KUR logogram for the verb kašādu, to invade, though it always get phonetic complimets, thus ikšud = i-KUR-ud šat syllabogram for the sound šat Only one of these usually fits in, and the context is key. There's an easy book in English that's called "How to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" whose aim is to teach you how to read the steli and stuff you can go look at at the British Museum. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 5 of 35 16 June 2012 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I take it that KUR sign is the Sumerogram as used in Akkadian (as opposed to being Egyptian). Hampie is right about what goes on with the writing systems and the need for grammar so that you can decipher how things fit together. In Egyptian, as with Akkadian and Sumerian and Hittite, the root meanings of words will often be indicated with ideograms, but the meanings and nuances of them can vary. The endings tend to be written with signs that have the same sounds as the endings. In this regard, I'm given to understand, Egyptian is a little less painful than the cuneiform languages - endings tend to be spelled with the so-called Egyptian alphabet so there's not as much guessing about whether you're looking at a character meant to convey meaning or one meant to convey sound.
I have thought about but not purchased the Assimil course. However, I recently got Allen's Middle Egyptian. It is a nice work for learning the language that the hieroglyphs seek to capture. Unlike too many other books - Collier and Manley jump to mind for some reason - the grammar sections are intended to teach you, in earnest, what was going on with the language. Many other books focus on deciphering the signs well enough and briefly introduce bits of the grammar but not well enough that you could strive to consistently decide what a similar sentence with a slightly different meaning would sound like or be written like. Though Allen focuses on Egyptian to English, there is enough variety in the exercises that you could work from the answer key back to the exercises to see if you've really got the hang of it. And while the work is intimidating, it is less so than Gardiner, which I think is what you would do next. Or, in your case, I would work through Allen quickly, then give full attention to Assimil, using your scattered recollections of Allen to make it a bit easier to work through the Assimil explanations since they will be in your second language. As to the question of how to learn a dead language: Keep it alive, at least in your own mind. For my Sumerian, I imagine visiting the Middle East and finding familiar looking inscriptions. For Sanskrit, I imagine some strange priest starting to recite and let passages I have memorized play through my mind. It's a lot harder to bring an ancient language alive if your plan is to plan what you'd say before buying groceries or ordering in a restaurant. But the language we have is language that real, living people wrote down and we can daydream experiencing that language either as native speakers or as a part of the elite that has access to the ancient wisdom today. For what it's worth, I also carry with me a little book where I have copied passages from the Rig Veda and short texts from the Sumerian inscriptions, just to glance at in a leisure moment. These are not flashcards to be memorized, but more like familiar story books - just as the child puts together the first word from a book and can then recite the story he has memorized while play reading, you can make texts familiar till they become a part of you. Then, not only do you gradually become familiar with the language; you bring it back alive because once again there is a living human brain within which it is resonating. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 35 16 June 2012 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Wow! Thank you, everybody, for all this excellent advice.
Interesting. I really prefer to study grammar at the upper-beginner levels, once I already have an embryonic version of the language living in my head. If the Assimil course is typical—and if the reviews can be trusted—I should be able to ease my way into the grammar slowly. It's not that I have anything against stative verbs. :-) I actually find grammar fascinating, but too much at once tends to get chewy. Looking at Wikipedia (fr), I see the following: * 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural * 2 genders: masculine and feminine, which can allegedly be inferred from the spelling * Several tenses: aorist, progressive, parfait ancien There are also some links to Champollion's old grammar, which is pretty readable but long, and which appears to lack any summaries or overviews. I think I'll poke around a bit and look for a concise grammar. KUR doesn't sound too bad (famous last words, I know). I mean, oral French has c'est, s'est, sais, ces and ses, all of which are extremely common, and which all sound exactly the same. What do people do for learning hieroglyphs? Can you reuse all the standard Anki/Hesig tricks so commonly used for Chinese and Japanese? How many hieroglyphs do you need for a beginner's reading ability? And how does the Manuel de codage fit in from a student's perspective? Thank you so much for all your advice! This is nothing like a serious project, just some casual messing about, but I'm delighted to have expert input. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 7 of 35 17 June 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
After a little digging through my old posts, I managed to excavate some ancient antiquities of my own and merge them for you... ;)
Edited by Teango on 17 June 2012 at 12:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 8 of 35 20 June 2012 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
I learnt Middle Egyptian during my studies and I'm now a Ph. D. student in Ancient Egyptian linguistics (though not in Middle Egyptian), so I hope I'll be able to give you some useful advices. I don't know how good is Assimil because I've never used it. It had not been published when I learnt ME and even if it had been I'm not sure our teachers would have picked up that kind of ressource :). Allen is very good, maybe a bit too dense for a complete beginner but I guess it depends a lot on your relationship to grammar. The biggest problem is that, if I remeber well, there's no vocabulary list, which is a big problem for self-study. In French, you can also give a look to Grandet/Mathieu, Cours d'Egyptien Hiéroglyphique. Although it's lesson-based, has exercises (no correction) and word lists, I don't recommend it : it has too much (unuseful) abstruse grammar terms and some of their explanations are strange from the point of view of mainstream egyptology. But still, if you stick to it, it does the job and learn you pretty well to read ME. You may want to check Obsomer, Egyptien Hiéroglyphique (Editions Safran). It's also lesson-based and very user friendly, basic but teaches you all you need to know to read. To answer your question : - you can sure use Anki to learn hieroglyphs, I learnt the signs by using cards I made, one side had the sign, translitteration was on the other. - classical ME uses 700 signs (that's what they say, I didn't count) but most of them are "determinatives/classifiers". You only need to know 150/200 of them to read any text (but you have to know them well !) My advice would be to focus on learning the most common 100 signs at first (I can give you a list if you want). Then you can tackle the reading and the grammar. I've seen many people rushing into grammar without a solid knowledge of the basic signs. As a result, they could not use their grammatical knowledge because they had trouble recognizing words and knowing where they ended (no ponctuation, no spaces in ME texts). 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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