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Is.t n(y).t r n(y) km.t (Team Egyptian) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4456 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 9 of 43 31 December 2013 at 12:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ok, after a week of reflexion, I'm still not sure what to do. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable to attempt it if I ever want to improve in my other languages (I'm sure "May 2015" still means a couple of hours every week... that's a hundred hours in the year that could be used to get better at another language). But on the other hand, it seems to be the only chance I'll ever have to be part of an Egyptian team which decides to go that slowly.
My main concern here is the time it takes to input stuff in hieroglyphs. Are you considering continuing the deck you had built up to lesson 30 last year? I'd be happy to work on adding audio to that. Anyway, I have brought back the book here, so it is possible I'll actually join. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4429 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 10 of 43 31 December 2013 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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*jaw drops*
As a history and language geek, I can only applaud you folks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5310 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 43 31 December 2013 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I have successfully lured vermillion onto the team despite his staggeringly impressive goals for the year. Welcome, vermillion!
Thank you! Middle Egyptian is a surprisingly approachable language, given the right tools (and sufficiently modest expectations!). The Assimil course contains far more actual Egyptian text than something like Collier, et al.'s How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Combined with spaced repetition software and cloze cards, it's possible to wander very slowly through the course without forgetting everything in between study sessions. And this, in turn, makes it possible to put in an hour or so per week and still make progress over time. And now it's time to start our first challengeโฆ :-)
I'm going to tackle the second line, because it looks hardest. To see this post, please install the Gardiner font. EDIT: I also recommended installing Aegyptus_R, but that seems to break hieroglyphs on some systems. First up, we have ๐ ๐๐ ๐๐ฉ and something which looks like ๐ but which I ultimately decided was actually the sign V97 (not in Unicode). So we're looking for a word spelled something like mxmt. In theย English translation, the second line begins with "sealed". So I zip over to hierogl.ch and try searching for sceller "sealed". This quickly finds ๐๐๐ ๐ฉ xtm "sealed", which suggests we're on the right track. Spelling is sort of an optional extra in Egyptian, since the language was used for thousands of years, and most of the scribes were writing in their L2 anyway. Plus there's the whole thing with consonant roots. From there, I can look up the rather unusual determinative ๐ฉ, which gives us a long list of words related to sealing things, including ๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ฉ+V97 mxtmt "sealed chest". This is how I found the V97 determinative that I mentioned earlier, which makes a lot more sense here than ๐. So I'm guessing the correct reading here is probably m xtm "sealed". I'm not quite sure what that leading m is doing there. The next two characters are ๐๐ nf. This looks like a sDm.n.f form, aka the "non-emphatic perfect", which I haven't seen in Assimil yet. More shortly. I want to post this and see if the forum software can deal with Unicode hieroglyphs. :-) Edited by emk on 31 December 2013 at 6:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4429 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 12 of 43 31 December 2013 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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No, the forum soft evidently can't deal with the hieroglyphs. Sucks :(
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4456 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 13 of 43 31 December 2013 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yes it does. At least when I install Gardiner. Once I install both, nothing appears any more. :S Edited by vermillon on 31 December 2013 at 6:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5310 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 43 31 December 2013 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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OK, so install Gardiner and uninstall the other, then. :-/ Anyway, everything is rendering here, so it's not the forum software (for once). Hieroglyphs are 4-byte Unicode characters (I simplify), so they're great for breaking software.
Up next we have ๐๐๐ด๐๐๐ญ๐, which looks like qrs plus a whole bunch of determinatives, most of them related to funerals. Judging from theย English, we'd expect the word "buried" around here. And sure enough, hierogl.ch gives us qrs "to bury". We're in business! Clearly whoever wrote this text is going out of their way to make this easy: They use a full set of consonants for every word, then they pile on every vaguely related determinative. Then we have ๐ f, which is probably another verb ending, and another ๐ n, which is mysterious, but maybe it's n, which might mean any of "to, towards, in, of". Let's see how the bit at the end goes before we decide... Now we're looking for something which means "for all time." First up, I recognize ๐๐ Dt from Assimil. It means "eternity." (And it's really high frequency vocab. The Egyptians were just a bit obsessed with eternity.) Confirming this on hierogl.ch, we see that we can also include the following ๐พ as a determinative of some sort. Next up we have ๐ r, but that's a really common preposition that can mean all kinds of stuff (even as of Assimil lesson 30). So let's skip ahead to the next unusual symbol, ๐ , the bird with the horns and the throat loop. That's this critter here: 
Photo from Wikipedia (Seriously, the only downside of hieroglyphics is telling all the darn birds apart.) If we look up at the MdC codes I provided, that charming bird is G21. Scanning down that page, I find ๐ ๐๐๐ณ nHH "eternity, eternally, forever". But looking at Dt again, I notice that Dt r nHH is a fixed expression vaguely along the lines of "for ever and ever." So, putting this all together, I have a very tentative take on the second line:
So clearly I need to keep working on my Assimil lessons, and learn more about common verb endings and prepositions. But given some time and a dictionary, I can now align Egyptian hieroglyphs against a translation, and even translate pieces. Of course, even with tools and time, Egyptian is still a lot harder to read than an unknown Romance language. On the other hand, I'm having fun and I can clearly see that this will get easier with time. All right, anybody up for "A million years into the sky is Ra" or "his Stargate"? I know, I know, we all have more important things to do. But 15 minutes with hierogl.ch would be, I don't know, a good way to start the New Year? :-) Edited by emk on 31 December 2013 at 7:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4456 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 15 of 43 31 December 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've looked at the first line, which took me more than 15 minutes, but it seems to me that ๐
in first position of the second line is a predication marker, and that we find it just before in the "m-itn", which I'll translate (conveniently helped by the proposed translation) as "as (i.e. predication) the sun".
So here I am (I don't know how to type hieroglyph unicode points yet):
r:n:p conveniently repeats R4 "rnp", and rnpt means "year". The three strokes under the t suggest a plural: that should therefore be "rnpwt": the "w" bird is missing, but Assimil says it was commonly omitted, so "rnpwt" is still a valid assumption. I8 "Hfn" means 100,000 and V20 "mD" means 10, which hints at a 10x100,000 = 1 million. r is a particle, here meaning "towards", "in direction of" (I guess) qbHw-W15 : qbH-W15 means several things: to purify, offer libations, or calm. The "w" is a conjugation mark, possibly a passive marker if I am to follow this table. This doesn't appear in the proposed translation, but.. N1 is the sky, and N25 usually marks foreign lands. I haven't been able to find more, but I suppose this could be something like "space" or the sky as a domain (something like "paradise"), and that's where the idea of "calm/purify" could come, as an epithet for the sky? pw is the demonstrative adjective "this", or relative "which" or interrogative "who,what". It is a post-particle and here I guess it separates the phrases: "A million year, in direction of the sky, [TOPIC marker] ....". ra-C1 is obviously the god Ra. :) (that was the only thing I could read without looking up) m-itn-N8: itn is the sun, the solar disc. I take m- to be the predication particle, something like "acting as" (i.e. "being"). English doesn't include such a marker, but it makes sense to have "Ra, [as] the Sun", and it fits the m- that emk considered to be a particle rather than part of the word mxtm. So we indeed have something like "A million of years, towards the calm Sky, is Ra, Sun,...". Interestingly for me, I first assumed from emk's post that "m" would be a kind of "passive"/"agent" marker, because in Arabic it works like this: Hmd is a root carrying the idea of "blessing" and "mHmd "(MuHamad) means the one which is blessed. Also interestingly, in Arabic "seal" is ุฎุชู which, using the Egyptian transliteration, is exactly "xmt". Not to say that this is bullet-proof, but I am sure there is help to be gained from exploring a bit the dictionary for other Semitic languages (ok, Egyptian is not one). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5310 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 43 31 December 2013 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I slapped together a Gardiner/MdC input method for Linux using ibus. On the off chance that anybody here is a Linux user, I'm looking for victiโahem, testers. :-) Thank you for tackling the first line! You picked up some very neat things I hadn't noticed. I'm still a total n00b when it comes to Egyptian particles and verb forms.
Oh, wow.ย English Wiktionary has Egyptian! What a find. Thank you. When I scroll the whole way to the bottom of that page, I see qbHw "sky", which settles the question rather nicely. Interestingly, in the movie dialog, Daniel is also rather perplexed by this word:
Just for fun, I checked the rather epic Aegyptisches handwรถrterbuch, which doesn't seem to have this form. But I don't read German, so maybe I'm overlooking something. :-) 
Well played, indeed! It looks like we have lines 1 & 2. Any takers for line 3? Edited by emk on 31 December 2013 at 8:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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