Table Of Content

AVOCALISEDDICTIONARYOFANCIENTEGYPTIAN by ChristiandeVartavan SAIS -London- Firstpublishedinpaperbackin2016 bySAISBOOKSLTD(UK-formerlyTriadeExplorationLtd.) ©ChristiandeVartavan&SAISBOOKS2016 TypesetinCalibriandotherspecialisedfontsbytheauthor PrintedinFrance. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthis bookmaybereprintedorreproducedor utilizedinanyformorbyanyelectronic, mechanical,orothermeans,now knownorhereafterinvented,including photocopyingandrecording,orinany informationstorageorretrievalsystem, withoutpermissioninwritingfrom thepublishers. BritishCataloguinginPublicationData. Acataloguerecordforthisbookisavailable fromtheBritishLibrary. ChristiandeVartavan,2016 VocalisedDictionaryofAncientEgyptian SAISBOOKSLtd.,London. saisbooks.co.uk ISBN978-0-9954898-1-3 Keywords:Egyptology,AncientEgyptian(hieroglyphs),vocalisation TABLEOFCONTENTS Acknowledgement 3 Foreword 5 Introduction 7 Fundamentalprinciples 8 Importantnewconventions 10 MAINLINGUISTICEQUIVALENTSANDSHIFTSBETWEENANCIENTEGYPTIANANDCOPTIC Consonants(Table2) 12 Semi-consonants/semi-vowels(Table3) 13 Fullvowels(Table4) 13 Digraphs (Table5) 14 ChartofAncientEgyptianvowelsacrosstheIPAvowelchartwithaudio 17 TYPEEXAMPLESOFVOCALISATION Onomatopeias 18 Animalnames 23 Vocalisedtermsstillexistinginmoderncontemporarylanguages 32 Foreignterms 34 ANALYSISANDIMPORTANTCONCLUSIONS V/C/Tstatisticsandanalysis 41 Nonexpressedvowels 43 Digraphs: Statistics 44 Verbs:Statistics 45 Rulesregulatingthevocalisationofverbs (‘ô’and‘A’) 46 Principlesregulatingtheexpressionoftheaccentuatedstress (‘è’) 49 Thecompoundphoneme‘ow’andthevocalisationofthepluralin‘owè’ 51 Summaryofadvancesandconclusion 54 DICTIONARY PartI: ANCIENTEGYPTIAN-VOCALISATION-ENGLISH(ANDADDITIONALDATA) 55 PartII: ENGLISH-VOCALISATION-ANCIENTEGYPTIAN(SIMPLIFIED) 220 PartIII: DICTIONARYCLASSIFIEDBYV/C/TRATIO(SIMPLIFIED) 366 1 LISTOFTABLESANDFIGURESINTHETEXT Table:page Table1:ModificationsoftheManueldeCodageforvocalisation:10 Table2:Consonants:12 Table3:Semi-consonants/semi-vowels:13 Table4:Fullvowels:13 Table5:Digraph(diphthongs): 14 Table6:Onomatopeias: 18 Table7:Onomatopeiaswithreduplication:21 Table8:Animalnames:23 Table9:Vocalisedwordssubsistinginmoderncontemporarylanguages:32 Table10:Foreignterms: 34 Table11:TableofhieroglyphictermsclassifiedbyV/C/Tratio: 42 Table12: RecalibratedtableofhieroglyphictermsclassifiedbyV/C/Tratiominus’-’,‘*’and’?’categories: 42 Table13: Exampleofalternativescribalwritingshowing anotherwiseinvisbleaccentuationorstress:43 Table14: Numberofoccurencesandpercentageofeachtypeofdigraphsacrossthevocabularyofthedictionary:44 Table 15:VerbsclassifiedaccordingtoV/C/T: 45 Table16: Examplesofverbswith'[ô]assecondphonemeselectedfromareaH,sandt ofthedictionary :46 Table17: Examplesofverbswith'[ô]asthirdphonemeselectedfromareaH,sandt ofthedictionary:47 Table18: ExamplesofverbswithAassecondphoneme:47 Table19: Exampleofaverbwithalternative[ô]/Aconstruction:48 Table20: Exampleofatermwith{tè}accentuation: 49 Table21: ExampleofCoptictermswithalternativee /i ending:49 Table22: Aternativee /i endingsforthename‘Osiris’:50 Table23: Examplesoftermsusingthecompoundphoneme{[ô]w}:51 Table24: Examplesofaforeigntermusingthecompoundphoneme{[ô]w}: 52 Table25: Exampleoftheuseofthecompoundphoneme{[ô]w}toformtheplural:52 Figures Fig.1DistributionofAncientEgyptianfullvowels,semi-vowelsanddigraphs/diphthongsaccrosstheIPA vowelchartwithaudio.:17 Fig.2GraphofhieroglyphictermsclassifiedbyV/C/Tratioi.e.[Missing]vowel/[Apparent]consonants andsemi-consonants~semi-vowels/Totalnumberofphonemesinanyterm:41 Fig.3 Graphofnumberofoccurencesofeachdigraphsacrossthevocabulary:44 Fig.4 GraphofcalibratedV/C/Tratioofverbs: 45 2 ACKNOWLEGMENT Without the Coptic ethymological dictionary of Werner Vycichl, itself based on major previous works1, the presentdictionarycouldsimplynothavebeenachievedasitisdirectlybuiltfromanduponit.Tohispredecessorsand to Werner Vycichl (1909-1999) in particular goes the earnest and deepest scholarly gratitude and souvenir of the author. I however also wish to thank two scholars, one an egyptologist and the other not, whose supports have accompanied the author in an unstinted manner throughout this difficult journey and who have encouraged him to notonlyfinishthisworkbuttomakeitavailableassoonaspossible. The first is Prof. Richard Wilkinson, reknown egyptologist, current general editor of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections and former Regents Professor of the University of Arizona. A man of true superior intelligence,andaverykindman. The second is Mrs Lucile Allorge, world class botanist of the National History Museum (Paris) and ‹correspondant›attheAcadémiedessciencesd’outre-mer(Paris),mygoodfairysinceIstartedmycareerandsomuch morethatcannotbesaidhere. Maytheybothreceivemydeepestandeverlastingthanks. C.deV. 1 See the introduction of Vicychl’s dictionary for a list of these major works including Crum’s Coptic Dictionary (Oxford, 1939), Černý’s Coptic EtymologicalDictionary,CambridgeUniversityPress(Cambridge,1976)andWestendorf’s KoptischesHandwörterbuch(Heidelberg,1977). 3 4 FOREWORD EvenmoresothanfortheCodex2,compilednearlytwentyyearsagonow,theauthorhasreliedalmostbuton himself for the research which is presented in this book and which treads so deeply on terrae incognitae. With the resultthatitmaycomeasfirstsurprisetothereaderthatbutafewcomplementarycitationstoscholarlyworksareto be found in the present book. The reason for this peculiar situation is that this study presents a methodology to vocalize Ancient Egyptian which was empirically developped by the author. This system relies in turn on equally seeminglypreviouslyunseenlinguisticshiftsandruleswhichhehasbeenabletoidentifiedduringthesameempirical analyticalprocessandwhichareherepresentedforthefirsttime.Finally,thebookevidentlyalsopresentstheresult of applying this vocalizing method to a corpus of Ancient Egyptian words - precisely 1795 - which were drawn from Vycichl’s dictionary. This vocabulary constituting the ‹Vocalised Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian› which is the main objectofthisbookandamajorleapinourknowledgeoftheAncientEgyptianlanguageaswehavepractiseditever sinceJeanFrançoisChampolliondiscoveredthebaseprinciplesofthehieroglyphicsystemin1822,ascript believedto show only consonants and semi-vowels but no vowels. Since that date many attempts have been made to resituate these invisible vowels and vocalize Ancient Egyptian, but so far with little convincing successes3 and certainly no coherent systemology. Ancient Egyptian has hence remained unvocalised since nearly two hundred years and its sonority, particularly that of its poetry, remains equally unknown. In 2014 however the author of the present publication presented a breakthrough article entitled ‹New Method to Vocalize Ancient Egyptian Based on Specific OfferingTextsofaPoeticNature›4.Anovelmethodologybased,asindicatedinthetitle,oninternalpoeticanalysisand usingCopticasaverificationagenttorevealthevowelsnotshownbythehieroglyphicscriptbutusedbytheAncient Egyptianlanguagewhenspokenorread.Thisarticle,nowoneofthemostreadontheAncientEgyptianlanguagewith over 1000 readings on academia.edu only, created an unexpected precedent as for the first time not only one but three ancient Egyptian poetic quatrains of a similar structure were nearly completely vocalised allowing to hear Ancient Egyptian as it may have been pronounced. However, as the ‹poetic internal analysis› reconstructing methodology is an extremely lengthy method to use, in 2013 the author embarked himself in developing a second morerapidmethodologytovocaliseAncientEgyptian.Onebased,thistime,ontheevolutionarylinguisticshiftswhich exist between Ancient Egyptian phonemes and Coptic ones. Using critically5 Prof. Werner Vycichl’s well known Dictionnaire éthymologique de la langue Copte, the author dismantled over forteen months of sustained research betweenSeptember2013andNovember2014eachandeverysinglephonemeoftheselected1795AncientEgyptian ancestors of the Coptic words which Vycichl lists in his dictionary; thereafter to compare them to the similarly dismantledphonemesoftheseverysameCopticwords.This,untilempiricallyseriesofshiftsimposedthemselvesto the evidence and allowed the full revocalisation of each Ancient Egyptian word examined in their base undeclined form(infinitivefortheverbsforexample).Resultinginthefundamentaldiscoveriesandthedictionariespresentedin thefollowingpages. 2Vartavan,C.(de),Arakelyan,A.andAsensiAmoros,V.CodexofAncientEgyptianPlantRemains/Codexdesrestesvégétauxdel’Egypteancienne. TriadeExploration,London;1997(Sais2010). 3AsconvenientlysummarizedbyMüller,M.in:ÄgyptischePhonologie?MöglichkeitenundGrenzenlinguisticherModellebeiderBeischreibungdes LautsystemseinerextinktenSprache.BeisschreibungdesLautsystemseinerextinktenSprache.InVerbovsek,A.&al.(eds.)MethodikundDidaktikin derÄgyptologie.WihelmFinkVerlag,München:509–531;2011 4ArmenianEgyptologyCentreFundamentalResearchPaperNo.2:1-24(2014).AvailablefordownloadonAcademia.edu. 5DictionnaireétymologiquedelalangueCopte,Peeters,Leuven;1983.ManyofVycichl'sethymologiesseemtotheauthorfar-fetchedperhapsa resultofhislinguisticextensiveerudition(particularlyinrelationtoAfricanlanguages)aswellashisclearlackofunderstandingofthevocalisation ofAncientEgyptian.Asituationblatentlyexpressedforexamplebyhisrenderingof'OpenDouat!,'where'Open'a-wnisexpressedas‘a-wn’when itshouldbe{æ-w[ô]n,Hencemisunderstandingthephoneticvalueofthefirstphonemeoftheimperativeform‘i’whichisnotanopen‘a’butan ‘æ’typeofvowelandignoringtheinvisiblelongvowel‘ô’situatedbetweenwandnasformostverbs(seethechapteronverbformation);one exampleamongmany.OneunequivocalvalueofVycichl’sbookhoweverresidesintheveryextensiveandinthisrespectverytrulysurprising numberofCoptic/pharaonicethymologieswhichhehasbeeneitherabletocompilefromvarioussourcesorequatehimself-numberfarmore numerousthancouldcommonlybeassumeduponopeninghisbook. 5 6 INTRODUCTION By the age of five, and even more so when he reached adulthood, an Ancient Egyptian was fluent with his language. We can surmise that the extent of his vocabulary depended to which social class he belonged and the degreeoflitteracy,ornot,whichhehad.Ifthispharaoniclanguagecouldhavesurvivedintothetwentiethcentury,we canequallyimaginethatasformanyotherlanguagesanethno-linguistcouldhavetranscribeditintophoneticsusing theInternationalPhoneticAlphabet(IPA).Thenwewouldhavehad,whetherthelanguagewouldhavesubsequently vanished or not, a very precise knowledge of how the language sounded and how it was spoken - dialects included. Obviouslyhistoricalcircumstanceshavemadeitimpossibleforsuchrecordingofthepharaoniclanguageevertotake placeandtheprecisesonoritiesofthislanguagewerelostandhencebecameunknown. Many centuries later when Christianity took over and the ancestral pharaonic language was expressed by the Greek alphabet complemented with six or seven6 newly created Egyptian letters - to express sound specific to this language-ithadalreadyenduredsomanyevolutionarylinguisticshiftsandincorporatedsomanyforeignvocabulary additionsthattoapharaonicEgyptiantheCopticlanguagewouldhaveessentiallysoundedverydifferent.Essentially different but not totally as, as this study reveals, much of the vocabulary issued from the pharaonic period passed phonetically unchanged into Coptic - unlike is presently widely thought. The latter constituting one of the major discoveriesofthepresentstudyandonewhichtheauthorwouldfranklyneverhaveexpectedtobeatthetimewhen he started the present research. Whereas the other part of this pharaonic vocabulary - that which changed phonetically - endured such recognisable phonetic shifts, when known, that it is clearly identifiable in the corpus of Copticwords.TothepointthatwecanalsosurmisethathadanAncientEgyptianscribebeenfictiouslyallowedtotime travel to Coptic times and examine that corpus he would have very easily equally recognized them, i.e. his own pharaonicvocables. ThenotionofanabsolutetruealbeitvanishedphoneticformoftheAncientEgyptianlanguageshouldalways beborneinmind.Phoneticforms,plural,theauthorshouldsay,astheAncientEgyptianlanguageinfactenduredvery manyevolutionsacrossthemilleniaduringwhichitwaspractised(OldEgyptian,MiddleEgyptian,Neo-Egyptian,etc., accompaniedbytheparallelEarly,MiddlleandLateHieraticandDemoticscripts).Ifwefurthertakeintoconsideration thateachoftheseevolutionarystageshadmanydialects,thenonemayreasonablysurmisethatPharaonicEgyptian, likeCopticlater,hadinhistoryindeedanarrayofsuchphoneticforms.Thisalsoshouldbeborneatalltimesinmind and not only do many pharaonic texts let us have a glimpse of these forms and dialects but the many vocalised variantsofsomewordspresentedinthisdictionaryclearlyrevealorbetraythem. Finally the title of the present dictionary could in fact have been 'Atheorized Vocalized Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian'.IndeedatthisstageallthevocalizedAncientEgyptianwordsherepresentedshouldbetakenastheoretical as only time and verification will establish them as definite; in other words as truly reflecting the way (or ways, as pronunciationsvariedaccordingtoperiods)AncientEgyptianspronouncedthem.Thisisnottosayhoweverthatthe vocalizationspresentedhereareonlytheoretical.Theauthorbelievesthemtobeeitherrightoressentiallyso,withof course some hiatuses, doubts and unrestitued vowels. The reader, for his part, will quickly understand that the vocalizationsystemfollowsinfactphoneticrulesandshiftswhicharefarmoreprecisethananyonecouldhavehoped foratthebeginningoftheproject.Andatthisstageoftheresearchthisiswhatmatter,precisioninvocalisationwill graduallyimposeitself. 6Theexactnumberofadditionallettersdependingonthedialect. 7 FUNDAMENTALPRINCIPLES Over all this dictionary is built on the first fundamental and even surprising discovery and conclusion, based on the analysisofthe1795wordslistedbelow,that: 1. ThephoneticdistancebetweenasubstantialnumberofAncientEgyptianwordsandtheirCopticdescendantsis inagreatmanyinstancesfarlessthanthoughtandinequallynumerouscasessimply:nul. InotherotherwordsmanyCopticwordsarephoneticallynear-identicalorevensimplyphoneticallyidenticaltotheir ancestralpharaonicform. Itisequallybuiltonthesecondfundamentaldiscoverythat: 2.AncientEgyptianswere farmore proficienttowrite the phoneticsoftheirlanguage thancouldeversofarhave beenimagined. Andinthisrespectwehaveclearlygravelyunderestimatedtheircapabilities.Thisisfirstdemonstratedbythenumber of different vowels listed in Table 4 below. But far more so by the author's new and unexpected third fundamental discoverythat: 3. The hieroglyphicscriptusesdigraphs,i.e.twophonemestoexpressathirddifferentone,toexpress‘complex’ vowelsasfordiphthongs(seeTable5,below). These digraphs, which change considerably our reading of Ancient Egyptian,have seemingly laid unseen before our very eyes for nearly two centuries7. One possible way to explain that they had not been identified earlier is that Egyptologists (the author included) had not systematically paralleled Ancient Egyptian and Coptic words to detect them,astheyarefullypresentintheformofdiphthongsintheCopticlanguage.Parallelcomparendaexecutedbythe authorovermorethanayearuntiltheexistenceofeachofthemestablisheditselfasacertaintybecausetypifiedby clearcutandunequivocalkeyexamples(againseeTable5). This is also to be said of the discovery of the peculiar and most fundamentally important 'ôw' sound of the Ancient Egyptian language (see page 51, below), used in particular for the formation of the plural [‘'ôw'[è]’ and which Egyptologists will discover for the first time in this study although it is commonly known to Coptologists. A sonority which is phonetically declined or accentuated in a variety of ways in Ancient Egyptian and evolved in Coptic in a number of varying sounds (p. 51). Sounds themselves expressed phonetically in Coptic - to make things more complicated-inavarietyofforms8.ThispossiblybecauseCopticscholarsliketheirancestralEgyptianscribeswereat losstoexpressthesubtletiesofthisdifficultsoundanditsvariationsdependingonword-rootlocation.Thistoohasill beenseen,ifatall,andisamajoradditiontoourfunctioningunderstandingofthelanguage.Theselatterlinguistics additions changing fundamentally our reading and perception of Ancient Egyptian. There is no doubt that Coptic phonetics, vocabulary and grammatical structure have evolved considerably from Ancient Egyptian, with concerning grammar a clear agglutinating evolution (and for its phonetics a simplification of phonemes). But this agglutinating phenomenahadexistedforthepharaoniclanguagesincetheearliestoftimesandmostpossiblybeforetheinvention ofwriting.InventionwhichmostlikelyfurthereditsevolutionaryprocessuntilreachingtheinfactratheroddCoptic compoundedphraseology,andoneperhapstowhichthestudentofthislanguagemaynotsoeasilygetaccustomed. Asvocalizationtook place the authorcame tobe familiarwiththe original sonoritiesof the pharaonic language and realizedthatthewayhehadpractiseditformorethan35yearsismorethanartificial,itisclearlyincomplete.Inother 7 InterestinglyinVycichl’sdictionary(p.37)  iwisunderstoodtobepronounced'e'or‘a’inCoptic,i.e.astwodifferentvowelsdependingon circumstanceswhichheadmitsarenotfullyunderstood('Nousnesavonspaspourquoiiwseprononcee-(SB)commepréfixeducirconstantielete- (S),a(B)ausecondprésent’).Butthenotionof‘digraph/diphthong’,whichinthiscasecouldhaveeasilybeenusedastwoAncientEgyptian phonemesarefullyunderstoodtoproducetwodifferentsingleCopticones,isnowheretobefound. 8berseoubershyubrshyuberesyu'coriander'isablatentdemonstrationofhowthephoneticsofaCopticwordmaybedeclinedwithdiferent phonemes,producingultimatelydespitesmallvariationsthesameresultwhichmaybeexpressedwithLatinlettersasfollows:bèrshèoo,bershéoo (ou(oo)abbreviatedasu),brshéoo(idem),bèrèshéoo(idem).Theunderstandingoftheexistenceandomnipresence ofthisvariabilityisofthe utmostimportancewherevocalisationisconcerned. 8