From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1997 #103 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Sunday, April 20 1997 Volume 1997 : Number 103 Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Re: ane Is IH a leaf on the Stammbaum? Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Re: ane Is IH a leaf on the Stammbaum? Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Re: ane Proto... whatever Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. ane Boogie Nation (huh?) ane Hebrew: continuity from antiquity Re ane Mount Moriah ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 08:03:13 -0400 (EDT) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Did I? Could it be that I was, uncharacteristically, W R O N G? I dont recall saying that, in fact i recall saying that I have no idea whether most leading comparativists, even ones I know intimately, hold the position that protolanguages really existed or the one that they are convenient fictions expressing correspondences among attested languages and named some names. When I myself began work on Proto-Uto-Aztecan over a decade ago, I dont think I had ever even thought about the issue, and I rarely think about it now since it so little affects what one actually does. Again, there are attested in the literature atleast three positions: the one which, if I am reading them correctly, Peter and Gonzalo agree on and which goes back at least to the great Indo-Europeanist Meillet (protolanguages are fictions but GOOD fictions), the one which Gonzalo considered "naive" and which goes back much further, which Meillet himself took to be the standard view and which I CONJECTURE is the majority view among Indo-Europeanists and Uto-Aztecanists and probably other kinds of comparativists though perhaps not among the current crop of Semiticists (based on what I am hearing here) and which I find rather more congenial (protolanguages are real), and the one Peter now calls "silly" and which has been held by such great names as Trubetzkoy, Kotwicz, and Doerfer (protolanguages are BAD fictions). I myself do not consider any of them, at least not publicly,to be naive or silly, though I do think that the first is a view that is inconsistent with what people who hold it actually do and that it is ultimately self-defeating. There have been several times in the history of science when people thought Scientific theories were fictions but it has never lasted. I think position number three is simply wrong and that the arguments forit, while respectable, are not strong. I think position two is largely correct, but obviously an oversimplification and maybe we can do better. In addition, it is still a very much open question which lots of research is being done on, how much information about protolanguages is recoverable (as a function of the number of descendant languages or the number of years elapsed or other things) and how much error we are liable to introduce with different methods of reconstruction, and it would I think be much more interesting to discuss these issues if anybody cared to then to continue to worry about who is silly or naive, or about whose position is in the majority, or generally about philosophy rather than linguistics. But maybe that's me. I would add once again that adherents of positions 1 and 3 to my knowledge in their published work always take position 2 as the standard one and then bring ou their arguments against it. I am puzzled that Peter and Gonzalo and others here are determined to make position 1 be the standard one. IF it were, there would be a whole list of refernces to articles by people criticizing that view and arguing for no. 2, and people who argue for no. 3 would contrast it with 1. But I know of no such literature. So I still think that 1 and 3 are posiitons which for decades have been advocated as alternatives to 2 but the very fact that they are still being argued for (see Goznalo's references) while at the same time work on reconstruction of any number of protolanguages is going on means that the arguments have not taken and that position 2 is still willy-nilly the one to beat. As I said, I take no intellectual comfort in that, since even if 2 really IS the majority view, that does not mean that it is right. In the entire exchange sofar, though, I have only seen two attempts to argue that it is not right, one referring to a very old argument having to do with the Romance languages but without acknowledging how old it is and how easy to counter, the other referring to the fact that there were 5000 years ago no fewer Semitic languages than today, which I dont think has any relevance to the issue at hand as I explained. It may be that the arguments about Israeli Hebrew not being a Semitic language are intended somehow to relate to this too, although as I noted there are much better examples of where the Stammbaum model fails, and it is far from clear whether the notion of protolanguage depends crucially on belief in the Stammbaum. It may, but that remains to be shown. I again think it would be more productive to talk about the ongoing research on modifying the Stammbaum model or on developing better ways of discovering the correct tree in any given situation. It is not that I have any general aversion to philosophy of science but I do think that it is a very tricky subject and it requires in any case that one firstcome to grips with the science itself, in this case, linguistics. And I think the discussions here have not given an acurate picture of linguistics. If there are limits on what linguists can discover about prehistory--and I think that this is the real issue we are skirting--I think there are ways of talking about that, and there is research on that, but you cannot possibly get any useful results on this by merely repeating tired arguments about the reality of this or that. I will give one example. It has long been held that in doing reconstruction you should have three or at the very least two attestations of anything you reconstruct. However, as has been pointed out by various people, in Kartvelian we have the following situation: this family clearly consists of two branches call them Svan and non-Svan, and many basic words are completely different in the two, soit would seem you cannot reconstruct anything in these cases. However, the word for 'tooth' for example in Svan is an unanalyzable monosyllabic root whereas in non-Svan it is a derived form transparently meaning something like 'gnaw-er'. Some would argue that this entitles us to reconstruct the Svan form for Proto-Kartvelian. Now here is something that might be worth discussing: how likely are we to be right (or wrong) if we do this? But of course to even pose the question you have to assume that there is something to be right or wrong about, namely what was the Proto-Kart word for 'tooth', and this you cannot get with position 3 or even with position 1 (although as I keep saying people who have held 1 like Meillet have been inconsistent because they certainly do argue about such things all the time). Another example: some Indo-Europeanists have begun work on distinguishing differnt chronological stages of PIE. I myself am partial tot he work of Rasmussen and Olsen from Copenhagen but they are not the first. A reasonable question would be how reliable such results are and how such methods can be applied to other language families. Finally one more point which I think should be obvious but whoch I have not seen discussed anywhere except maybe by me somewhere. In the rush to get rid of protolanguages or put them in their place, Ithink the assumption is that somehow they cannot be real because we know less of them than we do of attested languages. Now, clearly we knw more English than we do Proto-Indo-European and more Arabic than Proto-Semitic, BUT wait a second we clearly know more Proto-IE than we do Palaic or Venetic or Carian, we know more Proto-Semitic than we do Amorite I THINK, and so on. There is an attested Uto-Aztecan language called Giamina or Omomil which died out at the turn of the century of which we know around 20 words, but we know several hundred words of Proto-UA. More examples: as I have recently written in WZKM and CAJ, it is clearer that Proto-Turkic had two vowel lengths (and not three as argued by Doerfer) than it is whether Khalaj,a living Turkic language of Iran, has two or three, while on the other hand the recordings of three vowel lengths in a dialect of Hopi last studied by Whorf in the 1930's (and which no one has believed for a long time) can be proven to be right because his long corresponds to Proto-UA long or short in an open stressed syllable, his medium to PUA short in a closed stressed syllable, and is short to PUA short in an unstressed open syllable--AND crucially he did not know this reconstruction of PUA because I came up with it long after he was dead, and I did not use his data in developing the reconstruction. SO we have cases even where the reconstructed protolanguage is not only better known than an attested one but even where the reconstruction can help us decided what the facts were in the attested language. And indeed, although I know much too little about Semitic or Afro-Asiatic, I am sure that there are cases which some of you could tell us about where the decipherment or the analysis of one of the ANE languages was influenced by our knowledge of comparative Semitic or comparative AA. Certainly, ourunderstanding of Hittite and the other Anatolian languages and of other extinct and poorly attested IE languages has been jheavily infuelcend by comparative IE linguistics. It just is not true that knowledge of linguistic (pre)history always works from the bottom up, i.e., fromthe most recent tothe most ancient. Often it works theother way around. And that also would be a good topic to discuss. But now I really must quit. A. Manaster Ramer On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, Peter Daniels wrote: > Conventional = majoritarian, as presented by Alexis himself when he defined > the 2 (3, counting the silly one) positions. > > ********** > > While I graciously accept the rest of Peter's remarks (not quoted > here), I dont see what possible basis he could have for describing > his own view as "conventional" and mine as something else. > ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 08:50:59 -0400 (EDT) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Re: ane Is IH a leaf on the Stammbaum? Elie Wardini writes: Note that Ullendorf, and commenting on him Cohen agree that what makes Amharic, Modern Aramaic dialects, Ugaritic, Arabic, Akkadian etc. part of the same "family" is *NOT* a historical chain of events (which we in fact can not document for most of our languages; Note for example the assumed origin of Ethiopic from Southern Arabia, due to its close resemblance to South Arabian, yet no "histroical" domcumentation is available), but rather a shared set of isoglosses, or developments thereoff. This is ambiguous. It is true that there is not an attested chain of events, but it is ONLY a hypothetical chain of events leading back to a common origin that can be considered the basis for positing a family. Even Meillet, see my earlier postings for why I say 'even', argued vehemently that an IE language is a language descended from Proto-IE BECAUSE there is no set of properties which synchornically distinguish an IE language from a non-IE one. Now there is a view which was common in the 19th century which attributes to each language fmaily a set of eternally immutable characteristics, and specifically to Semitic the triliteral root and to IE ablaut. But we now know, do we not, that Semitic is related to languages which do not have triliteral roots and that it itself has shorter ones too, and I think we now understand that IE ablaut is very much the same thing as the use of differnt vowels for different grammatical morphemes in Semitic and so IE itslf can be viewed now as having had biliteral and triliteral roots just like Semitic. And we have for a half-century or even longer now had the distinction between comparative linguistics and typology, a distinction which int he ANE field is perhaps immeditaely tracebale to Greenberg, but which was made in the 1840's by Castren in his work on Ural-Altaic. Any commonalities which could be used to define 'Semitic' to mean anything other than 'a language derived from Proto-Semitic' would be typological and would in all likelihood either be shared with various non-Semitic languages or notshared by all Semitic ones. This time I have no hesitation in saying that this is the standard teaching in linguistics, although it was not fifty or a hundred years ago, and that it is correct. Again, if we are only thinking of ancient Semitic languages, which FEEL so different from most of our native tongues (and which we are TAUGHT to regard as different in our Arabic 101, Hebrew 101, and so on) and which are BOTH derived from a common soruce AND typologically very very similar to each other, this distinction may not be palpable. But surely when we compare English, Sinhalese, Vedic Sanskrit, Old Egyptian, Hausa, Hebrew, Arabic, Yokuts, Burji, and Berber, the real picture will emerge with startling clarity. Typologically, we may well find Hebrew, Arabic, Berber, and Yokuts to be the closest (Yokuts is a native language of California) with Egyptian and Sanskrit being the next closest, and we would certainly notthink that Sinhalese is typologically close to English OR to Sanskrit (thoigh they are all related) or that Hausa and Burji are typologicall close to Arabic and hebrew and Berber. In fact, in days gone by, it was precisely the case that it took a very long time for Sinhalese to be admitted to be an Indo-European language (Mu"ller in his 1876- classification did not), andI think the persistent attempts to relate Semitic to Indo-European rather than to languages like Hausa (Chadic) or Burji (Cushitic) have in part been due to the same lakc of clarity about how typology has nothing directly to do with common descent or lack thereof. Related languages of course will share typological features if they are closely related because it takes a long time for typological features to change, which is precisely whyc the Semitic languages look so typologically alike: it is because they are so closely related, with Proto-Semitic being a very recent protolanguage. Which is again why you canNOT learn comparative linguistics in general by just looking at the ancient Semitic languages. And now PLEASE, isn't there somebody out there who will take this over. I really find it difficult to continue, and yet I would hate to have you people think that the critics have won if I cannot respond. But this really is it for me. I am off to bed, and if no one is willing to speak up for the things on ANE, then so be it. But I do hope that they younger people in particular will not be deceived and will seek out ways to inform themselves. We are living in a time when, despite very significant economic and political pressures which have reduced or are threatening to reduce or are reducing by leaps and bounds the teaching of comparative lx in America, Russia, France, Denmark, and even Germany, yet incredibly exciting things are being done in Indo-European, Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Austroasiatic and Austronesian, and many other fields and when exciting and importnat problems remain to be solved in refernce to Semitic, Sumerian, Hattic, Hurrian, and other specifically ANE languages. I cannot but hope that the students who read these postings will focus on learnin about such work instead of on what I really think is sterile repetition of venerable but tired philosophical arguments which if they ever be resolved can only be resolved by doing more linguistics and not by doing less, by seeing the potential and not by focusing on the limits (which while they do exist are not nearly as restrictive as some would like to believe). Above all, that they will want to DO and not merely hear ABOUT, DO and not merely be critics OF, comparative linguistics. There are hundreds of topics to work on in particular languages and language fmailies and dozens of theortical ones (about the extensions and revisions and limits of the methodology) which I alone could list that are not getting adequate attention for lack of sufficient peoplepower. Instead of pretending that realistic comparative linguistics disappeared in the 19th century or that we have long exhausted the limits of our knowledge, why not tell the more interesting story of what remains to be done and about how to do it? A. Manaster Ramer ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 08:14:06 -0500 From: Peter Daniels Subject: Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. All week I've thought Alexis was arguing for position 1, and now he says he favors position 2 like the rest of the participants. Did other readers get that impression? But I don't see that I ever suggested position 1 is the standard; Alexis put at the end of his essay my clarification that calling position 2 conventional I meant majoritarian! We no longer bother to discuss phlogisthon or phrenology, even though in the late 18th century both were legitimate theories attempting to account for observed data; they turned out not to account for other data, so they were rejected. Surely the same holds for positions 1 and 3? Certainly one can reject the notion of Altaic unity without rejecting the concept of Stammbaum! Areal linguistics is additional to, not replacive of, comparative linguistics. And of course comparative Semitics was essential in the decipherments of the Semitic scripts--Palmyran, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Ugaritic (see my articles that I keep referencing here, esp. in CANE). But not in terms of a reconstructed PS--that didn't exist until the last of the three--; simply in terms of what a Semitic language is supposed to look like (in all three cases, grammar [incl. morphology] was more' important than phonology, since everyone always knew that there were more letters in Arabic than in Hebrew). Peter T. Daniels ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 08:48:52 -0500 From: Peter Daniels Subject: Re: ane Is IH a leaf on the Stammbaum? (a) Triliteral roots: Grover Hudson has been arguing for several years (NACAL 1995, LSA 1997, and apparently quite a few talks elsewhere) that the triliteral root is not a helpful way to regard Semitic; rather we should recognize that Semitic ancestral forms had 3 consonants (usually) and a vowel and so were not typologically unique among the languages of the world. (One of his arguments is that the basic vowel is not predictable and so must be part of the form-- I can't say either "root" or "base" as in other language families!) (The notion of triconsonantal root comes from the Arab grammarians, and that, I say, is because they could see the consonants on the page but not the vowels: it's an artifact of the abjadic script rather than the result of analysis the way Panini's description of Sanskrit was done without benefit of writing.) (b) Stages of PIE: I forgot to mention this in my previous response to Alexis--he mentions that analysis of stages of development within Proto- Indo-European is just getting under way, and mentions several scholars working on this. But W. P. Lehmann, in *Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics* (Routledge, 1993), lays out no fewer than 6 stages of the development of the vocalic system, based entirely on internal reconstruction (and a commitment to the application of laryngeal theory throughout the system, rather than grafting it onto the description found in what he calls "the handbooks", meaning primarily Brugmann but also Meillet). He notes in passing that the old term "Indo-Hittite" seems to have reflected an attempt to not have to do that--Indo-Hittite-ists tried to keep the IE of the handbooks while restricting the use of laryngeals to the description of the Anatolian group (Hittite etc.). If that re- striction were correct, then there would indeed be justification for the revision of the name and treating IE as a major break. However, he says this is untenable, that IE is much easier understood when laryngeals are used to explain many phenomena; and that the use of the term IH pretty much died out with its last supporter, Warren Cowgill (d. 1985). (I would add that the volume *Evidence for Laryngeals*, edited by Werner Winter, with a chapter on each of the IE families, was published in 1965 by Mouton.) Peter T. Daniels ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 10:16:44 -0400 (EDT) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. OK, let's get this straight and I apologize if I have contributed to any confusion: (1) Protolanguage are fictions, but useful. I take this to have been Meillet's view and tobe Wardini's and Rubio's and I thought Daniels'view. And Ibelieve Rubio claims that this is the majority view. (2) Protolanguages are or rather were real languages once spoken. This is what I think is the majority view although I dont know this because I havenot done a census. It is the view Rubio said was naive and had died out in the 19th century, but I certainly hold itand I was only born in 1956. (3) Protolanguages are ficitons and completely misleading because the language "families" reflect convergence of originally unmrelated languages. This was Trubetzkoy's and Kotwicz's view and I think is still largely Doerfer's. I belive this is the one which Peter compares to phlogiston theory, but I would not since it is currently held and was in recent times by well-respected scholars. AMR ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 12:53:00 -0400 From: Gonzalo Rubio Subject: Re: ane Proto... whatever I don't want to sound rude, but I am completely fed up with this discussion. However, since Alexis keeps obsessively repeating my name as a sort of mantra, message after message, I want to try an exorcism. It's NOT that Proto-languages are fictions. It's that we canNOT achieve a complete reconstruction, a coherent and complete diasystem. I made it extremely clear. Since Alexis seems to be into "positions" in this discussion, let's put it this way: there are FOUR positions in the history of the discipline: (1) POSITIVISTS: that was the standard position in the 19th century and the beginning of ours. They thought they could reconstruct completely a proto-language, even write a descriptive grammar of it, and infer everything about the history, religion, ideology, etc. of the people who spoke it. WHO does defend such a position nowadays? Well, mostly people who "reconstruct" "proto-proto-...-languages", such as Nostraticists, "Long Rangers" ("Proto-World people" --perhaps, an homage to Disney World), etc. If these guys are working on already reconstructed proto-languages to reconstruct a proto-proto-whatever, obviously they need all of them to be "real". In general, they who feel so confident, happen to work exclusively on "reconstruction", having little, if any, knowledge of the actual languages spoken within that language family, which prevents them from understanding the nuances involved in diversity. (2) "Sprachbund explains it". That was Trubetzkoy's "position". Very few people supported his claims and this was never a very sound option. (3) "We reconstruct mere algebraic relations". That was for years defended (and it's still) by some scholars. Although the true phonetics of a proto-language, all the nuances of its pronunciation, are impossible to recover, this very extreme skepticism has very few supporters. In the case of Semitic, no one would say this, since Semitic languages are so similar. (4) The fourth "position" is held by MOST Semitic linguists (Huehnergard, Rabin, Kaye, Blau, etc.) and it's becoming the theoretical framework - --when this issue is explicitly addressed-- in the most classical paradigm of Indo-European linguistics, i.e. the German school (Untermann, etc.). Within this paradigm scholars argue: (a) reconstructed proto-languages are sorts of "proto-type" languages (as Kaye says). The real proto-languages we had lost for ever, had complicated diachronic (stages), diatopic (areal dialects), and diastratic (sociolects) variables in most cases we can hardly figure out. (b) any attempt to infer historical, ethnic, etc., points based on "linguistic paleontology" are erroneous (here I can mention Untermann, but also Schlerath --that is, the "sancta sanctorum" of Indogermanistik). Now Alexis will keep repeating my name for the next two weeks. What about "om mani patme hum", or just "om agnim ile purohitam"...? Please, Alexis, forget I exist, OK? - ------------------------ Gonzalo Rubio Near Eastern Studies Johns Hopkins University gonzalor@jhu.edu - ------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 14:58:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Paul Sodtke Subject: Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. How about a naive question from someone with absolutely *no* training in linguistics, but who has been following this discussion because liguistic theories - even implicit ones - do make a difference for interpretation of texts (in my case, Biblical Hebrew). I just don't see what all the fury is about. Let me start with a small snippet from a post by A. Manaster Ramer: On Sat, 19 Apr 1997 manaster@umich.edu wrote: > ... and it is far from clear > whether the notion of protolanguage depends crucially on > belief in the Stammbaum. It may, but that remains to be shown. Precisely! It seems to me that *all* participants in the debate agree that divergence (the basis of the Stammabum model) is only one of many processes going on in linguistic development. (I understand some of the other important processes to be things like geographical dialects, contact, extinction, etc.) I don't see that this denys the existence of proto-languages. Everybody agrees that our re-constructions are very imperfect at best. But any model has to have some sort of family grouping. Semitic languages are obviously more closely related to each other than to IE languages. Some sort of descent must have happened, even if it was not linear or simple. So then, take the following snippet from Gonzalo Rubio: >It's NOT that Proto-languages are fictions. It's that we canNOT achieve a >complete reconstruction, a coherent and complete diasystem. I made it >extremely clear. Was Alexis saying that we *could* achieve a complete reconstruction? I didn't read that. Or, this snippet from the same post: >(4) The fourth "position" is held by MOST Semitic linguists (Huehnergard, >Rabin, Kaye, Blau, etc.) and it's becoming the theoretical framework >--when this issue is explicitly addressed-- in the most classical >paradigm of Indo-European linguistics, i.e. the German school (Untermann, >etc.). Within this paradigm scholars argue: > > (a) reconstructed proto-languages are sorts of "proto-type" >languages (as Kaye says). The real proto-languages we had lost for ever, >had complicated diachronic (stages), diatopic (areal dialects), and >diastratic (sociolects) variables in most cases we can hardly figure out. Again, I don't see anything there that Dr. Manaster Ramer has contradicted or would contradict. So, it seems to be that you fellows are reading things between the lines that I don't see, and that your real positions are not that far apart. The diferences are real but subtle, more to do with emphasis than principle. Am I wrong? Could it be that there are some old battles being re-fought here? Paul - ------------------------------------------ Paul Sodtke Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto psodtke@chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~psodtke ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:00:47 -0500 From: Peter Daniels Subject: Re: ane Protolanguages, Linguistic Family Trees, etc. Alexis has just switched the numberings of viewpoints he had been using. What he now calls (1) is what he originally called (2). I accept what he now calls (1), and I say this is the conventional = majoritarian view. I think that (2) is Chris Ehret's view (based on his dating AA on the basis of reconstructed vocabulary a.k.a. Woerter und Sachen a.k.a. liguistic paleontology. (3) Seems to me silly (based on Alexis's description of it; I have myself never read any work advocating this view. Apparently it's an Altaicist's attempt to make the Altaic problem go away). Peter T. Daniels ************ OK, let's get this straight and I apologize if I have contributed to any confusion: (1) Protolanguage are fictions, but useful. I take this to have been Meillet's view and tobe Wardini's and Rubio's and I thought Daniels'view. And Ibelieve Rubio claims that this is the majority view. (2) Protolanguages are or rather were real languages once spoken. This is what I think is the majority view although I dont know this because I havenot done a census. It is the view Rubio said was naive and had died out in the 19th century, but I certainly hold itand I was only born in 1956. (3) Protolanguages are ficitons and completely misleading because the language "families" reflect convergence of originally unmrelated languages. This was Trubetzkoy's and Kotwicz's view and I think is still largely Doerfer's. I belive this is the one which Peter compares to phlogiston theory, but I would not since it is currently held and was in recent times by well-respected scholars. AMR ****************** Actually I was comparing both the new (2) and (3) to phlogisthon and phrenology. New (2) seems to assume we can know far more than we can. I reiterate my earlier statement, which Alexis didn't comment on: certainly there was a Common IE, a Common Semitic, a Common AA, maybe a Common Altaic language; but we can reconstruct only a very vague approximation of what it was like, and all responsible historical linguists agree that if they got in their time machines they wouldn't be able to converse with the speakers of the Common languages. And, within the Common languages there were dialectal variations just like in observed languages. Occasionally we can even see hints of them in their descendants a few (at the most) thousand years later.  ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 19 Apr 97 21:47:03 -0500 From: David Lorton Subject: ane Boogie Nation (huh?) Since other members of this list probably have received or will receive the following invitation to visit a website with photos that are supposed to show an ancient Egyptian inscription containing pictures of a submarine, an airplane, and whatever, I thought I should post the invitation and my response to it. For the Egyptologists, this will be old hat, but I thought I should make the posting to help prevent confusion on the part of the interested amateurs. Please folks (and Boogie), I don't want to hear any more about this. Subject: Unusual Hieroglyphs in Abydos Egypt Sent: 4/19/97 10:03 AM Received: 4/19/97 8:22 PM From: Boogie Nation, egyptologists@amargiland.com To: Abydos Inquiry, egyptologists@amargiland.com We have sent this inquiry out to you in the hopes of gaining some answers regarding some very unusual hieroglyphs. To this date, we have not been able to 'decode' these glyphs or find an academic attempt to translate them. As a result, these hieroglyphs have allowed people's imaginations to run wild which has brought us farther away from scientific understandings. What we have here are some very interesting hieroglyphs that are found in the Temple of Abydos (Temple of Ramses II) in Egypt. What is unusual about these glyphs is what they seem to depict... nothing like we've ever seen before! Modern helicopter, submarine and disk in 6,000 year old ancient art? Please help us solve this riddle. If you can contribute any data, we will post it on a separate web page within the site and give you full credit (and links to your site). Rare photos of these hieroglyphs can be found at: http://www.amargiland.com/mysterious.glyphs/ Best Wishes, Amargi Hillier President, BOOGIE NATION Dear Amargi, There is no mystery here; it's just a palimpsest, as was suggested (though without the use of that term) in two of the comments I read at your web site. It was decided in antiquity to replace the five-fold royal titulary of Seti I with that of his son and successor, Ramesses II. In the photos, we clearly see "Who repulses the Nine Bows," which figures in some of the Two-Ladies names of Seti I, replaced by "Who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries," a Two-Ladies name of Ramesses II. With some of the plaster that once covered Seti I's titulary now fallen away, certain of the superimposed signs do indeed look like a submarine, etc., but it's just a coincidence. What is happening in the photographs is quite clear; just consult Juergen von Beckerath, Handbuch der aegyptischen Koenigsnamen, Muenchner aegyptologische Studien 20, pages 235 and 237. David Lorton ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 08:50:47 +0300 (IDT) From: Yonatan NADELMAN - 5892216 Subject: ane Hebrew: continuity from antiquity Greetings! Being neither a linguist nor a politician let me comment on a more personal level. The continuity of the Hebrew language and the unifying traditions of my people throughout the world emphasize the connection of modern society with antiquity. On a visit to Yemen last year I met with local Jews. The contents of those encounters, conducted fluently amongst us in my 'Israeli' Hebrew and their 'Yemeni' Hebrew, clearly reinforced the unity of one nation connected through more than just a language. The link between them and me is far stronger than any 'political' purpose [taken in the negative extremist sense]. The re-vamping of the language rather helps preserve our culture and [now diaspora and non-diaspora] community which has its formative roots and beginnings in the same antiquity. Perhaps it also preserves a sense of dignity which _every_ nation deserves. On the eve of Passover, with the unity and continuity from antiquity which it reminds us of, sincerely, YONATAN NADELMAN Israel Antiquity Authority (off-line between April 21 - 29) On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, Naccache wrote: [...] > Now, on the political side of things, allow me to turn to Horovitz's last > posting, > in which he writes: > > Israeli school children can read the > >Bible and probably make out the gezer calendar with less trouble than an > >American can understand Shakespeare and certainly Chaucer. > > I'll grant the point without nit-picking on Horovitz's unfortunate choice of > illustration (lets say we replace the Gezer calendar by the Siloam tunnel > inscription). I'll grant the point because creating that kind of link with > the past was precisely the 'nationalistic purpose' for which IH was > 'resuscitated'. > > But then, what is happening? Horovitz is no fool, how could he not see that > 'resuscitating' a language for 'nationalistic purpose' is an act squarely > within the realm of politics? How could he write: > >Those who would charge the politics are involved in the classication > >argument are the ones guilty of the politicization of the discussion. > > What kind of delusion is at work here? ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 08:14:03 +0100 From: biblio.abbayeliguge@interpc.fr (Abbaye Liguge (Biblio)) Subject: Re ane Mount Moriah Dear Douglas, The name of Moriah first appears in Gn 22, 2 as the country where God said to Abraham to go for Isaac's sacrifice. The text don't wrote "Mount Moriah" but "land of Moriah". In 2 Chr 3, 1, one can read : "Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem in Mount Moriah". The identification between this "Mount Moriah" and the "land of Moriah" of Gn 22, 2 was done by the Jewish tradition and is attested by Josephus (Ant. I, 13 and II, 13). In Gn 22, 14, Abraham named the place YHVY yireh (YHVH provides, or YHVH sees, or YHVH will be see). The identification of Mount Moriah and the place of the crucifixion was done by the christian Fathers, not only because they did a comparison between Abraham's sacrifice and Jesus' death, but also because they interpreted the speaking of Jesus in John 8, 56 in relation with Abraham's sacrifice and Mount Moriah. Sincerely fr. Lucien-Jean BORD biblio.abbayeliguge@interpc.fr ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1997 #103 **************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html