From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1999 #53 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Tuesday, February 23 1999 Volume 1999 : Number 053 ane ANE: PEF ane The Ancient World on Television (North America) Re: ane eme sal Re: Babylonian m > w (was Re: ane eme sal) Re: ane eme sal ane Cilicia ane Kizzuwatna, Tarhuntassa, Que and Hilakku ane Name for Assyria/Syria/Aramaic ane Indus Valley Images available ane list ane emesal ane: Assyrian Gyges Re: ane: Assyrian Gyges Re: ane emesal ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:47:27 +0200 From: Cynthia Edenburg Subject: ane ANE: PEF Does anyone have the address and telephone number for the Palestine Exploration Fund offices? Please reply offlist. Thanks, Cynthia Edenburg The Open University of Israel Tel. 972-3-6460500 fax. 972-3-460767 Dept. of History, Philosophy and Jewish Studies POB 39328 Rehov Klausner 16 Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 61392 ISRAEL ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 05:54:29 -0500 From: David Meadows Subject: ane The Ancient World on Television (North America) ]|[============================================]|[ ]|[ ]|[ THE ANCIENT WORLD ON TELEVISION ]|[ ]|[ (NORTH AMERICA) ]|[ ]|[ February 22 - 28, 1999 ]|[============================================]|[ Another quiet week: ]|[ Monday, February 22 9.00 a.m. DISCU Assignment Discovery Gulliver's Travels/ The Odyssey Discovery Channel is showing TLC's 'Great Books' series in pairs every morning for the next while; the Odyssey installment is excellent ]|[ Thursday, February 25 8.00 p.m. HISTC Ancient Civilizations The Celts and Picts Another one I have to add to the collection ]|[ Friday, February 26 8.00 p.m. HISTU Riddle of the Zodiac Oft repeated on many channels -- a look at the history of astrology 8.00 p.m. HISTC 500 Nations Nez Perce The trials and tribulations of the Nez Perce people ]|[ Saturday, February 27 7.00 p.m. A&E Mysteries of the Bible The Ten Commandments What the Commandments 'originally' meant ... 8.30 p.m. HISTC History Bites Pure Vandalism To judge by the show's premise, this one must be about the Vandals ... ]|[ Sunday, February 28 12.00 p.m. A&E Mysteries of the Bible The Story of Creation Repeat of Saturday's program 6.00 p.m. A&E The Unexplained The Curse of King Tut An account of the supposed curse 9.00 p.m. A&E Cleopatra's World Alexandria Revealed This may or may not be new; the title certainly is, but the fact that it is a two-hour special and has a somewhat familiar description (i.e. that she wasn't a seductress but a shrewd political type) suggests it might be two older programs masquerading as a new one. Still worth a look, of course. ++ Next installment on or about February 28, 1999++ ]|[============================================]|[ A channel guide is available at: http://web.idirect.com/~atrium/awotv/channelguide.html ]|[============================================]|[ To subscribe to these listings, send a blank email message to: AWOTV-subscribe@onelist.com To unsubscribe from these listings, send a blank email message to: AWOTV-unsubscribe@onelist.com Or go to: http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/AWOTV ]|[============================================]|[ Copyright (c) 1999 David Meadows. Feel free to distribute these listings via email to your pals, students, teachers, etc., but please include this copyright notice. Please do not post these listings to your website, but rather make a link to: http://web.idirect.com/~atrium/awotv.html Thanks! ]|[============================================]|[ ]|[ David Meadows ]|[ http://web.idirect.com/~atrium ]|[ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 07:49:25 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Re: ane eme sal On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > manaster@umich.edu wrote: > > >On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > > >> I think the list clearly demonstrates that neither Emegir nor > >> Emesal is "primary" and the other variant "secondary". Both are > >> secondary and can be derived from what we may call > >> "Pre-Sumerian". > > > >I don't see that at all. > > Well: > > Emegir -> Emesal Emesal -> Emegir > > b b b b, p, g, g~ > p b (p) -- > d d, z, 0 d d, g, s^, h > t t, z t t, s^ > g g, g~, n, d, b g g, g~, h > k k k k > m m, n, g~ m m, n, g~ > n n, m, s^, l n n, m, g~, g, l > g~ m, n, b, g g~ g, m > s s, s^, z s s > s^ s, d, t, 0 s^ s^, s, n > z z z z, d, t, s > h h, g, d h h > l l, n l l, n > r r r r > > > You said: "If sounds X1 and X2 of eme-gir correspond to a single > sound Y1 of eme-sal, but not vice-versa, then the case is > proven." That's emphatically not the case. Neither can the > contrary case be made. The conclusion must be that both Emesal > and Emegir derive from an earlier Common Sumerian. The case is > especially clear in the alternations that can not be explained as > positional variants (g ~ b, g ~ d, g ~ h, n ~ l, n ~ s^). I already asnwered this. Your examples are either sporadic or involve conditioned shifts, whereas like Thomsen (I think) you are listing them as though they were UNconditioned. > > >> And g~idru was > >> never transcribed as ngidru, as far as I know. It was and is > >> written GIDRU in Akkadian or Hittite contexts, where the finesses > >> of Sumerian phonology are not essential. Only medially, in cases > >> like DINGIR and DUNGU, do we see NG. We should ask the Akkadians > >> why. > > > >You don't have to bother the Akkadians. Ask anybody. The > >answer is simply that Akkadian had no initial ng-. > ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 13:54:10 GMT From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Subject: Re: Babylonian m > w (was Re: ane eme sal) Robert Whiting wrote: >On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >> Cuneiform writing of /w/ was defective. In later Babylonian, >> was often used to write /w/, mainly because of the development m >> > w in Babylonian itself. > >This varies between vaguely inaccurate and completely speculative. >In later Babylonian was ALWAYS used to write etymological [w] >(as opposed to the glide between /u/ and /a/). There was no other >way to write it, as the WA sign (previously used for /wa/, /we/, >/wi/, /wu/) was restricted to the values /pi/, /pe/. I vaguely remembered that could be used as well, after PI had fallen into disuse. Having checked Lipin'ski, he only mentions an Assyrian spelling of ni-nu-u for /ninuwa/. >As for the alleged m > w change in Babylonian, this is simply speculation >based on the graphic replacement of with and graphic mergers do >not necessarily represent phonetic change. True. There is no way of knowing whether LB intervocalic -m- was identical with [w] or slightly different, say nasalized [w~]. Or maybe both at different times. Old Irish was pronounced [w~], but in modern Irish (most dialects) it's [v] (< [w]). >English once had signs for and , >both of which have been replaced with . But this graphic merger >does not mean that one sound has changed into the other. Native >speakers still know the difference between the sounds in "this" and >"thin." Bad example: that was a phonemic split, not a graphic merger. OE never systematically distinguished between thorn and edh, which were allographs of the single phoneme /T/, in Norman orthography. In ME, the phoneme eventually split into /T/ and /D/, but the spelling never changed. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv@wxs.nl Amsterdam ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 16:35:42 GMT From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Subject: Re: ane eme sal manaster@umich.edu wrote: [mcv:] >> The case is >> especially clear in the alternations that can not be explained as >> positional variants (g ~ b, g ~ d, g ~ h, n ~ l, n ~ s^). > >I already asnwered this. Your examples are either sporadic or >involve conditioned shifts, whereas like Thomsen (I think) you >are listing them as though they were UNconditioned. So what are the conditions? EG /g/ ~ ES /g/ nugig ~ mugib g~estug ~ mus^tug engar ~ mungar [before front, back; final] EG /g/ ~ ES /d/ agar ~ adar - -gin ~ -dim ga- ~ da- [before front, back; initial] EG /g/ ~ ES /b/ dug ~ zeb dugud ~ zebida igi ~ ibi nugig ~ nugib sig ~ s^eb s^ag ~ s^ab [before front, back; final] EG /n/ ~ ES /n/ engar ~ mungar Enki ~ Amanki Enlil ~ mullil g~es^tin ~ mutin inim ~ eneg~ munus ~ nunus nam ~ nag~ nag~a ~ nama unu ~ munu [before back, front; final, initial] EG /n/ ~ ES /s^/ anir ~ as^er en ~ as^ nigbunna ~ s^enbunna nin ~ s^en nir ~ s^er nirah ~ s^erah nirg~al ~ s^ermal nundum ~ s^umdum [before front, back; final, initial] As to the the last two, even if you can explain away and (how?), I'm not aware of any examples anywhere of palatalized /n^/ going to /S/. A much more natural change would be /l^/ > /S/, so there is at least an underlying n ~ l alternation here. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv@wxs.nl Amsterdam ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:18:00 -0800 (PST) From: Andrew Lafli Subject: ane Cilicia Dear Listmembers, I am working on Cilician history (southeastern Turkey) in Iron Age. I have a chapter, in which, I deal with the Greek colonisation in Cilicia. Can anyone tell me where I can find the first inscription (or textual context in Greek), in which the name of "Kilikia" was mentioned (Homer?, Herodotos?). I must confess that I know nothing about the early Greek inscriptions or texts. Perhaps this was not the right mailing list to be mailed, but i still wanted to try it. Thanks in advance. Anything new about the Cilician history is welcome! _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:30:43 -0800 (PST) From: Andrew Lafli Subject: ane Kizzuwatna, Tarhuntassa, Que and Hilakku Dear listmembers, again me! I still have a second question, which is also concerning with the Cilician history. I am working on Cilician iron age(s). I have to deal with the Hittites in Cilicia and their survivors in the middle iron age. I´ve collected all publications before than the year of 1992. I still need some info (especially in German) after this year. Does anyone know any new publication on these four themes: Kizzuwatna, Tarhuntassa, Que and Hilakku. But please after the year of 1992. Before than this date, I found almost everything. Anything new about the Cilician history is welcome. Regards, _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 17:51:00 -0500 From: "George Kiraz" Subject: ane Name for Assyria/Syria/Aramaic I have a request from Dr. John Joseph. If you think you can help with some info, please email him and CC me with the communication. (Dr. Joseph is not on the ANE list). In the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (vol 51, 1992), p. 285, there is a table of "Words used for Assyria and Syria and the Aramaic Language in the Ancient Near East. Some elements in the table are missing. If you can shed some light on these elements, please let me and Dr. Joseph (his email is in the CC field above) know. What are the Old Persian names for: 1) area of Syria, 2) Aramaeans, 3) the Aramaic language, and 4) ancient Assyrians? What are the Middle Persian names for the same items? George Kiraz - ---------- George Anton Kiraz, Ph.D. Language Modeling Research Bell Laboratories Lucent Technologies Room 2D-446 700 Mountain Ave. Murray Hill, NJ 07974 Tel. +1 908 582 4074 Fax. +1 908 582 3306 email: gkiraz@research.bell-labs.com Bell Labs Text-to-Speech: http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts Hugoye Journal: http://www.acad.cua.edu/syrcom/Hugoye ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 17:46:07 -0600 From: "Charles E. Jones" Subject: ane Indus Valley Images available Forwarded on behalf of the undersigned, to whom responses and inquiries should be directed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx From: Omar Khan New Ancient Indus Valley Slides A new set of 80 ancient Indus Valley slides focusing on the latest discoveries (1995-1998) by the Wisconsin-Harvard archaeological team is now available. It includes some of the world's first writing, artifacts from a new pre-Indus culture, new seals, jewelry, pottery, the spectacular bead pot find and numerous updated color maps. The slides can be see on the Internet at http://www.harappabazaar.com/slide2.html. Photographed by two leading scholars, Dr. Mark Kenoyer (Wisconsin) and Dr. Richard Meadow (Harvard). The discoveries themselves can be seen at http://www.harappa.com/indus2/index.html. This set is a sequel to our successful first sets introducing the ancient Indus Valley culture, which can be seen at http://www.harappabazaar.com/slide.html. The full set is $130 ($3 S & H in the US, $8 international). The slides have printed captions, and come with another 11 pages of detailed captions. Order securely online, by phone/fax at (415) 642-1620, or by mail at 66 Cumberland St., San Francisco, CA 94110. Purchase orders accepted. Full money back guarantee. Profits benefit continuing research. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions. Regards, Omar Khan - -- Omar Khan, Producer Harappa http://www.harappa.com The Oldest Site on the Web New: The Latest Indus Discoveries at http://www.harappa.com/indus2/ New Ancient Indus Valley Slides A new set of 80 ancient Indus Valley slides focusing on the latest discoveries (1995-1998) by the Wisconsin-Harvard archaeological team is now available. It includes some of the world's first writing, artifacts from a new pre-Indus culture, new seals, jewelry, pottery, the spectacular bead pot find and numerous updated color maps. The slides can be see on the Internet at http://www.harappabazaar.com/slide2.html. Photographed by two leading scholars, Dr. Mark Kenoyer (Wisconsin) and Dr. Richard Meadow (Harvard). The discoveries themselves can be seen at http://www.harappa.com/indus2/index.html. This set is a sequel to our successful first sets introducing the ancient Indus Valley culture, which can be seen at http://www.harappabazaar.com/slide.html. The full set is $130 ($3 S & H in the US, $8 international). The slides have printed captions, and come with another 11 pages of detailed captions. Order securely online, by phone/fax at (415) 642-1620, or by mail at 66 Cumberland St., San Francisco, CA 94110. Purchase orders accepted. Full money back guarantee. Profits benefit continuing research. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions. Regards, Omar Khan - -- Omar Khan, Producer Harappa http://www.harappa.com The Oldest Site on the Web New: The Latest Indus Discoveries at http://www.harappa.com/indus2/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 16:52:54 -0700 From: "Charles W. Suran" Subject: ane list Please remove my name from this list. Thank you Charles W. Suran cwsuran@infomagic.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:41:31 -0500 From: nyokabi@kingcon.com Subject: ane emesal On Sunday Fed 21 M Vidal wrote: >>I think you are still assuming that eme.sal means "woman's >>language". In fact, the word "sal" means "thin, refined". > [EA] >Uuh... are you saying that SAL no longer means woman? [MV] >Yes. [EA] >Or simply that it has multiple meanings and does not HAVE to mean woman? >But are these other meanings also written with the triangular logogram? [MV] >"Woman" is . It is written with sign B554, which also >stands for (and a lot of other things). Is there some definitive article you can refer us to when it lost this meaning? Or does it still retain the meanings "pudenda", "female sex", but not "woman"? I always thought sal and munus were two alternative words for woman, perhaps with different shades of meaning, like woman and female, or like LU and UR? I have a margin note that says Deimel (1910?) has salla/woman and that Langdon (1911) has sal/woman. [ what about the goddess d-Shala? Adad's wife? and Hurrian shali/ girl, daughter? so much fluidity of sh/s going on in this area in 2nd milennium, there could be some connection couldn't there? I notice in LaRoche that Hurrian doesn't have an s, only $? cf Eg shri-t or s3-t/ maiden, daughter; Also Georgian tsuli/ wife, Ingushe sielk/ woman. Looking through some notes I have from CG Gostony, 1975, Dict Etym Sumerienne et Grammaire Comparee, I noted # 143 sal-la, vast, wide, and # 180 sal, ditto. Could Eme-sal possibly have meant the dialect of the wide open spaces, i.e. the country folk, country talk? Still not sure why it would mean "refined" if its pronunciation was so divergent from the standard used for royal inscriptions, etc. Anybody have any other sal meanings to suggest? [EA] > >Why would people add prefix-like syllables to existing words [eg mu-lu >>for lu, Aman.ki for Enki, mungar for engar, munu for unu, umun for en]? >>Is it a coincidence that the Bantu {and many other N-K langs} singular >>prefix for the human class is usually mu (variants umu, ama) (and mw or m- >>before some vowels) and that every one of these names I picked off the >>list is a class I, i.e. human word? (man, farmer, shepherd, Enki, ruler). > [MV] >Interesting. However, the number of cases seems to be limited to >two (mu-lu ~ lu2 and (u)mun/aman ~ en) Why do you limit to those two? ES mungar> EG engar is a classic of its type. The prefixless folks know to drop mu which leaves them with ngar, which they can't pronounce so they add a vowel. Remember the young Tom Mboya, who in the 1960 presidential election charmed first Kennedy and then Nixon into donating a free plane to transport Kenyans to the US for college education? Mboya was a media hit for a short time and even made the cover of Time. All the press pronounced his name Emboya, because Americans couldn't handle mBoya. As for munu > unu that is also simple: it was mu-unu, not mu-nu, but mu-unu coalesces to munu. [never heard of mwunu, mw is usually before front vowels - mwembe, mwimba...]. As for Amanki, it would seem that that could have been an alternate pronunciation of umun, so it was "translated" into Enki. [Naturally I am assuming an ES>EG derivation here, not EG>ES, for the sake of the argument]. > and there are many "class I" words that lack an nasal prefix in Emesal >(e.g. nunus "woman" [Emegir munus], or ga-s^an [Emegir nin] "lady"). Two answers to that. 1) if we assume the prefix language was actually the proto language, then EmeSal has also probably lost most already, but perhaps just retained some that EmeGir lost. 2) it is not uncommon for there to be class I words in a modern Bantu language which do not start with m-; but their plural prefixes agree, and their singular adjectival prefixes would still be m-, or w- in the case of possessives. For example: Chi Nyanja, the language of Malawi: A Hetherwick , A Manuel of the Nyanja Lang, p 6, after describing class I with its m- (mw- or mu-) singular prefix and its plural a- prefix [it's "animate", not just human] says: "other nouns which do not have the prefix m-, or would seem to have dropped it, make their plural by prefixing a - : namwali/ maiden, pl. anamwali; tsamwali/ friend, pl. atsamwali; kapolo/ slave, pl. akapolo; piru/ turkey, pl. apiru; kavalo/ horse, pl. akavalo." The latter, obviously being a LW from Portuguese, would suggest what I already suggested, the hesitancy to tack prefixes onto foreign words. But to indicate plural, the a- is still necessary, who would hear -s as plural? Anymore than westerners hear Ba-ntu as plural..so the unitiated tack on an -s: Bantus. So nunus might actually be a foreign word in EmeSal, adopted from the people who were the autochthons when THEY moved in. And on it goes... The Emesal word gashan / "lady" is a variant of the proto Bantu root for "woman, female" which appears, in HH Johnston's 1919 comparison of Bantu roots, in nearly 200 languages. [His range is actually much wider than Bantu. He includes what he calls "Semi-Bantu" bringing him close to the full Niger-Kongo family]. This is one of those ancient core words that has jumped over language boundaries from Nig-Kongo into Nilo-Saharan : Meroitic kadi/ woman, Kuliak: So: gwathat/*gwasat/woman, Ik 'gwasat (cf Nubian kissi/ female organ). In Bantu the g- pronunciation of this word is in the minority, the k- forms as in Meroitic predominating. In most instances the Bantu root carries the mu- prefix, but in about 15 languages it is already prefixless. Johnston thinks the original was -kati, then moved on to -kazi/-kasi/-kashi, then to -kari/kali, etc. This makes it difficult to believe it could have been adopted from the languages of the Nile... it seems much more likely that a N-K substratum donated the word to both Meroitic and Nubian, the same substratum who may have carried it abroad in earlier ages. Unless it goes back to Noah and spread N, S, W and E from the ShanHarian/Shinarian cradleland. [cf. Turkic langs: kari, kadin, kissi, aghachi/woman, wife ; Khalaj/ Khallukh Turkish: kisi/kishi/ woman/ wife; Georgian: kali/woman ]. Significantly, it is among the Western Lu-ba or Lu-lua of Eastern Kongo that we find the closest versions to EmeSal: -KASHI, and -KASHIANA. West of the Luba, in the Kasai river region, the Bambala have prefixless Kosoma/woman. Just south of the Luba are the Nyoka, who have the word Kash/woman without a prefix.[Anyone who has read Vansina's Kingdoms of the Savannah will appreciate that the crucial role played by these kingdoms in far flung trade and general cultural innovations has led many to speculate about intrusive ruling groups.. They could be the proto-LU, or they could be a major destination of the migration of the Children of Nimrod. Most certainly they were not in this location during the period we are dealing with: 4th-2nd mil BC. This was probably pygmy territory]. It is also interesting that about 10 Bantu languages have another root for woman similar to nin, the EmeGir form: It is -nina among the Zulu and Xhosa (where it coexists with the ES-type root -KAZANA/woman - no wonder Wanger got hung up on Zulu!!), -nen, -nan, -ninye, and -ninyi in some languages of the Cross-Benue region, once thought to be the proto-Bantu homeland. But it is the variant form nig~a (in Johnston's day they spelled this sound nin~ga) which is the most interesting. It is found in this form among the Nyamwezi of the Lake Victoria region, as well as among the Teke of Gabon, and the Yaunde of Cameroons. This raises the distinct phonetic possibility that EmeGir nin/lady may not only have dropped an initial mu- prefix, but may have lost what Kramer calls an "amissible terminal consonant", i.e. its g~. Perhaps the ancient original was muning~e. Johnston includes in his 200 language list of variants of kadi/kash/kazi/ woman some forms, both prefixed and prefixless, which distinctly sound like SAL. He moves from Cadi to Tsali [his convention is to capitalize the prefixless roots] to -sadi to -sali to -xali, most of these localized among the Tswana and Sotho of southern Africa. But not a trace of a munus or nunus, unless Mande has elided the n; its root muso/woman seems quite isolated in Africa: *munso>muso & munuso? [in Mandinka, Bambara, Kono, Vei, Djalunka, Toronka and 2 others]. Aside from that, So, an aberrant lang which shifts its classification every 20 years or so- I think it's part of Kuliak in E. Sudanic now: nos/nusin/ female organ (while So: gwasat = woman). [MV]>If it weren't for the annoying fact that the Sumerian possessive >is suffixed, I had rather explained these as prefixed g~u10 >(Emesal -mu) "my" (cf. monsieur, madame etc.). > Well that does seem a weak straw to clutch at. In Bantu the possessive follows the noun, either as a separate adjective: mwenzi wake /his friend, OR, in one of the few instances where suffixes are actually attached to nouns, and therefore do not need agreeing prefixes, mwenzake, his friend. mke wako, your wife or mkewe, your wife; dada wangu my sister or dadangu my sister. [examples from Swahili]. So if the prefix system had been dropped, one would expect that this latter form would be the one adopted in a modernized written prefixless language: the suffixed possessive. Kramer in The Sumerians has a little one page summary of the grammar, in which he states , 1) Sumerian is rather poor in adjectives and often uses genitival expressions instead. Ditto for Bantu.[cf Swahili rangi ya majani [the color of grass for "green"], mtu mwenye nguvu , a man possessing strength for a strong man, etc. 2)He says copulas [ditto for Ntu] and conjunctions are rarely used. Aside from Bantu na/and, Swahili has no real conjunctions but has borrowed many from Arabic: e.g. lakini/but; wala, ila, bali, basi etc. 3) He says nouns have no gender but are divided into animate and inanimate with animals in inanimate category. Unlike Nyanja, Swahili has animals in a separate class, mostly prefixless, but their adjectives do not use the human prefix but a w-/pl z- prefix. Ditto for no gender. Not even for pronouns, this is true of almost all Niger-Kongo, also true in Jamaican. 4) Kramer: "There is no relative pronoun in Sumerian; a nominalizing particle is used at the end of the clauses instead." This is identical to a Swahili construction: The suffix is called the -O of Reference (except for when the reference is to a member of the singular personal class, in which case the particle is -ye): Some examples from E O Ashton, Swahili Grammar: kengele i-lia-yo/ a bell which rings [bell it-rings-"which"]. kengele zi-lia-zo / bells which ring; mtu a-soma-ye / a man who reads. This is just a little surface scratch. If I remember, Wanger has a plethora of other examples. I sure hope someone in Africa is doing the definitive work on this. Which is not to say pre-Sumerians left from Africa and went to Sumer. Nobody had to go anywhere, though folks were probably coming and going all the time still, trading,raiding, smiting, migrating, fleeing, taking refuge, colonizing. As the ancients used to say, it was all Ethiopia from the rising to the setting of the sun. Until history happened, and after untold conquests and migrations, crimes and intermarriages we end up with today's human map. E. Adams PS While searching for words tonight I found the word I couldn't find during the Colchian discussion. Two names of one of the surviving Colchian languages are Laz and Chan, a language closely related to Mingrelian. I knew that a nearby language had the word Laza for wool, and wondered if the name wasn't originally an epithet meaning "woolly- headed" . The language is Abaze, otherwise known as Abkhaz, just up the Eastern Black Sea Coast from Colchis. Interesting that the Mitzdjeghi, who belong to NE Caucasian, have the word Cha/wool, since Chan and Laz are supposed to be alternate names for the same language. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:21:32 -0600 (CST) From: Tobin Cataldo Subject: ane: Assyrian Gyges Could anyone point me to where I could find the Assyrian parallel to Herodotos and the account of Gyges? Even secondary sources would be most useful in this case. Thanks. Tobin Cataldo ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 07:43:01 +0200 (EET) From: Robert Whiting Subject: Re: ane: Assyrian Gyges On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Tobin Cataldo wrote: > > Could anyone point me to where I could find the Assyrian parallel > to Herodotos and the account of Gyges? Even secondary sources would be > most useful in this case. Thanks. The narrative itself is contained in various Assurbanipal prisms. The sources and their history are discussed in M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, "Gyges and Assurbanipal: A Study in Literary Transmission," _Orientalia_ NS 46 (1977), 65-85. There is also a brief discussion in M. Nissinen, References to Prophecy in Neo-Assyrian Sources, SAAS 7 (Helsinki 1998), 57-58. Bob Whiting whiting@cc.helsinki.fi ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 00:18:26 -0600 From: "Charles David Isbell" Subject: Re: ane emesal Suggestion to okabi and miguel. For God's sake, try continuing your pointless discussion off list. For two weeks neither of you has admitted the other has any credibility and you have not settled one thing that I can observe. Talk to each other privately, but please don't make the rest of us suffer any more. - -----Original Message----- From: nyokabi@kingcon.com To: ane@oi.uchicago.edu Date: Monday, February 22, 1999 11:54 PM Subject: ane emesal >On Sunday Fed 21 M Vidal wrote: > >>>I think you are still assuming that eme.sal means "woman's >>>language". In fact, the word "sal" means "thin, refined". >> >[EA] >Uuh... are you saying that SAL no longer means woman? >[MV] >Yes. > >[EA] >Or simply that it has multiple meanings and does not HAVE to mean >woman? >But are these other meanings also written with the triangular >logogram? > >[MV] >"Woman" is . It is written with sign B554, which also >>stands for (and a lot of other things). > >Is there some definitive article you can refer us to when it lost this >meaning? Or does it still retain the meanings "pudenda", "female sex", but >not "woman"? I always thought sal and munus were two alternative words for >woman, perhaps with different shades of meaning, like woman and female, or >like LU and UR? I have a margin note that says Deimel (1910?) has >salla/woman and that Langdon (1911) has sal/woman. > >[ what about the goddess d-Shala? Adad's wife? and Hurrian shali/ girl, >daughter? so much fluidity of sh/s going on in this area in 2nd milennium, >there could be some connection couldn't there? I notice in LaRoche that >Hurrian doesn't have an s, only $? cf Eg shri-t or s3-t/ maiden, daughter; >Also Georgian tsuli/ wife, Ingushe sielk/ woman. > >Looking through some notes I have from CG Gostony, 1975, Dict Etym >Sumerienne et Grammaire Comparee, I noted # 143 sal-la, vast, wide, and # >180 sal, ditto. Could Eme-sal possibly have meant the dialect of the wide >open spaces, i.e. the country folk, country talk? Still not sure why it >would mean "refined" if its pronunciation was so divergent from the >standard used for royal inscriptions, etc. Anybody have any other sal >meanings to suggest? > >[EA] >> >Why would people add prefix-like syllables to existing words [eg mu-lu >>>for lu, Aman.ki for Enki, mungar for engar, munu for unu, umun for en]? >>>Is it a coincidence that the Bantu {and many other N-K langs} singular >>>prefix for the human class is usually mu (variants umu, ama) (and mw or m- >>>before some vowels) and that every one of these names I picked off the >>>list is a class I, i.e. human word? (man, farmer, shepherd, Enki, ruler). >> >[MV] >>Interesting. However, the number of cases seems to be limited to >>two (mu-lu ~ lu2 and (u)mun/aman ~ en) > >Why do you limit to those two? ES mungar> EG engar is a classic of its >type. The prefixless folks know to drop mu which leaves them with ngar, >which they can't pronounce so they add a vowel. Remember the young Tom >Mboya, who in the 1960 presidential election charmed first Kennedy and >then Nixon into donating a free plane to transport Kenyans to the US >for college education? Mboya was a media hit for a short time and even >made the cover of Time. All the press pronounced his name Emboya, because >Americans couldn't handle mBoya. As for munu > unu that is also simple: it >was mu-unu, not mu-nu, but mu-unu coalesces to munu. [never heard of mwunu, >mw is usually before front vowels - mwembe, mwimba...]. As for Amanki, it >would seem that that could have been an alternate pronunciation of umun, >so it was "translated" into Enki. [Naturally I am assuming an ES>EG >derivation here, not EG>ES, for the sake of the argument]. > >> and there are many "class I" words that lack an nasal prefix in Emesal >>(e.g. nunus "woman" [Emegir munus], or ga-s^an [Emegir nin] "lady"). > >Two answers to that. 1) if we assume the prefix language was actually the >proto language, then EmeSal has also probably lost most already, but >perhaps just retained some that EmeGir lost. 2) it is not uncommon for >there to be class I words in a modern Bantu language which do not start >with m-; but their plural prefixes agree, and their singular adjectival >prefixes would still be m-, or w- in the case of possessives. For example: >Chi Nyanja, the language of Malawi: A Hetherwick , A Manuel of the Nyanja >Lang, p 6, after describing class I with its m- (mw- or mu-) singular >prefix and its plural a- prefix [it's "animate", not just human] says: >"other nouns which do not have the prefix m-, or would seem to have dropped >it, make their plural by prefixing a - : namwali/ maiden, pl. anamwali; >tsamwali/ friend, pl. atsamwali; kapolo/ slave, pl. akapolo; piru/ turkey, >pl. apiru; kavalo/ horse, pl. akavalo." The latter, obviously being a LW >from Portuguese, would suggest what I already suggested, the hesitancy to >tack prefixes onto foreign words. But to indicate plural, the a- is still >necessary, who would hear -s as plural? Anymore than westerners hear Ba-ntu >as plural..so the unitiated tack on an -s: Bantus. So nunus might actually >be a foreign word in EmeSal, adopted from the people who were the >autochthons when THEY moved in. And on it goes... > >The Emesal word gashan / "lady" is a variant of the proto Bantu root for >"woman, female" which appears, in HH Johnston's 1919 comparison of Bantu >roots, in nearly 200 languages. [His range is actually much wider than >Bantu. He includes what he calls "Semi-Bantu" bringing him close to the >full Niger-Kongo family]. This is one of those ancient core words that has >jumped over language boundaries from Nig-Kongo into Nilo-Saharan : >Meroitic kadi/ woman, Kuliak: So: gwathat/*gwasat/woman, Ik 'gwasat (cf >Nubian kissi/ female organ). In Bantu the g- pronunciation of this word is >in the minority, the k- forms as in Meroitic predominating. In most >instances the Bantu root carries the mu- prefix, but in about 15 languages >it is already prefixless. Johnston thinks the original was -kati, then >moved on to -kazi/-kasi/-kashi, then to -kari/kali, etc. This makes it >difficult to believe it could have been adopted from the languages of the >Nile... it seems much more likely that a N-K substratum donated the word >to both Meroitic and Nubian, the same substratum who may have carried it >abroad in earlier ages. Unless it goes back to Noah and spread N, S, W >and E from the ShanHarian/Shinarian cradleland. [cf. Turkic langs: kari, >kadin, kissi, aghachi/woman, wife ; Khalaj/ Khallukh Turkish: kisi/kishi/ >woman/ wife; Georgian: kali/woman ]. > >Significantly, it is among the Western Lu-ba or Lu-lua of Eastern Kongo >that we find the closest versions to EmeSal: -KASHI, and -KASHIANA. West >of the Luba, in the Kasai river region, the Bambala have prefixless >Kosoma/woman. Just south of the Luba are the Nyoka, who have the word >Kash/woman without a prefix.[Anyone who has read Vansina's Kingdoms of the >Savannah will appreciate that the crucial role played by these kingdoms in >far flung trade and general cultural innovations has led many to speculate >about intrusive ruling groups.. They could be the proto-LU, or they could >be a major destination of the migration of the Children of Nimrod. Most >certainly they were not in this location during the period we are dealing >with: 4th-2nd mil BC. This was probably pygmy territory]. > >It is also interesting that about 10 Bantu languages have another root for >woman similar to nin, the EmeGir form: It is -nina among the Zulu and Xhosa >(where it coexists with the ES-type root -KAZANA/woman - no wonder Wanger >got hung up on Zulu!!), -nen, -nan, -ninye, and -ninyi in some languages >of the Cross-Benue region, once thought to be the proto-Bantu homeland. >But it is the variant form nig~a (in Johnston's day they spelled this >sound nin~ga) which is the most interesting. It is found in this form >among the Nyamwezi of the Lake Victoria region, as well as among the Teke >of Gabon, and the Yaunde of Cameroons. This raises the distinct phonetic >possibility that EmeGir nin/lady may not only have dropped an initial mu- >prefix, but may have lost what Kramer calls an "amissible terminal >consonant", i.e. its g~. Perhaps the ancient original was muning~e. > >Johnston includes in his 200 language list of variants of kadi/kash/kazi/ >woman some forms, both prefixed and prefixless, which distinctly sound like >SAL. He moves from Cadi to Tsali [his convention is to capitalize the >prefixless roots] to -sadi to -sali to -xali, most of these localized among >the Tswana and Sotho of southern Africa. > >But not a trace of a munus or nunus, unless Mande has elided the n; its >root muso/woman seems quite isolated in Africa: *munso>muso & munuso? >[in Mandinka, Bambara, Kono, Vei, Djalunka, Toronka and 2 others]. Aside >from that, So, an aberrant lang which shifts its classification every 20 >years or so- I think it's part of Kuliak in E. Sudanic now: nos/nusin/ >female organ (while So: gwasat = woman). > >[MV]>If it weren't for the annoying fact that the Sumerian possessive >>is suffixed, I had rather explained these as prefixed g~u10 >>(Emesal -mu) "my" (cf. monsieur, madame etc.). >> > >Well that does seem a weak straw to clutch at. In Bantu the possessive >follows the noun, either as a separate adjective: mwenzi wake /his >friend, OR, in one of the few instances where suffixes are actually >attached to nouns, and therefore do not need agreeing prefixes, >mwenzake, his friend. mke wako, your wife or mkewe, your wife; dada wangu >my sister or dadangu my sister. [examples from Swahili]. So if the prefix >system had been dropped, one would expect that this latter form would be >the one adopted in a modernized written prefixless language: the suffixed >possessive. > >Kramer in The Sumerians has a little one page summary of the grammar, in >which he states , >1) Sumerian is rather poor in adjectives and often uses genitival >expressions instead. Ditto for Bantu.[cf Swahili rangi ya majani >[the color of grass for "green"], mtu mwenye nguvu , a man possessing >strength for a strong man, etc. > >2)He says copulas [ditto for Ntu] and conjunctions are rarely used. Aside >from Bantu na/and, Swahili has no real conjunctions but has borrowed many >from Arabic: e.g. lakini/but; wala, ila, bali, basi etc. > >3) He says nouns have no gender but are divided into animate and inanimate >with animals in inanimate category. Unlike Nyanja, Swahili has animals in >a separate class, mostly prefixless, but their adjectives do not use the >human prefix but a w-/pl z- prefix. Ditto for no gender. Not even for >pronouns, this is true of almost all Niger-Kongo, also true in Jamaican. > >4) Kramer: "There is no relative pronoun in Sumerian; a nominalizing >particle is used at the end of the clauses instead." This is identical to a >Swahili construction: The suffix is called the -O of Reference (except for >when the reference is to a member of the singular personal class, in which >case the particle is -ye): Some examples from E O Ashton, Swahili Grammar: >kengele i-lia-yo/ a bell which rings [bell it-rings-"which"]. >kengele zi-lia-zo / bells which ring; mtu a-soma-ye / a man who reads. > >This is just a little surface scratch. If I remember, Wanger has a plethora >of other examples. I sure hope someone in Africa is doing the definitive >work on this. Which is not to say pre-Sumerians left from Africa and went >to Sumer. Nobody had to go anywhere, though folks were probably coming and >going all the time still, trading,raiding, smiting, migrating, fleeing, >taking refuge, colonizing. As the ancients used to say, it was all >Ethiopia from the rising to the setting of the sun. Until history happened, >and after untold conquests and migrations, crimes and intermarriages we >end up with today's human map. > >E. Adams > >PS While searching for words tonight I found the word I couldn't find >during the Colchian discussion. Two names of one of the surviving >Colchian languages are Laz and Chan, a language closely related to >Mingrelian. I knew that a nearby language had the word Laza for wool, >and wondered if the name wasn't originally an epithet meaning "woolly- >headed" . The language is Abaze, otherwise known as Abkhaz, just up the >Eastern Black Sea Coast from Colchis. Interesting that the Mitzdjeghi, who >belong to NE Caucasian, have the word Cha/wool, since Chan and Laz are >supposed to be alternate names for the same language. > > > > > ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1999 #53 *************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html