From: owner-ane@ (ANE Digest) To: ane-digest Subject: ANE Digest V1999 #56 Reply-To: Sender: owner-ane@ Errors-To: owner-ane@ Precedence: bulk ANE Digest Friday, February 26 1999 Volume 1999 : Number 056 Re: ane emesal: emegir g~ issues ane Sumerian & Bantu ane Non-linguist ane Alishar Huyuk books for sale... Re: ane Non-linguist ane Calendars Lecture by Dr. R Wells ane Library of Elmar Edel ane Top of the temple ane Basileus-game ane emesal/gir - Afrocentrism ane emesal ppps [none] Re: Babylonian m > w (was Re: ane eme sal) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 10:56:07 GMT From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Subject: Re: ane emesal: emegir g~ issues nyokabi@kingcon.com wrote: >Thanks for your explanation in another posting of how sal can mean >both vast and thin -that was illuminating. You had spoken of >"several other" meanings of sal. Not really. I mentioned several readings of the sign SAL. (According to Miller/Shipp "An Akkadian Handbook": (1) determinative "f" (female), (2) syllabograms/Akkadograms: mam2, man2, mim, min2, rag, rak, raq, sal, sala, s^a12, s^al, s^el4; (3) Sumerograms: GAL4, MI2, MUNUS, RAG, RAK, SAL, S^AL; (4) combined Sumerograms: BALLA2, EME3, EME5, EMES^, LUKUR, MURU5, MURUB2, NIDLAM, NIDLAM2, ZEHx). >Then what is the general symbol for the velar nasal? "Eng" (n with left-turning right tail). >In what >other language transcriptions other than Sumerian is this g~ used? None that I know of, which is convenient. >If the theory proves wrong on some >new data of another dialect -- more words from some of the other >eme's are dug up -- then we all have to respell the language again. Sorry >for people who write books in that interim! Well, that's Sumerian for you. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv@wxs.nl Amsterdam ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1904 00:42:12 -0500 From: "Peter T. Daniels" Subject: ane Sumerian & Bantu If the similarities being offered between Sumerian and Bantu do in fact represent language contact of some sort, when/where could this have happened? Haven't the archeologists shown that the spread of Bantu from West Africa across the continent is a very recent phenomenon -- within the last couple of millennia -- long after Sumerian was no more? - -- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 10:03:03 -0500 From: Brian Betty Subject: ane Non-linguist Does anyone know what has happened to Manaster? I replied to the email he sent to ANE yesterday, and I got this message saying his address had "permanent, fatal errors." That's like 12h after I received an email from him via the ANE list! My message is below; it's ANE business, so I might as well post it. BB On 2-24-99, manaster wrote: "It is grand to hear a nonlinguist expressing in such clear terms precisely what surely every linguist would say. Comparisons of languages have to be systematic, and pay attention to history." Ouch! ;-) I may not be a professional linguist, but I've taken my share of coursework at Harvard. Consider me a linguist-in-training (and a biological-anthropologist-in-training); I'm not old enough to be a linguist yet! But seriously, I was trying to express what I felt as a LIT - in short, yuck. I mean, I DO think that if we find correlates to Sumerian, they would obviously be in non-Semitic languages. But Bantu? Not unless we're talking proto-Bantu. I don't know enough about African languages outside of the ones mentioned on ANE to know if anyone has even been working on a protolanguage in that family, or to when such a reconstruction would be dated. They call me Coffee 'cause I grind so fine. God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the Andes and I had to eat him. Only 315 shopping days left before the end of the world. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 10:06:07 -0600 From: "Charles E. Jones" Subject: ane Alishar Huyuk books for sale... Forwarded on behalf of the undersigned, to whom responses and inquiries should be directed. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Please note the availability of seven Oriental Institute Publications (OIP) volumes in the Researches in Anatolia series (RIA) (Alishar Huyuk excavations) for sale. The volumes are in excellent condition and contains all their original tinted plates and fold-out maps and illustrations. *OIP V, Explorations in Central Anatolia, Season of 1926 (von der Osten), RIA I, 1929. *OIP VI, The Alishar Huyuk, Season of 1927, Part I (von der Osten and Schmidt), RIA II, 1930. *OIP VII, The Alishar Huyuk, Season of 1927, Part II (von der Osten and Schmidt), RIA III, 1932. *OIP XIX, The Alishar Huyuk, Seasons of 1928 and 1929, Part I (Schmidt), RIA IV, 1932. *OIP XX, The Alishar Huyuk, Seasons of 1928 and 1929, Part II (Schmidt), RIA V, 1933. *OIP XXIX, The Alishar Huyuk, Seasons of 1930-32, Part II (von der Osten), RIA VIII, 1937. *OIP XXX, The Alishar Huyuk, Seasons of 1930-32, Part III (von der Osten), RIA IX, 1937. On the basis of recent internet sale listings for some of the same volumes, the seven volumes are priced at $350.- plus shipping. Direct inquiries to: Seth Richardson e-mail: sfr4@columbia.edu 145 West 12th Street #6-1 New York, NY 10011 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 12:28:10 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: Re: ane Non-linguist Even Proto-Bantu won't do. The Bantu group is a very small twig on the family tree of the Niger-Congo family, so we would have to compare Sumerian, if at all, to some kind of Proto-NC, which we can't really do because no one has reconstructed Proto-NC. Pending that, we could in principle use Proto-Bantu together with some of what we do know of the other NC languages. But the general point is, of course, right. Whatever we are gonna try to compare Sumerian to will have to be something other than scattered examples in MODERN Bantu languages. The same applies to virtually all "comparisons" that have been made in the past for Sumerian. Someone compared it to Hungarian, but Hungarian is just a small twig in the Uralic family tree, and you'd have to try to compare Sumerian to all of Uralic or better yet to Proto-Uralic. Even in an appanretly simple case like Basque, we cannot compare Sumerian to some homogenized form of modern Basque found in a handy pocket dictionary but rather to the little we know of Proto-Basque and its one acknowledged relative, Aquitanian. As far as I know, none or almost none of the attempts to relate Sumerian to anything deserve even a first much less a second look because they violate this elementary requirement. Comparing Sumerian to some modern Bantu language is like a biologist comparing Homo sapiens to the whales, and forgetting that each has much closer relatives that need to be considered first. AMR P.S. Sorry about the "nonlinguist" bit. I thought you were a PHYSICAL anthropologist. On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Brian Betty wrote: > > I mean, I DO think that if we find correlates to Sumerian, they would > obviously be in non-Semitic languages. But Bantu? Not unless we're talking > proto-Bantu. I don't know enough about African languages outside of the > ones mentioned on ANE to know if anyone has even been working on a > protolanguage in that family, or to when such a reconstruction would be dated. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 12:21:41 -0800 From: Al Berens Subject: ane Calendars Lecture by Dr. R Wells Here is the edited talk by Dr. Wells on ancient Egyptian Calendars. It has been reviewed and edited by Dr. Wells himself and should accurately reflect his statements on the subject. Al Berens American Research Center in Egypt Northern California Chapter Newsletter editor It's Later Than You Think: The Origins of Egyptian Calendars and Their Modern Legacy Dr. Ronald Wells, currently a computer resource specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an astronomer who studied ancient Egyptian grammar and history at the Near Eastern Studies Department in Berkeley in the 70s compared his return to speak to that department and the members of ARCE to the return of Sinuhe from his self-exile in Palestine. He began his January talk noting that the need to measure time was of vital interest to humankind. Knowing when to plant and when to harvest are necessary to the success of food production. Dr. Wells recom-mended consulting Revolutions in Time: Studies in Ancient Egyptian Calendrics, a compendium of essays on ancient timekeeping published by Van Siclen Books as a good starting point for studying the development of ancient time measurement. Alternatively, his chapter on the same subject can also be found in Astronomy Before the Telescope published by the British Museum Press in 1996. Showing a Landsat image of northeastern Africa, Dr. Wells pointed to the differences between the Delta and the Valley of the Nile in terms of the environment and the arable land available. These differences contributed to the development of the notion of duality which dominated ancient Egyptian thought and religion. Religion in the north had its focus on solar imagery (the pyramids at Giza and the sun temples at Abu Ghurab, for example) while in the south the emphasis was mainly stellar in origin (embodied by the temple of Satet at Elephantine). The earliest calendars in use in Egypt appear to be lunar in origin, based on phases of the moon. Such calendars were used to determine festival dates in the religious year. In the south the main festival was the ‘Going Forth’ of the star Sirius (Prt Spdt); while in the north the `Birth of the Sun’ (Mswt Rc) was the chief festival of interest; each occurs roughly six lunar phases apart. The legend of the Goddess Nut (as depicted on the ceilings of a variety of temples and tombs, e.g., the tomb of Rameses VI in the Valley of the Kings) holds the key to some of the astronomical observations which combined to form the Egyptian year. The Rameses VI ceiling has mirrored images of Nut (her body running back-to-back in Siamese twin fashion in an East/West orientation along the center of the vaulted ceiling of the tomb) with her limbs outstretched and dropping down to the north and south walls (one twin represents the northern, the other, the southern half of the sky). The southern facing Nut has ten solar disks running along her body, as well as one at her mouth and another one at the birth canal between her legs painted with the image of Khepri (the god of coming into being). No disks are depicted on the northern facing Nut because the sun is always seen to traverse the southern part of the sky in Egypt. The stars on Nut’s body represent the brightest stars of the Milky Way, the latter of which gives the impression of a diaphanous gown cloaking a female body. The stars of the constellation Cygnus mark a bifurcation of the Milky Way into leg-like appendages, the brightest star Deneb ( Cyg) located at the position of the birth canal. The Barque of Re traverses her body as the sun passes through the heavens. The ecliptic passes through the mouth of the head of Nut as formed by the Milky Way near the constellation of Gemini. About an hour and a half after sunset on the Vernal (Spring) Equinox near Cairo around 3500 B.C.E. a glimmering head, face-up with mouth agape, would have been seen on the western horizon at the point where the sun had disappeared. Nine months later at the Winter Solstice the sun appears on the horizon at sunrise as though dropped directly from Deneb in Cygnus, very much like Gardiner’s Sign-List glyph B3, the squatting female giving birth. That is, on a hemispherical projection of the sky, a line connecting the North Celestial Pole (about which the ‘Undying Stars’ rotate), Deneb, and the horizon sunrise point all form a great circle at this one moment each year. The imagery of the sun coursing through the body of Nut to give birth to himself once each year was later used by the Kings of Egypt to herald their divine birth as Sons of Re. Re in the guise of the pharaoh was sup-posed to impregnate the queen to produce the next generation (this legend is the origin of the matrilineal inheritance of the Egyptian throne). Observations of this phenomenon point to a date somewhat earlier, around 4500 B.C.E., for the origins of the mythology of Nut. The importance that the Egyptians placed on this annual birthday event (Mswt Rc) motivated the development of the first religious calendar. Although 365 days could be counted between each occurrence, it would have been noticed that twelve phases of the moon almost coincided with the same interval. However, since a lunar year averages only 354 days, the next year’s birthday festival would not fall on the same day of the last month. Eventually in two or three years, the birthday would fall out of the last month altogether. Since the month was named for the major festival being celebrated in it, this situation could only be avoided by the periodic intercalation of a whole month of 30 days at the beginning of the year to force the celebration back into the last month (a little math shows that whenever the first day of a new year occurred within 11 days after a winter solstice feast, then the new year would have to contain the intercalary 13th month placed at its beginning). Intercalation did not restore the event to the same day of the month, but at least it kept the celebration within the correctly named month. In Upper Egypt, a temple was built at Elephantine Island at Aswan (believed to be the wellspring source of the Nile) dedicated to the goddess Satet (Sothis in Greek = Sirius). A view down the axis of this temple marks the winter solstice sunrise and also (with allowance for the knoll across the river) permits a view of the star Sirius as it rises above the horizon. The special annual rising of Sirius (or ‘Going Forth of Sirius’, Prt Spdt) just before sunrise (heliacal rising in astronomical terminology) near the time of the summer solstice also marked the rise of the Nile floodwaters as measured by the Nilometer at Aswan. This appearance before the sun occurs after a seventy day absence from the sky, a period which also became the duration of interment of later pharaohs. Observations of this phenomenon also point to a date around 4500 B.C.E. for the origins of another Egyptian lunar calendar in Upper Egypt having come into being like that in the North, except that its chief festival celebrated the rise of Sirius and the Nile. The star Sirius is also equated with Isis who is the daughter of Re. These two festivals of the North and South (Mswt Rc and Prt Spdt) occur about six months apart. The Egyptian lunar calendar of the pharaonic period begins with Prt Spdt and has a 12th month called Mswt Rc which was apparently a combination of both predynastic calendars, a result of the union of the North and the South. The first day of each new year on which Sirius rose heliacally was also called Wp Rnpt (Opener of the Year). The first hieroglyph in the word wp is a pair of ox horns and this same symbol forms part of the crown of the goddess Satet as seen on her temple at Elephantine. The priests who regulated the calendars were given the title ‘Overseers of the Hours’. In the first dynasties as writing spread through the country, the lunar religious calendar was simplified to twelve months of thirty days with five days added to the beginning because the religious calendar was too cumbersome to use for commercial transactions. This new calendar is called the civil calendar and is the earliest form of our modern western counterpart. Because the year is actually about a quarter of a day longer than this averaged civil year it gradually goes out of synchron-ization with the observable festival year and so both the lunar and religious calendars were used side by side throughout Egyptian history. The development of the hour also grew out of the need to provide for religious rites to occur at their proper time (at actual sunrise on any given day, for example). The sungod Re traverses the netherworld where he is confronted by demons and demigods who attempt to impede his progress to be reborn at sunrise. Spells found in the Valley of the Kings (the Book of Gates, for example) help Re pass through twelve portals or hours of the night. Re had to recite the names of each Gate, Gate Keeper, and his assistant demigods in order to pass safely to the next one. Dr. Wells pointed out that the Book of Gates was simply a mnemonic device ensuring that the proper sequence of constellations which came out of the Underworld would be remembered correctly (i.e., the recitations at each Gate). It would work to measure hours in the following manner. Observations of a single star show that it rises four minutes later each day so that in the ideal case observations of twenty-four stars equally spaced across the sky would be needed to make accurate predictions of sunrise throughout the year in which a given star would be used to mark the hour before sunrise. That star could serve as a ‘Herald’ for only 15 days before it rose 2 hours before sunrise and thus had to be replaced by the next star in the series. Since it would be difficult to recognize which bright stars were which rising near the same place on the horizon, star groups or patterns of stars surrounding the brighter star would be needed to aid recognition. The brightest star of a particular group represents the Gate Keeper. The other fainter stars in the pattern, or constellation, are the attendants or demigods. The place on the horizon where they rose would be the Gate itself. Writing down the names of all these deities and the stories associated with them thus became the Book of Gates. The usual number is 12 gates, corresponding to the 12 hours of night, but variants with eight or ten gates also are known to exist. These would simply represent star clocks with 8 or 10 constellations used to predict sunrise. At Abusir and Abu Ghurab are the remains of two of six known sun temples that were built during the Old Kingdom 5th Dynasty. The alabaster altar of Niuserre’s sun temple is still in place (although Dr. Wells argues that it should be removed to the Cairo Museum and saved from further damage with a substitute placed in situ) which is formed from four hotep signs oriented towards the cardinal directions and surrounding a large solar disk. The altar therefore actually says ‘Re is satisfied’ in the four principal directions. Dr. Wells believes that the lower valley temple roof located in the priests’ village below each sun temple, which was situated higher up on a small hillock, could have been used to make stellar observations used in calculating the hours of night in the manner described above. Deneb (the birth star of Re in Cygnus) was part of the series of stars found to rise along the axis of the lower temple belonging to the sun temple of Userkaf, the first of the six that were built. Although these stars rose on average about an hour apart, the actual inter-vals between star rises were quite variable indicating that the first hours to be measured were of unequal length. Different interval (or ‘hour’) lengths were used at the different temples because their valley temples faced different sets of rising stars. As determined from the coffin lids of the 8th-10th Dynasties, a new type of hour was introduced during the period between the Old and Middle Kingdoms. It was called the decanal hour based on a group of stars similar to Sirius in that they were absent from the sky for 70 days. The decanal hour was 40 minutes in length based upon sets of thirty-six such stars (the Dendera star ceiling, a much later example) which marked a given hour for 10 days (not 15) before being replaced by the next in the series. Eighteen stars would be observable above the horizon while eighteen remained below. Three of the 18 denoted the twilight hours before sunrise and another three again after sunset so that you would get twelve hours of darkness (18 x 40 min/60 min = 12). Calendars of lucky days and unlucky days also are known from Deir El Medina and elsewhere. These were days portending evil or good fortune for people born on a particular day. The civil calendar was standardized into a 365 day year with the division of the night and day into twelve hours each which was handed down to us through the Greeks and Romans. Dr. Wells ended his talk by illustrating with a few slides the two most important uses of the ability to measure the hour length handed down to us by the ancient Egyptians: the measurement of longitude at sea which depends on a very precise chronometer to measure the hour; and the landing of men on the moon which also required precision measurement of time. He noted the coincidence of the Apollo missions and the television show Star Trek each lasting approximately the same three years with only Star Trek having continued on with new missions and crews. He hoped that new explorations of the moon, the source of our time keeping, might begin again. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 14:43:42 -0600 From: "Charles E. Jones" Subject: ane Library of Elmar Edel Such things don't come up for sale very often. The Egyptological Library of Elmar Edel (including substantial components of the libraries of Bonnet, Wiedemann, Bilabel and Wresinski) is for sale through Ars Libri in Boston. It consists of 4700 monographic titles in more than 5200 volumes; 80 runs of periodicals (nearly all complete) in more than 2800 volumes and about 3000 offprints. Ars Libri intends to sell the library intact for... $850,000 There is a two volume catalogue of the collection. For further details contact them via http://www.arslibri.com/ - -Chuck Jones- cejo@midway.uchicago.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 23:33:20 -0800 From: "Knud W. Skov" Subject: ane Top of the temple Dear ANEs Is there anywhere in Misnah, Talmud or any other jewish writing a clue on where the top of the temple of Jerusalem at the times of the NT should be. Are there any writen sources that creates a clear link between the top of the temple and the found cornerstone mentioning a place where to blow horns in relation to any proclamations. Feel free to answer off-line Yours Knud W. Skov (M.Theol/editor of TEL) 29,B 1. Hedemoellevej, DK - 8850 Bjerringbro Tel: (+45) 86 68 50 90 knudwskov@post3.tele.dk - ----------------------------------------- Take a look at the following homepages: The Danish Society for Biblical Archaeology - in Danish/English (http://home3.inet.tele.dk/sba-dk) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 23:34:12 -0800 From: "Knud W. Skov" Subject: ane Basileus-game Dear ANE's Does anyone know of any references or desciptions of the socalled Basileus-game? It is thougth to have been very widely used among roman soldiers at the time of The New Testament. Could it be a part of that game that the roman soldiers dressed their prisoners up (like the gospels refer it happened to Jesus)? If you know of someone, who should know better than you - just pass me their adress. Do please answer off-line Yours Knud W. Skov (M.Theol/editor of TEL) 29,B 1. Hedemoellevej, DK - 8850 Bjerringbro Tel: (+45) 86 68 50 90 knudwskov@post3.tele.dk - ----------------------------------------- Take a look at the following homepages: The Danish Society for Biblical Archaeology - in Danish/English (http://home3.inet.tele.dk/sba-dk) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 01:28:03 +0200 From: "Lloyd Thomas" Subject: ane emesal/gir - Afrocentrism This is a multi-part message in MIME format. - ------=_NextPart_000_0059_01BE5F94.EC006540 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The reference to an element of Afrocentrism in this debate, while a = liitle off-subject, reminded me of the thesis of Dr Cyril Hromnik = concerning a significant Indian influence on the development of BaNtu = (Indo-Africa 1981 Juta) - the Sanskrit connection, etc, in the first = millennium BCE from an original Ndimi.=20 If I understand his position correctly, the fundamental structure of the = BaNtu group, in addition to various terms, developed under this ancient = Asian influence via trade, mineral exploitation, and settlement.=20 Can one can connect Sanskrit to Sumerian? =20 Asiocentrism? Lloyd Thomas Cape Town - ------=_NextPart_000_0059_01BE5F94.EC006540 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
The reference to an element of Afrocentrism in this debate, while a = liitle=20 off-subject, reminded me of the thesis of Dr Cyril Hromnik concerning a=20 significant Indian influence on the development of BaNtu = (Indo-Africa=20 1981 Juta) - the Sanskrit connection, etc, in the first millennium BCE = from an=20 original Ndimi.
If I understand his position correctly, the fundamental structure = of the=20 BaNtu group, in addition to various terms, developed under this ancient = Asian=20 influence via trade, mineral exploitation, and settlement.
Can one can connect Sanskrit to Sumerian?
Asiocentrism?
 
 
Lloyd Thomas
Cape Town
- ------=_NextPart_000_0059_01BE5F94.EC006540-- ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 22:13:55 -0500 From: nyokabi@kingcon.com Subject: ane emesal ppps >Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 13:21:29 -0500 >From: Brian Betty >Subject: ane emesal ppps > >I am interested in the material being discussed about possible >correlations with Sumerian, but I am highly concerned about the >ahistorical attitude being taken ... how can we compare a language >no longer spoken by 1500 BCE at the latest with languages spoken >3500y later like Swahili and Bantu? One reason is that Bantu, like most languages in Africa, was never written down till the modern age -when? the 19th century? Many not till the 20th. Concepts like Proto-Bantu are hypothetical constructs - I don't know how far they have come with reconstructing the grammar. I can't imagine anyone even trying to reconstruct proto-Niger Kongo, nor could I estimate what intermediate level between these two stages (the former stretching from perhaps the 2nd milennium BC, the latter from what -40,000 BC?? meaningless primeval guesses by glotto- chronologists)-what intermediate level would be the parallel stage with say the Halafian or Urukian period or whenever we would imagine the common ancestors of pre-Sumerian and pre-Bantu, or NE Niger Kordofanian, whatever, would have met or lived in a common territory. Obviously there is enough research to be done in joining ANE and NE African history over the course of the last say 12,000 years, probably since the Mesolithic, to keep several generations of researchers busy. Suppose there were no native Americans left to teach us of their languages, and all we had were toponyms and LW's into English, Spanish, and French to go on, plus snippets of supposed "Injun talk" that made it into ethnocentric literary and travel works of earlier centuries. We aren't getting much of anywhere figuring "it" out [we have no idea how many separate languages there were ] and we declare that whatever it was it doesn't seem to be related to any other language in the world. Then someone finds a group of 10 pre-Chinese and pre-Tibeto Burman languages in the hills of SW China and N. Thailand and Burma, which miraculously, seem to exhibit some of the same structures, phonology etc. You don't think linguists would flock to study them and perhaps end up by announcing that incredible as it may seem, either the native Americans crossed the Bering Straits or these people crossed back in the other direction... So the fact that we didn't have versions of either set of languages from before the modern age (no ancient texts) would not stop us from forming hypotheses about events that transpired many milennia earlier. And if people could cross the Bering Straits on a land bridge from deep in Inner Asia and hike down to the southernmost points of South America [cf the legends of the Hopi migrations to the end point of the four directions only to return to the center] why it is such a big deal for some early Niger-Kordofanian speakers to have crossed over Sinai to the ANE? Like the woolly haired men with the dangling foreskin type of circumcision ("Kikuyu circumcision") being slaughtered on one of the Narmer-period palettes in the BM. (I am not the first to have pointed this out, it was mentioned in 1914 when people were not so squeamish about admitting that black people were always around...Seligman in AAA VI & VII, 1914, "Ethnic Relationship of the vanquished on certain proto-dynastic Egyptian palettes". He wasn't squeamish in identifying the "peculiar type of circumcision" "similar to that practised in East Africa today". But he IS squeamish to actually describe it, lest a lady should happen to read it, so he puts the details in LATIN in a footnote!! ( I can do it for you much easier: instead of removing the foreskin entirely it is left dangling as a French tickler!) Needless to say, this point in time was thousands of years before the Kikuyu had reached Kenya, it was before Proto-Bantu and probably before proto-Nilotic! (Only the E. Bantu and E & S Nilotes circumcise. The W Bantu of the forest lands generally don't, nor do the W Nilotes or Central Sudanics, with whom they have mixed so thoroughly in Uganda.) >Also, it seems sketchy to compare Burushaski with Bantu, and to >pick a handful of words from several dozen languages. I don't remember comparing it to Bantu! Oh yes I pointed out that it had an "amorphous" class, as Bantu does (and all of NK practically, except for the classless "isolating" langs which have lost the whole system!). But I also pointed out that unlike Bantu, it suffixed its class particles instead of prefixing. I wasn't in anyway trying to say it WAS Bantu, any more than Bienveniste in the quote was trying to say that Burushaski WAS North Caucasian. He was just noting a similarity/difference between their class systems, as was I. I threw Burushaski in (Kurt Jaritz, yu see wa trouble yu get mi in now, mon!!) because I thought it would make the people on the list who were resorting to smelling salts perk up a little. It was an example of what I meant by saying you don't have to move anyone from Africa to anywhere if it bugs you so much. Noun class languages have left traces in several parts of Asia and may once have been a wide vast substratum, or on the other hand, just a band along the southern edge of Asia stretching from Africa to Australia -- as if the main homeland was the sunken Gondwana land , the ancient land bridge between Africa and India... Furthermore I never took any position as to whether finding the curious combination of a gusun/woman word with a dummun/god word, and a word for people, kutsik meant that they might be a)ancestors? or b)posterity? of some pre-Sumerians whose words might have made it into Sumerian texts and Biblical traditions. [cf Georgian and Mingrelian katsi/kotsi man, people ]. I first heard of the Burushaski/Khajuna/Kasioi in the pages of Kurt Jaritz's treatise on the language of the Kashshu of Babylonia [Anthropos 52, 1957, "Die Kassitische Sprachreste"]. He mentioned them in his comparanda because of only three items, just like I did! 1& 2)the name itself, both the Kas/ Khaj and the Burush- roots, and 3) the name Sah for sun, because of Kashshite d-SaH / = Shamash, UTU. If he can do this, I can say: [cf. Burushaski dummun/god gusun/woman, and kutsik/people.] No more, no less. Curious connection if you will. (Ah, the Titanic jokes! Thank God the kids learn this at such an early age, so they'll be prepared for it!) The real reason I threw in the quote about the noun class stuff was that I thought if there were a lot of people on this list who had never heard of the Tocharians or the Kushana, then surely they would not know who the Burushaski are. Who does, really? They are kind of like the Basque in that sense. I believe Hrozny? once tried to connect the two of them as remnants of a Kaspian diaspora from the Hindu Kush through Afghanistan, Iran, Sogdia, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, (can't remember if he threw in Meroe as they used to), probably ending up at the Rock of Gibralter and the tin traders to the Kassiteros or tin islands, England. >I think it worthwhile to compare Sumerian with other African >languages, but question the methodologies used in recent posts to >ANE ... there seems to be a haphazard picking and choosing of >linguistic evidence. Well clearly I am not like Mr. Winters, focussing on this as my project to "crack" Meroitic or Proto-Sumerian, etc. I have probably devoted 1/200 of my research time over the last 20 years to what you might call "the Sumerian problem" (judging by the volume of my Sumerian files to my total collection!) i.e. it's not my schtick, just something I'm doing for this discussion. When you have about 4-500 Niger- Kordofanian languages to pick from, any one of which might be a distant relative of spoken pre-written Sumerian, it's a little hard to know which one to chose examples from. At this level, when we don't know what languages even existed in the relevant time period we have to talk about "types of languages", not individual languages. I am just trying to scatter some seeds, not to reap any harvests. My arguments were about a substratal "prefix noun class type" of language. If I drew my samples from Bantu, that is what I had lying around my office. If Father Wanger had written a book on languages of Papua New Guinea, I could have drawn from there just as easily I should imagine. In fact I have not looked at Wanger's book during this entire discussion, though I have it. Didn't want to get his reputation mixed up with mine, whatever it may have been. From what Langdon said he seems to have been granted more respect than, say, Velikowsky... Also I think in 1935 people were much less fearful of the Black Threat than today, probably because it never occurred to them that any black people would read their books!! Ah, the stifling self-conscious self-censorship brought on by the excesses of the late 60's! And I'll bet you a large majority of people on this list had never heard of Father Wanger's book. If Langdon thought it was worth a read, surely young people should be free to have a look for themselves. But if the science of omission is carried to such an extent that they no longer know the questions or the sources exist, what freedom of choice do they have? You linguists can get a little linguistocentric when you act as if every discussion involving language is a discussion about establishing genetic connections. To me language is just one more way to try to reconstruct a hazy image of the peoples and their history, one more tool along with ceramics and bones and graves and legends and religions and tools, etc. It's not an end in itself. Which is why I said, I'm not trying to "crack" anything. I am just trying to open some mental doors which have rusted shut for decades or centuries, or to knock holes in some walls so thick they were designed only to exclude, not to permit passage back and forth.. When the Ural-Altaic theories were in, there was a period of two or three generations when the Sumerians were regularly referred to as "Turanians" by some of the big names in the field of Orientalism. So we shouldn't get so nervous about just entertaining theories, no one is suggesting altering the nomenclature -- not yet anyway!! Although a switch from "Sumerians" to "Kingians" would seem long overdue! Or is it Kig~ians? Now there's a thought! It might be the origin of Mt Kinya!! King'ya ?? [g~ > n~] ! That would be a tongue twister!! No wonder they elided the g~ ! Such exquisite phonetic economy! E. Adams PS Your little epigraph about how fine you grind... apparently you are unaware of the street meaning of this verb, which I am quite sure reached Harvard square years ago; or are you aware and that is why you put it on there? If it is a double-entendre I find it, in short, yuck! This word may have begun in the black community (not sure at all) but it has definitely crossed over, and with a younger generation so involved in crossing over in the opposite direction, you know, the hip hop generation, you have to be careful of what you don't know! Well to each his own...far be it from me.... ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 15:39:42 +0900 From: "=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCM3Q8MDJxPFIhIU03GyhC?=" Subject: [none] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. - ------=_NextPart_000_0062_01BE619E.3A887120 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-2022-jp" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I am researching for a Japanese television production company, which is making a documentary on the history of the lotus flower. The programme, which is being made for NHK (The Japanese equivalent of the BBC, or PBS.), is looking at the different ways that different cultures have used the lotus flower as a symbol. Material on Egypt and the Far East has been relatively easy to come by, but I have had much less luck in finding sources for the Mesoptamian region. (The libraries in Japan are relatively barren when it comes to near Eastern studies.) I was wondering, then, if anybody on the list had any thoughts on the importance of the lotus flower in the art or religious life of the Assyrian and Persian Empires. It has been suggested to me that the early Zorastrians also placed an importance on the flower, and so any thoughts or references on that would also be very welcome. (I am also trying to find out if there are any sites in the region where lotus engraved sculptures can actually be seen in situ.) Please feel free to reply to my address personally if you dont want to post to the list. Gavin Rees, You Terebi Inc. "The Culture of the Lotus." you2000@gd5.so-net.ne.jp - ------=_NextPart_000_0062_01BE619E.3A887120 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-2022-jp" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I am researching for a Japanese = television=20 production company, which is making a documentary on the history of the = lotus=20 flower. The programme, which is being made for NHK (The Japanese = equivalent of=20 the BBC, or PBS.), is looking at the different ways that different = cultures have=20 used the lotus flower as a symbol.
 
Material on Egypt and the Far East = has been=20 relatively easy to come by, but I have had much less luck in finding = sources for=20 the Mesoptamian region. (The libraries in Japan are relatively barren = when it=20 comes to near Eastern studies.)
 
I was wondering, then, if anybody on the list had = any thoughts=20 on the importance of the lotus flower in the art or religious life of=20 the  Assyrian and Persian Empires. It has = been=20 suggested to me that the early Zorastrians also placed an importance on = the=20 flower, and so any thoughts or references on that would also be very = welcome. (I=20 am also trying to find out if  there are any sites in the region = where=20 lotus engraved sculptures can actually be seen in situ.)
 
Please feel free to reply to my address personally = if you dont=20 want to post to the list.
 
Gavin Rees,
You Terebi Inc. "The Culture of the=20 Lotus."
you2000@gd5.so-net.ne.jp
- ------=_NextPart_000_0062_01BE619E.3A887120-- ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 10:29:00 +0200 (EET) From: Robert Whiting Subject: Re: Babylonian m > w (was Re: ane eme sal) On Wed, 24 Feb 1999 manaster@umich.edu wrote: >> On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, 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/. Initial [w] >> simply disappeared from the language (as later happened in Greek). >> Intervocalic /w/ was probably never more than an allophone of /m/. >> Final /w/ disappeared prehistorically in Akkadian with the reduction >> of all diphthongs. > >> 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. If >> Babylonian m > w then it is equally likely that Assyrian b > w since >> Assyrian has a graphic replacement of with . > > Yes, and why would that be a bad thing to assume? It would be a bad thing to assume because Assyrian wrote Aramaic (and West Semitic in general) /b/ with and /w/ with /u/. It also wrote Uratian /b/ with . And Aramaic transcribed Assyrian names with /b/ with . There is not a trace of the confusion in western scripts between Babylonian /m/ and /w/ in connection with Assyrian /b/ and /w/. Assyrian /b/ is in Aramaic transcriptions and that is that. You find me an example of Assyrian /abu/ 'father' transcribed */awu/ in Aramaic and we'll talk about it some more. It would also be a bad thing to assume for the same reason that assuming Babylonian m > w is a bad thing to assume because it reintroduces [w] into environments from which it disappeared millennia earlier for phonotactic reasons and in which it is inherently unstable. And it would be a bad thing to assume because [b] is a very stable phoneme in Semitic in general and the shift of a stable phoneme to an unstable one just seems like a bad thing to assume (I know there are examples of such things happening, but it needs more evidence than a simple graphic merger). >> If Babylonian m > w then there are instant problems: /amtu/ > >> */awtu/ > */u:tu/ 'slave girl' just doesn't happen. > Why should it happen? Because /aw/ > /u:/ in Babylonian. >> Nor does /manu^/ > */wanu^/ > */anu^/ 'to count'. > And why should this happen? Because Babylonian w > 0 in word initial position. >> I will leave it up >> to your judgement whether the Hebrew transcription of Merodachbaladan >> indicates that Marduk had become Warduk or not. >Does anybody say that m > w word-initially??? What Miguel said (just a moment, let me go up and copy it) was: "In later Babylonian, was often used to write /w/, mainly because of the development m > w in Babylonian itself." I didn't see any environment specified in this statement. In the absence of any restrictions one can only assume that what he said, "m > w in Babylonian," is what he meant. If he had said 'intervocalic m > w in Babylonian', I wouldn't have put forward those examples. But even if we limit the change to intervocalic m > w we still have problems with the present tense of initial m verbs because this would now be *iwa- which goes to u in Babylonian. Thus we would have e.g., manu^, present: *unnu, preterite: imnu. If you are going to posit a change of intervocalic m > w, you also have to posit the blocking of phonotactic rules. >> There are very few Akkadian vocalic roots with a strong medial >> [w], most roots with medial [w] being weak ("hollow") roots >> caused by the instability of [w] in Akkadian with [w] being >> realized in most instances as /u:/. > What about a word like a awi:lum? awi:lum is not from a verbal root. It is, as far as I know, a primary noun, and primary nouns have different phonotactics in Akkadian from verbal roots. You would be better off with awa:tum which may be from a verbal root awu^ 'to speak' which does have a strong [w] as a middle radical (otherwise it would be a triple weak root -- a highly unstable form). The verbal root, however, does not seem to survive as a productive form beyond the Old Babylonian period (although it appears in the later literary language) and it also seems to exist only in the Gt stem. Many dispute, however, that awa:tu is related to the verbal root awu^, principally because the Assyrian form has short a (we know this because the a undergoes Assyrian vowel harmony) >> One of the few roots with strong [w] is nawa:ru 'to shine' which >> has writings of the [w] with already in Old Babylonian (i.e., >> before /w/ has disappeared from the language) when the graphic >> replacement of with cannot indicate a shift m > w. >> Rather, it allows the preservation of /namru/ 'shining' as >> opposed to /nu:ru/ 'light'. > But nu:ru comes from the same root, doesn't it? It does indeed, but from a different formation. In general (the paradigmatic) pars is the formation of what is called the "verbal adjective" (actually the passive/past participle of the verb) while pirs and purs are used for verbal nouns. So the shift from nawa:ru to nama:ru in Old Babylonian blocks nawru from becoming identical to nu:ru (< nuwru). But forms with and were used side by side for the verb nawa:ru (except for namru, of course). >> The fact is that medial /w/ must always have been close to medial >> /m/ in Babylonian, so much so that non-native speakers apparently >> had a hard time distinguishing them. > I don't think that this is a very well-documented phenomenon, the > so-called near-merger where native (you do mean native, don't > you?) speakers can't tell a real difference, although there is > some support for it (and I have even tentatively argued for in a > discussion in Jo. of Phonetics). No, I meant non-native speakers. I think native speakers were quite able to tell the difference between /m/ and /w/, but that whatever the distinction was between them in Babylonian was not distinctive to non-native speakers (e.g., speakers of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). Although Greek no longer had a /w/ except presumably as a glide, intervocalicly was the only environment in which [w] had survived in Babylonian by the time it was in contact with Greek. The fact that Greeks transliterated Babylonian sometimes with and sometimes with shows that they had a hard time distinguishing the Babylonian /m/ sound from the Babylonian /w/ sound (both regularly written with ). >> But this does not mean that at some point one became the other. >> 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." > This is not a valid parallel because English simply lost > the two native signs edh and thorn and replaced them with > the Latinate th. I didn't mean it as an exact parallel but rather as an example to show that what happens graphically doesn't necessarily reflect what happens phonetically. As I understand it, edh and thorn were lost for practical reasons having to do with typography when fonts from the continent simply did not have these signs and it was easier to do without them. Now if they had wanted to, early typesetters could have replaced edh with dh and thorn with th, but since the signs themselves had never been used consistently, apparently no need for this was seen. The inconsistent use of the signs was no doubt due the fact that their occurence is heavily conditioned, the edh sound occuring mostly deictically and grammatically, so that the sound could be predicted from the environment (although they contrast in thigh/thy, in most instances they don't). So I would see the inconsistent use of edh and thorn as somewhat parallel to the inconsistent writing of forms of nawa:ru with both and in Old Babylonian and the failure to replace edh with but allowing to represent both /dh/ and /th/ because a graphic distinction just wasn't that important as a parallel to allowing signs to be used for both /m/ and /w/ in later Babylonian. > If English had replaced all occurrences of thorn with edh or > the other way around, IN ONE PARTICULAR position, e.g., between > vowels, then we WOULD presume that there had been a sound change. I'm sorry Alexis, but this strikes me as a complete non-sequitur. If one of the sounds ONLY EXISTED IN ONE PARTICULAR position (as with Babylonian /w/), e.g., between vowels, and it is rare there, I don't see that replacing it graphically with a sign for a similar sound implies a sound change. Bob Whiting whiting@cc.helsinki.fi ------------------------------ End of ANE Digest V1999 #56 *************************** Back issues are available on the Oriental Institute World-Wide Web (WWW) site at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html