Language of Ramesses chapter 19
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- Опубліковано 5 жов 2024
- Chapter 19 - The Third Future. And several examples from the Peace Treaty of Ramesses II and Hattusili III.
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For me it's so hard to believe that such a sofisticated culture as A.E. one used symbols like palms, feet, sitting figures, etc. to express just syllables... Seems like something hasn't been learnt properly. I mean in comparison with the Sumerian writing systems... How good would a Coptic speaking if there left person understand Ancient Egyptian texts?
The majority of words is written with a combination of sound and meaning signs. This is very similar to what Chinese, Luwian, Sumerian and Maya also do - I would go as far as to say that all original writing systems that were not inspired by another work this way. The shape of the symbols used is of secondary importance - English would not be more or less alphabetic if we used a literal apple as the symbol for A.
Re: decipherment - done. Hasn’t been an issue for 200 years now. It’s like asking if we really know how electricity behaves. Yeah, I think we have that one down.
Similarity with Coptic - about 70% for Late Egyptian, the stage of the langauge discussed here. A Copt cannot directly understand it but will recognize a lot of words / phrases - and sometimes you can read entire Late Egyptian sentences out in Coptic (but normally you have to change a few words to make it proper Coptic, 1000 years of language change in between). Much less similarity for Middle Egyptian, because its so much older - modern English speakers normally cannot understand AngloSaxon either without learning it.
A lot of this is discussed in the first video of this series, check the beginning of the Late Egyptian playlist.
@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 Thank you so much for your most-covering answer.
@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 I completely agree with you about Chinese and Luwian, but yet I disagree concerning Sumerian. Their symbols didn't look anything like palms, feet, other body parts or objects. They were abstract symbols and looked way higher (abstract) level of writing, like of a next generation, whereas the A.E. writing seems to have been primitive, which makes it hard to believe those cultures were developing at the same epoch. To me it is like there's a huge periodical gap between the two though what is ackward to me is the Sumero-Akadian culture seems more ancient than A.E. one. Yes, I know they are dated to the same epochs yet... Well, do you know what the two peoples knew of each other, what diplomatic relationships they had, what artefacts they shared? Thanks in advance!
"Their symbols didn't look anything like palms, feet ..." - this is based on a false premise: early cuneiform looks just as pictorial as early Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Take a look at e.g. Labat to see the original forms - archive.org/details/LabatR.ManuelDEpigraphieAkkadienne5Ed1976/page/n39/mode/2up. The original shape of 𒊕 (sag̃, "head") is clearly a picture of a head. 𒅗 (gu3 "voice", inim "word", ka(g) "mouth" etc.), is the same sign with a little extra mark, 𒋗 (šu "hand") is a hand with 5 fingers, 𒀭(dig̃ir "god", an "sky") is a star and so forth. The reason they look more abstract to you is because you are looking at highly linearized forms that came about after a few centuries of pressing them into clay. The same thing happened with Chinese characters (what images are there in 情？) and Egyptian hieratic. The writing material influences the shape the characters take, but it doesn't change the way the writing system works. You wouldn't be able to recognize many hieratic symbols and yet they correspond 1:1 to the much more recognizable hieroglyphs - which tells you that, again, the shape of the signs means nothing.
As to whether Egyptian writing was influenced by Sumerian writing (or vice versa) - not impossible, but I see no reason to assume that. Egyptian writing fits the Egyptian language. 𓁹𓏏𓏤 jrt is "eye" and 𓁹 is also used for the verb jrj "to do", because it has almost the same sound. 𓂋𓏤 r is "mouth" and also used to write the letter "r" in other words because, again, same sound. You can see that whoever designed this writing system was a native speaker of Egyptian, the system wasn't imported from someplace else that spoke a different language. The same is visible in Chinese: 青，情， 清，静，精 are all pronounced qing or jing because they have the same phonetic element in them (青). Look at the kun reading for the same characters in Japanese and they'd be read differently because Japanese took a system that was made for a completely different language and mapped the characters onto their own words based on meaning (the same happens for Sumerian signs in Akkadian). You normally cannot guess the pronunciation of Japanese characters from their constituents while you can most of the time in Chinese => you can tell whether a writing system was designed for the language it was used for or not. In the case of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese they were clearly designed for the language they are used for based on sign-sound correspondences. Not so for Akkadian, Hittite or Japanese. The idea of writing may have been transferred from Mesopotamia to Egypt or vice versa, but that's neither here nor there (impossible to prove, unless a Sumerian text shows up in Egypt or an Egyptian text in Mesopotamia ca 3400 BCE).
Finally, can you read any of the three systems? If not, I would encourage you to learn at least one of them. Otherwise it's like trying to write a symphony without playing an instrument first ... probably not going to lead to anything. Not gate-keeping, btw, wanting more people to learn these languages is why we keep putting out these courses. Once you can read them (I'm fluent in Chinese and Egyptian and took beginners' Sumerian), a lot of that "mystery" goes away - and instead you can focus on problems that are a lot more interesting, actually, rather than doubting the standard chronology or whether Egyptologists & Sumerologists know what they are doing (they do ;-) ).
@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 First of all, Live long for such vast explanation! Use this comments for your new future video on pictograms of the AS and AE either as compared or as separated in different topics. Are you a Sumerologist, too?