| Author | Message | ||
     sekhmet (64.252.99.28) |
it might have been simply kept as "n" in hieroglyphics | ||
| Helene Hagan (206.170.217.110) |
Berber "tips" on reading Egyptian and other related languages. From Volume I, Berber Studies, Roediger Koegge publishers, 2001, 358 pp., edited by Harry Stroomer. "Tamasheq" Tamasheq is the language spoken by some 1 million to 2 million Berber speakers of Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso, Algeria and Libya, with a few in Mauretania and Morocco. It is a Berber language, Berber being one of the branches of the Afro-Asiatic (also called Hamito-Semitic) family. The Tamasheq people are descendants of Berber traders... Thus, although Tamasheq speakers are mainly found in sub-Saharan Africa, the language is not at all related to the neighboring sub-Saharan African languages. Rather it is related to the Algerian Kabyle Berber, the Moroccan Berber Tashelhit, and other Berber languages of North Africa (Berber speakers number roughly thirty million in North Africa.) Current scholarship suggests that the members of this language family derive from a common parent tongue spoken in the Sahara and Nile regions of Africa about 8,000- 14,000 years ago (scholars propose differing views as to time and place.) This proto-language separated into six major groups: Berber, Semitic, Egyptian, (a problematic Chadic), Cushitic and Omotic. The common theme of all these languages is their consonantic root system, most words being derived from a three consonant verbal root, prefixes and suffixes. The timescale available to scholars suggests that Berber was already the language of the North African coast from the banks of the Nile, or Western Egypt to the Atlantic by 4,000 BC.. Tamasheq split into three major dialects, which the Tamasheq themselves refer to as a "sha", a "za" and a "ha" dialect (differences in pronounciation.) The primitive link between Berber and other languages of the same family, such as Egyptian, is seen in the similarity of their phonetic systems and in the verbal system based on (usually three) root consonants, modified by vocalization and auxiliary consonants. The preferred word order of "verb-subject-object" is also part of their shared characteristics.... Tamasheq does not have a definite article and forms the genitive by use of the preposition "n," two additional characteristics in common with Egyptian... .. Special care should be taken with prepositions where Tamasheq and English function differently. Qualifiers too work very differently in Berber and in the English system of adjectives and adverbs. Idiomatic translation - one way or the other - will often require a re-ordering of thought patterns to get the correct syntax... Similarly with the verbal system. It will often be necessary to think differently to express an English time-oriented verbal construction where context and auxiliary words express the quality of action, to a Berber/Tamasheq quality-of-action orientated construction where time is indicated by context." (Heh: i.e. different concepts of dimensions of space and time) Heh | ||
| J.D. Degreef (213.177.133.84) |
Helene, A very, very interesting posting ! The part I’d like to comment upon is this : >Current scholarship suggests that the members of this language family derive from a common parent tongue spoken in the Sahara and Nile regions of Africa about 8,000- 14,000 years ago (scholars propose differing views as to time and place.) This proto-language separated into six major groups: Berber, Semitic, Egyptian, (a problematic Chadic), Cushitic and Omotic.< Looking at a map, one pictures the area occupied by this linguistic group : the N half of Africa, with just a smaller extension into Syro-Palestine and the Arabian peninsula. This may indeed convey the impression of an African language group having spilled over into neighboring parts of Asia. But using this system, historians from the future would deduce that Anglo-Saxon culture had originated in North America, and conquered a much smaller island (Great Britain) off the west coast of Europe. What troubles me is that archaeologically speaking, there’s a nice continuity between hunters-gatherers, the beginnings of cattle-breeding (Kebarian), the beginnings of pottery and agriculture (Natoufian) in the Levant. From the decorated objects left by these cultures, religious ideas show an interesting continuity also. AFAIK the Kebarian dates from a time (say 15-11,000 BC) when the severe drought that emptied the Sahara after the Aterian, and which lasted 15-20,000 years, hadn’t ended yet. And from the Natoufian on, the material level of archaeological remains in the Levant is incomparably richer than anything found in North Africa, Egypt included. Can one imagine a migration out of materially mediocre North Africa, bringing the Semitic extension of the language group into the Levant, and immediately exploding into a glorious culture, still materially speaking ? So I’m still sceptical on the N African origin of the languages. They could have differentiated after having been inoculated by Levantine people(s) immigrating into N Africa when the region became habitable again, and have differentiated into the five African subgroups (I suppose 10-12,000 years would be sufficient for this ?). The cultural resemblances between the Levant and non-Semitic cultures, such as India, Greece and Europe, may also point to an Asiatic origin of things (the Neolithic migrating out of the Levant towards Europe is another example of the central role of Syro-Palestine & Turkey). In Egypt proper, you know that with the exception of bovines, the animal and plant species used by the Neolithic inhabitants of the W Delta (Merimde) are all of Levantine origin. This may indicate that people from Syro-Palestine continued trickling into N Africa about 5000 BC. But are there prehistoric examples of movements in the opposite direction ? During the historical period, of course, the Egyptians did just that. :-) So the short mention “scholars propose differing views as to time and place” in your posting is very important, IMHO. For the rest I want to thank you again for the excellent posting. JD | ||
| Helene Hagan (206.170.217.192) |
Hello JD: In your response, you allow yourself the pronouncement of a phrase such as "materially mediocre North Africa." Such a phrase can only emanate from your scant knowledge of the richness of North African data. As to the differing views regarding time and place, indeed that note was important, and as I was quoting the work, did not edit it out. It pertains to differences within the same area, and the time aspect is as we all know a judicious variable. All scholars know that datation is approximate, and assertions must be tempered with caution. Heh |
