Posted on 10/20/2006 10:41:26 AM PDT by blam
GGG Ping.
Wasn't modern copt used to break the Rosetta Stone after it was found in Egypt?
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I don't know.
I've pinged muawiyah, he knows something about everything.
Modern Coptic has a vast infusion of more recent semitic words derived from Arabic, as do all the North African languages, so only old "church Coptic" (in which, for example, the Bible was written many centuries ago) would prove useful in dealing with Egyptian in the time of the Ptolemies.
This is sad another language lost because of Muslime invaders.
"Wasn't modern copt used to break the Rosetta Stone after it was found in Egypt?"
No.
The key to the Rosetta Stone is that it has two different languages on it, in three alphabets including the theretofore untranslatable Egyptian hieroglyphs.
One of the languages is (ancient) Greek, which was widely known to scholars. Because the Greek was there, it was possible to break the hieroglyphic texts, which say the same thing, in Egyptian.
Greek was the key to the whole thing.
Actually, Champollion recognized the similarities in certain characters between the three written languages on the Rosetta Stone. They were hieroglphic, demotic and Greek.
He was able to transliterate "Cleopatra" by seeing such letters as the "d" (a phoentic "T") in Greek in the same place in the name as the more cursive demotic symbol for "d" and the hieroglyphic "d" which is the symbol for the human hand.
GReek was the key to transliterating. Finding out what the words really meant required close analysis of the Egyptian and curch Coptic (which is the nearest language).
Did you choose your screen name from "mutemwiya" which is the ancient Egyptian name for "Mother of the sacred boat"?
That makes sense.
I suppose that there wouldn't be any way to know that the Greek is what the Coptic said, if you someone couldn't read the Coptic (in the Demotic script) and know that.
Probably the process was: Greek compared to Demotic-script Coptic, verifying that the two inscriptions said the same thing, and then Demotic Coptic to Hieroglyphic Coptic, allowing the breaking of the hieroglyphs.
Don't we have Napoleon to thank for all of this?
Wasn't the Rosetta Stone one of the things the scholars he took with him on his Egyptian campaign went and dug up?
That must've been a cool job: Napoleon's archaeologist. You never have to make an appointment to get in and see the artifacts...
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LOL. Just shove the dead bodies out of the way.
Yes, that's who I was thinking of. Thank you.
Coptic is a combination of the ancient Egyptian languages Demotic, Hieroglyphic and Hieratic.Demotic, Hieroglyphic and Hieratic are scripts, not languages. IOW, those are three ways of writing. The Coptic language is a hanger-on from pharaonic times, but with a substantial loan vocabulary of Arabic.
"Zaki revealed. “Why I didn’t pass on the language to my children, I don’t know.” Zaki says that she often receives strange looks when she is overheard speaking Coptic on her mobile phone. “People look at me as if I am an alien and I don’t belong. I guess that is what my ancestors had to deal with,although violently in some instances,” she said,which is the main reason that Zaki chose not to speak Coptic with her children.
“I didn’t want my kids to have to experience the exclusion that Coptic had with me when I was younger,” she revealed. “I can remember my friends making fun of me when I talked to my parents "
Coptic was the spoken language of an advaced civlized society when its Arab speaking neighbors were raiding, butchering and terrorizing people and living like parasites on the societies of civlized people.
As a matter of fact, nothing has changed in 2,300 years.
actually this one is lost because some parents have decided not to teach their children their mother tongue.
Language casualties have been a feature of history for as long as we have philological records; the romans certainly helped wipe out gaulish dialects, etruscan, oscan, and who knows what other bronze- or stone-age languages in western europe. I think Basque and p- and q-celtic (welsh, bretonish, cornish, and irish, scots gaelic (post-roman migration from irish), and manx) were the only to survive into the modern age, with cornish and manx now gone.
I would assume the language casualty list from the arab migrations of roughly 1300 years ago is similarly impressive, especially in the area of modern syria/lebanon/jordan/iraq, not to mention coptic and punic.
Yes, but parents aren't teaching their children because they feel it makes them a target of violence. Whether real or imagined and I believe the threat of violence is real, the language is lost because of the Islamic invaders.
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