On Pure Text Corpora

Stephan Seidlmayer makes an important point about text corpora in this article:

Für die Grammatik sucht man sich „reine” Corpora zusammen, Gruppen von Texten, von denen man meint, dass sie dieselbe Sprache sprechen.

For grammar one seeks for "pure" corpora, groups of texts which one considers to be in the same language.

But such pure corpora are illusory:

Die Auswahl „reiner“ Corpora ist, indem sie auf einer petitio principii fußt, zirkulär.

The selection of the texts as representing a "pure" corpus is a circular argument. What we find in Egyptian texts is a range of usage that changes over time. But we also have various registers of language that authors slide between.

To speak or write in an archaic form of the language or in an antique style conveys something different than doing so in a contemporary style. The same thing happens when one uses classical Arabic instead of colloquial or King James English (or even imitation King James English) rather than a more contemporary idiom. This is not to say that using archaic Egyptian necessarily meant the same thing to an Egyptian that archaic English does in modern English, but that in both languages the shift in register provides different connotations than the use of contemporary speech. A master of the language can use such things to great effect. Unfortunately, not all writers are masters of the language.

Speaking of text corpora, one of my favorite selections of texts was used by E. A. W. Budge in his book Egyptian Language. The text examples come either from the Pyramid of Unas or Papyrus D'Orbiney. The texts are about a thousand years apart. It would be a little like learning English with examples from Beowulf and Jane Austin. While there may not be such a thing as a pure text corpus, there are reasons we usually do not put those particular texts together.

In for the Long Haul

Stephen Seidlmeyer, in a recent article, points out the same obvious fact that I usually point out to my classes at the very beginning of class:

Das ägyptische ist die seit ältester Zeit und über die längste Dauer in Schriftquellen bezeugte Sprache der Menschheit. Von der Erfindung der Schrift im Niltal am Ende des 4. Jahrtausends v.Chr. bis zu den letzten koptischen Textschöpfungen im 14. Jahrhundert n. Chr. spannt sich ein Bogen der Literatur, der historischen und religiösen Texte, der Briefe und Verwaltungsdokumente, der alle Aspekte alten ägyptischen Lebens in Tradition und Transformation über mehr als vier Jahrtausende erhellt.

Egyptian is the human language attested at the earliest time and for the longest duration. From the appearance of writing in the Nile valley at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. until the creation of the last Coptic text in the fourteenth century A.D. it covers a spectrum of literature, of historical and religious texts, letters and administrative docuemtns, that covers all aspects of ancient Egyptian life in continuity and change for more than four thousand years.

Egyptian is uniquely situated to falsify many theories of historical linguistics. Chinese will not catch up for at least another millennium.

The Interconnected Ancient World II: A Tally of Bricks

When the Mormon pioneers entered Utah, life was anything but easy, and they had to make due with whatever they had available. One pioneer told Orson Hyde, “I labored hard under the pangs of hunger to put up a little adobie cabin and prepare to live, and at the same time my wife and children, pale with want, were ranging the hills and benches to find thistles and roots to eat, which we boiled in the milk of the remaining cows the wolves had not eaten.”[1] Sun dried mud brick, adobe, was the preferred building material. It was even suggested that the Salt Lake Temple be built “of the stone that is got in the Red Bute Kanyon, or of adobies, or of the best stone we can find in these mountains.”[2]

The term adobe is particularly associated with the southwestern United States, and came from the region of Mexico and Central America. Though mud brick is common in the southwest from prehistoric times, the origin of the term is Spanish, adobe.

The Spanish term, however, is not native to Spanish and first appears in the thirteenth century, when Spain was part of Fatimid Spain. It comes from Arabic, al-ṭūb “bricks.”[3]

The Arabic word, in turn, is not Semitic but borrowed from Coptic, tōbe “brick.”

The Coptic term derives from earlier Egyptian ḏb.t “brick” and goes all the way back to the beginning of Egyptian history. The bricks themselves began to be used in the Naqada I period,[4] and were used for most forms of non-monumental architecture throughout Egyptian history. In Exodus, the main building material was mud brick (Exodus 1:14; 5:7-19).

Both the Children of Israel before their Exodus and the Mormon pioneers after their Exodus built their dwellings of the same material and used the same word for it.

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[1] Orson Hyde, 24 September 1853, Journal of Discourses, 2:114.

[2] Heber C. Kimball, 9 October 1852, Journal of Discourses, 1:160.

[3] Hans Wehr, Arabic-English Dictionary (), 571.

[4] Dieter Arnold, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egyptian Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34.