Principles of Historical Language Reconstruction (PHILANGRECON)

Principles of Historical Language Reconstruction
(P-Hi-Lang-Recon, to be cited as "PHILANGRECON in the meaning of phil-lang-recon")
by Andis Kaulins
(Copyright © 2008 by Andis Kaulins, fair use permissible, copyrighted materials of others are used here pursuant to the "fair use" copyright exception.)

Principle Number One:
Human Language is Genetic and Arose Suddenly with the Dawn of Modern Humans
This contradicts the theory of some modern linguists that human language arose gradually and not from one specific place.

Science Daily reports about a Letter in Nature (19 July 2007) about which Dr. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge has stated:

"We have combined our genetic data with new measurements of a large sample of skulls to show definitively that modern humans originated from a single area in Sub-saharan Africa."

Juan Uriagereka writes at Seed Magazine in The Evolution of Language as follows:

"What we are beginning to see is that a set of disparate cognitive traits lends credence to the fact that language is genetic, and arose suddenly... we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution."

That point ca 200,000 years ago was in Africa, and from that point mankind ultimately spread.


(Download high resolution map at National Geographic)
Principle Number Two:
Human Language arose in Africa and - in the Case of Europe and Indo-European Languages - that Original "Out of Africa" Language Followed Human Migration Northward, via Central Europe and the Baltic Sea, from where it spread East and West



As can be seen from the above map from the National Geographic Genographic Project, the "genetic path" of migration into Europe (the yellow arrows) - a path otherwise blocked by mountains - proceeded on a path out of Africa across the Western Middle East, then between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea (the Black Sea may have been much smaller then) and via Central Asia to the what is now the Baltic Sea. This path of migration, in our opinion, explains why Latvian and Lithuanian are the most archaic still-spoken Indo-European tongues, as they are near the northernmost point of the migration at that time, stopped by the Baltic Sea, and thus reflect an early stage of human language spoken by mankind at this time of the migration out of Africa. One thus finds great lexical similarity between Latvian and Lithuanian languages and the ancient languages of the Middle East as well as the Bantu languages in Africa.

The genetic path of migration contradicts the practice of linguists in favoring, for example, Latin and Greek etymological roots for Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European terms. The genetically estimated "Out of Africa" date is about 55000-50000 BP. The oldest tool artifacts from that period (45,000 BP) in Europe have been found at Kostenki, in Russia, (see the Venus Figurine with braids) somewhat North of the passage between the Black and Caspian Seas, i.e. right where we would expect them. Kostenki (SW of Voronezh) is right at the center of the area from which the Indo-European language is proposed to have emanated by the Kurgan hypothesis. This is surely no coincidence but indicates that this is in fact the area from which the human migration may have spread.

The Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European language migration errs in its dating because it mistakes technology transfer with language spread. The Urheimat (Original Homeland) is much older than later technology transfers, utilizing similar routes. A Wikipedia map of the Kurgan hypothesis of the spread of Indo-European language is shown below and it closely matches the "Out of Africa" routes of migration, which occurred much earlier.


Other archaeological and anthropological evidence suggest a somewhat later date of "Out of Africa" migration and the Kostenki date could be more like 40,000 BP- supported by the Hofmeyr Skull 36,000 BP in South Africa, by the Cioclovina 1 neurocranium from ca. 33,000 BP found in Romania, which might be a Neanderthal hybrid, by the Oase 2 skull from Romania (35,000 BP), and by the ochred skeleton of a child at Lagar Velho, Portugal (24,500 BP). Very few human skulls or skeletons have been found in Europe for the period prior to 28,000 BP.)

Principle Number Three:
Not Only Modern DNA Genetic Studies but also Blood-Group Studies as far back as 50 Years Ago Show a Similar Pattern of Human Migration and Language Spread
(This contradicts the idea of some linguists that modern DNA genetics is still a young science and still has no directly applicable relevance to historical linguistics. As the graphic shows, genetic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) evidence is supported by blood-group studies. Compare the 1957 world blood-group dendrite below with the 2007 mtDNA map above. It is a match.)

(Above is a mathematically produced dendrite of the world distribution of blood groups, adapted from A. Kelus and J. Lukaszewicz (authors of Taksonomia wroclawska w zastosowaniu do zagadnien seroantropologii, Archiwum Immunol. terap. Doswiadizalnej, 1, 245-254 , 1953), as presented in Ludwig Hirszfeld (also Hirschfeld or Hirsfeld), Probleme der Blutgruppenforschung (book review here)).

Principle Number Four:
Along the Early Migration Route, A Lexical Comparison of Indo-European Languages - especially on the evidence of Latvian, which we speak as a native and thus use for accurate comparison - Shows Unmistakable Common Roots With Ancient Languages of the Middle East as well with Bantu Languages in Africa
The current division of languages into various allegedly separate groups in terms of language origins is false. All languages have a common origin. The expanded Nostratic theory is correct but does not go far enough, since it incorrectly excludes some groups of human languages from its ambit.). Here is a map of world languages after Joseph Greenberg, retired Stanford linguist:

(View this map in high resolution at The Tower of Babel (ToB), which "is an international, Web-based project on historical and comparative linguistics - so far, the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind to be found on the Internet", that began life in 1998 as the personal homepage of Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (1953-2005), who, until his untimely demise on 09.30.2005, had been Russia's leading specialist in diachronical studies and unofficial head of the so-called "Moscow school of comparative linguistics".)

Principle Number Five:
The isolated comparison of single words picked out of various language dictionaries is undesirable for etymological study. To obtain valid etymologies, words must be examined in the broader context of the place of a word in the entire language as a whole and only then can valid conclusions be made.

We take here the example of the word "hand" in English, for which various false etymologies have been developed over the years, with the result that no known etymology is accepted, especially since "hand" only exists in Germanic languages - English, German, Swedish. How can that be?

The Online Etymological Dictionary repeats the mainstream linguistic etymology:
"O.E. hond, from P.Gmc. *khanduz (cf. O.S., O.Fris., Du., Ger. hand, O.N. hönd, Goth. handus)." Linguists have not been able to follow this etymology any further because "hand" as a word only exists in the German languages.

The Eatonhand.com page correctly not only lists "hand" in its etymology, but also wisely refers to the broader conceptual context including finger, thumb, nail, palm, hand, wrist and elbow.

But the "broader conceptual context" of etymology for "hand" should also include the concept of "arm", because, as every modern linguist should know - and almost none do - in the Latvian language, together with Lithuanian the most archaic still-spoken Indo-European tongues, the word for "hand" and "arm" is the SAME word, namely:

Latvian roka "arm, hand"
Lithuanian ranka "arm, hand"
but also Finnish ranka "long, straight branch"

Given that knowledge, a "scientifically"-oriented world of linguists should immediately have concluded that if Latvian had only one term for both "arm" and "hand", that this might in fact reflect the Urzustand (original state) of the Indo-European language. But none, except us, have done so, because mainstream linguistics and their etymologies are faulty to the core, thinking that Latvian roka applies only to the hand and showing that they have not done their homework.

Since the mainstream linguists have little clue as to how language developed CONCEPTUALLY, they have of course not sought to find the etymology of English, German and Scandinavian "hand" in ancient words for "arm", because had they done so, they would have found the correct etymology, an etymology reaching clear back to Africa. Here are the Bantu words for "arm" as taken from the Bantu Language Database at the University of Auckland in New Zealand:

01758.	Asu G.22	m̀	kónò	N	3
01354.	Basaa A.43a	hì-/dì-	kéŋéé	N	19, 13
00941.	Bemba M.42	úkù	ßókó	N
00478.	Bukusu E.31c	kú- mù-	xònò	N	3, 4
00006.	Kinyamwezi F22	m̀ / mà	kɔ̀nɔ́	N	5, 6		arm = hand
02252.	Koyo C.24	ɛ̀	bɔ́gɔ̀	N	7-6
03072.	Lega D.25	kʊ̀-	bókò	N	15, 6
02638.	Rumanyo (Gciriku) K.38	lì	ßɔ̂kɔ̀	N	5, 6
03443.	Tswana S.30	lɩ̀-	bɔ́χɔ́	N	5
03863.	Yao P.21	ŋ̀-	kónó	N	3

Those words correspond to the Latvian sāni "side (of the body)" in diminutive form as sānīte, found in German as kante "edge" and Dutch kant "side", and that constellation of three words sānīte (side) : kante, kant (edge, side) : hand show us the true etymology of hand quite clearly in a well-known s>k>h consonantal shift similar to Grimm's law. At some point the weak "n" in Indo-European sānīte was lost or otherwise n//t was dentalized, giving the following words for side (as the left or right half):

Latvian sānīte "side" (diminutive form)
German Seite "side"
English side
French côté
Norwegian side
Swedish sida
Finnish sanka ("side of an object")
Chinese shǒubi (shǒu-bì)

But the arm is also an element with the shoulder, which modern medicine recognizes when it talks about "shoulder arm syndrome". Hence, when we combine the concepts of arm and shoulder in our etymology, we get that "eureka" effect that only comes with good science, because the methodology we are using is the correct methodology, contrary to current methods:
Widely disparate terms in various languages suddenly then show similar origin:

Thai แขน (kăen) "arm"
Vietnamese cánh tay "arm"
Syriac: ܟܬܦܐ (kathpā, kathpo) "shoulder"
Hebrew: כתפא (kathpā, kathpo) "shoulder"

IN Chinese, Japanese and Korean the Han character 肩 "shoulder"
(radical 130 肉+4, 8 strokes, cangjie input 竹尸月 (HSB), 戈尸月 (ISB), four-corner 3022₇)
is read as follows

Cantonese
Hanzi 肩 (Yale gin1) "shoulder"

Japanese
肩 (hiragana かた, romaji kata) "shoulder"
Kanji 肩 (common kanji) "shoulder"
Readings On: けん (ken) Kun: かた (kata)

Korean
Hanja 肩 (hangeul 견, revised gyeon, McCune-Reischauer kyŏn, Yale kyen) "shoulder"

Mandarin
Hanzi 肩 (pinyin jiān (jian1), Wade-Giles chien¹) "shoulder"

As can clearly be seen, the languages of the world relate back etymologically to a hand-arm-shoulder concept at inception, which then became dissimilated in the various human groupings as humanity migrated to different part of the globe.

Indeed, this knowledge provides us with a new tool to determine the date as to when languages separated from each other.

An average mainstream linguist trying to understand the relationships which exist between all the languages of the world is hopelessly lost - as mainstream linguistics is - if words are not understood conceptually to include broader original concepts in the early stages of language which later become more differentiated among various language groups.

This posting is the first in a series of postings establishing new principles for the comparative reconstruction of languages in historical linguistics. These principles are important because modern views of ancient history and language, often erroneous, greatly influence current events.

In the light of modern genetic findings concerning the direction of human migration out of Africa - and we refer here to the National Geographic Genographic Project and the map above from that website dating to ca. 55000-50000 BC - it becomes crystal clear that the methodology currently used by mainstream linguists to reconstruct ancient languages, especially the proto-Indo-European language of interest to Western civilization, is in need of a total overhaul.

In fact, based on modern genetic evidence of human migration out of Africa, many of the past "peer-reviewed" writings of Western linguists (the blind leading the blind) can probably be thrown straight into the wastebasket as reflecting a bygone age of a totally false focus by gullible classical scholars on what are essentially colonialist remnants of Latin and Greek sources. Then as now - the classical scholars foolishly thought and generally still think that European language was based on those two ancient tongues, an assumption taken simply because those languages were the most ancient written languages known in Europe at that time.

Of course, whether a language is put into writing or not has absolutely nothing do with how archaic that language is nor what stage of language development such a language represents.

Indeed, Latin and Greek have been used to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language, even for areas of Europe where no Greek or Roman ever set foot, and European languages are treated historically as if there had been no language at all in those regions, prior to the advent of the Greeks and Romans. It is an amazingly absurd and closed-minded approach to science and one reason that we hold little of modern linguistics, a pedantic language study which has resulted in the establishment of far-fetched etymologies (origins) for European words and which has greatly skewed the accurate reconstruction of true proto-Indo-European.

Modern comparative historical linguistics started late in the 18th century when Sir William Jones, an Englishman who studied law and who was at that time living India, observed as follows the year 1782:

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.” (Jones 1786, quoted in Lehman 1967 and Szemerényi 1996:4)."

As written at the Wikipedia:

"Although as early as the mid-17th century Dutchman Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1612–1653) and others had been aware that Ancient Persian belonged to the same language group as the European languages, and, publishing in 1787, American colonist Jonathan Edwards Jr. demonstrated, with supporting data (which Jones lacked), that Algonquian and Iroquoian language families (families, not merely languages) were related, it was Jones' discovery that caught the imagination of later scholars and became the semi-mythical origin of modern historical comparative linguistics."

Since then, modern linguistics has become a playground for scholars who abide by the principle voiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his first series of essays on Self-Reliance, where he stated that: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.". Linguistics has in fact developed into a pseudo-science where the scholars spend their time trying to devise artificial and highly subjective abstruse rules for the development of language, rather than looking at the available evidence to actually discover how language developed. Most scholarly publications on language no longer have anything to do with language at all but revolve around the application of obscure symbols which are their own self-serving end, and which are the focal point of discussion, with erroneous conclusions derived from erroneous etymologies, so that the allegedly discovered rules are next to worthless in language reconstruction.

Modern linguistics suffers from a peer group pressure syndrome discussed at Conformity, Compliance and Obedience, which is marked by the following characteristics:

* conformity occurs in response to social norms
* social norms are pervasive and powerful
* compliance occurs in response to a direct request
* obedience occurs in response to an authority figure

Major weapons of peer group pressure are:

1. Reciprocity
2. The demand for commitment and consistency, which "taps our strong desire to be consistent over time"

That describes perfectly how modern linguistics works. The fact of scholarly publication is a matter of reciprocity to theories published by other peers - not a matter of the truth or falsity of what is being published. That is combined in scholary writings by the demand for foolish consistency under the motto that some rule, however erroneous, is better than no rule at all.

This "linguistic method", and it is the major linguistic method in vogue in that science today, has led to a house of cards which is being swept away by modern genetics, and rightly so.

In light of modern knowledge and the above maps, any linguist seriously preferring linguistic explanations giving preference to Western etymological explanations rather than to Eastern ones, is simply deluding himself and others. We have long claimed that Latvian language is much more archaic than Western tongues and we are right, without question, based on genetic evidence. Any linguist who defends old outdated Western-centric Indo-European etymologies and theories with a straight face does not belong in the true scientific field, by which we mean that group of persons, whose theories will withstand the march of time. That demand excludes much of mainstream linguistics.

Ancient Egyptian "Great Green" actually meant "middle sea", i.e. Mediterranean

The hapless Egyptologists' readings of Old Kingdom hieroglyphs in Egypt involving words having an Indo-European substratum remain a source of great vexation to this writer.

A typical example are the hieroglyphs which the Egyptologists read as

wdj-ur
or as
wadj wer

as the ancient Pharaonic name for the Mediterranean Sea.

The Egyptologists erroneously translate those hieroglyphs as
"The Great Green"
as the alleged Pharaonic name for the Mediterranean,

but of course,
that is a preposterous mistranslation of the Pharaonic hieroglyphs.

As Alessandra Nibbi, who passed away this January 15, 2007, pointed out
(in The Sea Peoples and Egypt, NOYES Press, Park Ridge, NJ, USA, 1975, ISBN-13: 9780815550419, ISBN: 0815550413)
this translation by Egyptologists is bound to be wrong since it is weakly based on a Semitic word for water attested only in the New Kingdom, whereas the hieroglyphs for the Mediterranean Sea already appear in Old Kingdom texts.

Nibbi recognized that the Egyptologists had made a critical error here and thus suggested that the Pharaonic term referred to the Nile Delta, which would deserve the "great green" appellation. She did not consider the possibility, however, that the translation "great green" was wrong per se (on its face).

In any case, although Nibbi's idea was also wrong, her idea was much better than what mainstream Egyptology was ludicrously claiming. As anyone who has ever been to the Mediterranean can attest, that sea is by no means green and the ancient Pharaohs would never have given it such a stupid name.

In fact, as I pointed out years ago to the Egyptologists on the now defunct ANE list, the readings wdj-ur and wadj wer correspond to Baltic terms for the Mediterranean, with vid- viz. vidur meaning "middle" in both Lithuanian and Latvian (this compares to English mid- through v//m permutation) whereas jūra means "sea" in Latvian and vidus jūra (vid- jūra) is still used as the Latvian name for the Mediterranean Sea today.

Since the Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian are the most archaic still spoken Indo-European tongues, this word presents clear indication of an Indo-European stratum in Old Kingdom Pharaonic language.

Conclusion

wdj-ur viz. wadj wer
does not mean "great green"

rather
it means, as written, "middle sea",

i.e. medi-terra or,
as we still say today,

the Mediterranean Sea,

in Latvian (as an attestation of ancient Indo-European)
this is, even today, Vidus Jūra (= wdj-ur ).

No vestige, no visible trace of a name "great green" for the Mediterranean is found anywhere except in the hopelessly fertile imaginations of the hapless Egyptology linguists who came up with that preposterous reading and who persist on keeping that reading in spite of not a shred of evidence to support it.

Etymology of the Word for the bird Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving!

If you thought that the word for the Turkey bird originated etymologically from the country Turkey, you would be wrong.

Believe it or not, there is no accepted etymology for the word for the bird "Turkey", a word which has been analyzed lexically at great depth by Alain Theriault in his 1996 posting at the Linguist List.

There is also a comprehensive lexical list at the Wiktionary. The closest words to English "turkey" are German Trut-hahn, Latvian ti-tars, Hebrew tar-negol hodu"rooster Indian", Igbo (southern Nigera) toro toro, Irish turcai, Italian tacchino, Ladin (Switzerland) tachin, Lower Sorbian turk, Sorbian truta, Romanian cúrca, Telugu (Dravidian language of India) Tarkee Kodi (compare those two words with the Hebrew). Many other languages of the world have a word for the bird turkey starting with a word like hind- or ind- or something similar to it meaning "bird of India".

If the Turkey originated in Europe, the Latvian terms tark-sket or tark-skis might give the essential clue since these words mean to "chatter, clapper, patter, rattle", i.e. "to gobble".

But as explained by Michael Qunion at World Wide Words, the turkey originally came from Mexico of the New World and was brought to the Old World by the Spaniards, in part via India and the East Indies, which is how the bird got called the "Indian" bird. The Maya term for the turkey cock was ah tzo based on current evidence so that an original *tzor- form is not inconceivable. Since Tzorkin viz. Tzolkin means "cosmic matrix" and Chorti, the name of the Maya people, means "river of stars", the name of the Turkey bird may have come originally from the contact of the first European explorers with the tribal populations of Mexico prior to the colonial era, i.e. rather than a "bird of India", which the explorers thought they had discovered, it was actually a "bird of the Maya" Chorti, whence also names of the Turkey that reference Peru.

Etymology and Geometry : Origin of the word CIRCLE

N.S. Gill at About.com has a nice article on the
Etymology of Geometry Terms where she points to the rather troublesome etymology of our word CIRCLE, writing:

"That circle (coming either from a Greek verb meaning to hoop around or from the circular Roman circus) is marked with what you would have, in pre-geometry days, called a line across part of it."

That purported etymology is VERY WEAK and so is the linguists theory that the Indo-European root of circle is sker-, for which there is as good as no evidence.

Actually, I think the origin of the word CIRCLE comes from an even more ancient Indo-European word, that for "millstone", found, for example, in Latvian word DZIRKALIS "millstone", which did not get its original name from its shape at all, but rather from the function it served.

In Latvian DZIR- would have the same origin as Latvian DZIRKSTELLE "spark" and KALIS can mean "Smith, Smithy" in Latvian relating to the root KAL-T "to forge, to hammer" and so DZIRKALIS, the "millstone" would have some origin such as "spark grinder", a term probably going far back into the history of man and the observations that certain stones ground together would produce sparks - i.e. fire. Presumably, millstones were the first circular objects practically used and it is likely, in our opinion, that these ultimately led to the idea of the wheel for other applications (spinning wheels, etc.).

In time, the millstone became synonymous with the concept of a circle and we thus later obtained many words for circular concepts with the root CIRC-, which does not have an original concept of circle as its base, but rather a millstone for grinding.

Vowel Sounds in Pharaonic Egyptian Hieroglyphs

This posting represents our decipherment of the vowel sounds in Ancient Pharaonic hieroglyphs.

This explanation of the vowel system is not shared by mainstream linguistics, whose representaives appear to be too busy to look at such things. However, we are quite sure that we are right in our presentation.

Pharaonic Egyptian Hieroglyphs 1 - Vowel Sounds



Pharaonic Egyptian Vowels in Hieroglyphs

The current view of the Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they contained no "vowels". Although this is true in terms of "modern" vowels as used to separate consonants, the Egyptian hieroglyphs do in fact have symbols for vowel-type sounds which did not function as "vowels" per se but which represented separate language elements as specific sounds.

The above graphic shows my new decipherment of the ancient Old Kingdom Pharaonic Egyptian vowel-sound system.

Decipherment of the Vowel-Sound System of Ancient Egypt

This decipherment is the beginning of my correction of the mainstream transcriptions, transliterations and interpretations of the hieroglyphs. Mainstream work contains many, many errors.

In the early days of the Pharaonic Egyptian hieroglyphs, the ancients did not yet have our words or specific concepts for "vowel" or "consonant".

Indeed, even in modern times, a thing like "vowels" is a complicated subject. See e.g. Louis Goldstein of Yale University and his writings on "vowel theory".

Yet, in order to devise a written language, the ancients had to have some primitive "linguistic" understanding of sound and its connection to symbols in order to devise a workable writing system.

I have discovered how that Pharaonic "vowel" system worked.

Mater Lectionis - Early vowels in the Hebrew Alphabet

The Pharaonic "vowels" show that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were the DIRECT predecessor system to what is known as the matres lectionis of the Hebrew alphabet in which the letter Aleph is mostly an A, the letter He mostly an A, the letter Waw mostly an O or a U, and the letter Jod (also spelled Yod) mostly I, E or AE.

The Linguistics of Sound and Vowel Theory

Mater lectionis derives out of the limited number of ways in which
vowels can be formed by human speech.

Early Vowel Theory

As Goldstein notes:

Indian grammarians as early as the 7th century
already divided vowels into three distinct types:
(1) palatal (so-called "mouth vowels")
(2) labio-velar (so-called "lip vowels")
(3) pharyngeal (so-called "throat vowels")

Modern Vowel Theory

Modern linguistics has expanded this list to four types of vowels:
(1) palatal ("mouth vowels")
(2) velar ("lip vowels")
(3) uvular ("tongue vowels")
(4) pharyngeal ("in the throat")

The Egyptian Vowel-Type Hieroglyphs mark Vowel Sounds

What I have discovered in the most ancient Pharaonic Egyptian hieroglyphs is that their makers recognized four qualities of vowel-type sounds - and consciously selected homophonic (same-sounding) symbols to mark these sounds - sounds which are similar in function to modern linguistic vowel theory, but of course not as advanced in their nature 5000 years ago.

These four vowel-type sounds in ancient Egypt were:

1. The Breath Sound - - the "LEAF, reed LEAF" Hieroglyph
2. The Throat Sound - - the "EAGLE" (vulture) Hieroglyph
3. The Nasal Sound - - the "CHICKEN" Hieroglyph
4. The Palatal Sound - - the "BENT ARM" Hieroglyph

In order to represent these "vowel-types" with symbols, the makers of the hieroglyphs - on the basis of the evidence of the Indo-European language, e.g. on the basis of Latvian lexical comparisons, selected symbols which were pronounced similarly - i.e. were homophonic - to the vowel sound description.

The Four Pairs of Homophonic Hieroglyphs and Vowel Sound Functions

The following four pairs of words are homophonic in Latvian - and fit the Egyptian hieroglyphs perfectly. I find that these same homophonic pairs are found clearly in the Egyptian hieroglyphs:

1. ALPA (whence ALPHA) viz. ELPA "breath" is homophonic with LAPA viz. VARPA "leaf, ear" whence also VARPATA "couch-grass, dog grass". (Note that the later alphabet used the "steer, ox" symbol for Alpha, a steer in Latvian being LUOP, also a word homophonic to ALPA.) In ancient Old Kingdom Egypt, the "leaf" or "reed leaf" symbol thus represented the "breath sound" in the ancient hieroglyphs.

2. IERIKLIS ("in the throat") is homophonic with ERGLIS "eagle" (vulture in Egypt). The "eagle" viz. "vulture" symbol thus represented the "throat sound" in the ancient hieroglyphs.

3. UOSTA ("smell, smeller, of the nose") is homophonic with VISTA "chicken".
The "chicken" symbol thus represented a "nasal sound" in the ancient hieroglyphs.

4. ROKA ("bent, arm") is homophonic with LOKA "bent, pliable, flexible", supple").
The "bent arm" thus represented a "palatal (bent) sound" in the ancient hieroglyphs. Even today LOCISHANA in Latvian is applied as a word in linguistics, applying to declension and conjugation.

Consequence of the Hieroglyphic "Vowel-Sound" Discovery

This above discovery now permits us to recognize that the hieroglyphs were not just chance symbols selected at random or because of religious or other considerations, but were selected primarily for their pronounced SOUND as being similarly sounding - homophonic - to an intended linguistic sound FUNCTION.

Accordingly, we will expect a similar intelligence and rational reasoning to be at work in the formulation of the remainder of the hieroglyphs, also for the "consonants" (which - as we will see - were also seen combined with vowel sounds). Even though the ancients did not have the precise equivalent concept of "consonant" in ancient days, they recognized similar sounds.

An explanation of the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptian "alphabet" will also soon be forthcoming, as well as further correction of the decipherment of many other hieroglyphs which did not attain later "alphabetic" status.

Technorati Tags
Egyptology, Hieroglyphs, Vowel Theory, Matres Lectionis, Hebrew Alphabet, Alphabet, Origin of the Alphabet, Mater Lectionis, Palatal, Velar, Uvular, Pharyngeal, Labio-velar, Linguistics
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Linguistics, Philology and Language - The Brothers Grimm

Linguistics, Philology and Language are in some sense natural enemies.



The Brothers Grimm
The most famous linguist (philologist) of all time, Jacob Grimm [in German sometimes written as Jakob Grimm], who was not only the discoverer of Grimm's Law (see also here) but was also one of the Grimm brothers famed for their Grimm's Fairy Tales, wrote:

"As a matter of general logic, I am an enemy of grammar; it gives the appearance of being strict and exclusive in its rules, although it actualy limits pure observation, which I regard to be the soul of linguistic research. He who pays no attention to the perceptual fruits of observation - which from the very start do mock all theories by the certainty of their existence - will never make heads or tails of the impenetrable essence of language.

The above is our translation from the original German which reads - in original spelling:

Allgemein-logisch begriffen bin ich in der grammatik feind; sie führen scheinbare strenge und geschlossenheit der bestimmung mit sich, hemmen aber die beobachtung, welche ich als die seele der sprachforschung betrachte. Wer nichts auf wahrnehmungen hält, die mit ihrer factischen gewisheit anfangs aller theorie spotten, wird dem unergründlichen sprachgeiste nie näher treten.

- Jacob Grimm (1827:VI) Deutsche Grammatik [German Grammar], Göttingen, 1819, 2nd ed., Göttingen, 1822–1840, reprinted 1870 by Wilhelm Scherer, Berlin

Jacob Grimm has set forth the basic philosophy of the postings to be made to this blog. We make observations, which is the soul of linguistic research.

We might note here in connection with the Brothers Grimm that the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, "German Research Foundation") is financing a library digitization project and that the University of Kiel has digitized Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s epoch-making 33-volume German Dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch, "DWB") which is available online as Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm auf CD-ROM und im Internet. As written by Dagmar Giersberg for the Goethe Institut:

"If you have all 33 volumes of the DWB in front of you, you can readily imagine the herculean efforts involved in merely processing and proofreading all that text."

Take a look at that article to discover "the Chinese connection" to this dictionary.