Re: Re: Back in the Saddle

From: Christophe <xof_at_chanticleer.com_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:50:36 -0700

Well, my understanding (and it's only that) is that Coptic is still
used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church, so we
have some idea of what the pronunciation was like.

Of course, it may be completely misleading, and since Semitic
orthography (almost?) always omits vowels, it would be a guess at
best. (I've always loved the story of why we pronounce IHVH as
"Jehovah," even though it was almost certainly not actually
pronounced that way by Biblical Hebrew speakers, if they said it at
all.)

On 12 Apr 2006, at 13:55, tschibasch wrote:

> Yes, Coptic is indeed a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. There is
> reason to believe that the language has changed considerably since
> then. We now have only the consonants, and apparently no vowels.
>
> Maybe someone has re-created a pronunciation guide for this ancient
> language. In any case, in Historical Linguistics there is a certain
> amount of guesswork. How would we be able to determine how accurate it
> would be?
>
> John
>
> --- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, Christophe <xof@...>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 12 Apr 2006, at 10:56, tschibasch wrote:
>>> An interesting language that has truly died off is Ancient Egyptian.
>>> We have an idea how it sounded, since we have figured out the
>>> consonants and consonantal clusters. But the vowels are unknown. So
>>> our best efforts to reproduce it would have to be off.
>>
>> Isn't Coptic a linear descendant of Ancient Egyptian, though? Of
>> course, the vowels could have shifted all over the place, but doesn't
>> that give us a clue as to what they might have been?
>>
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Received on 2006-04-12 14:50:43