Re: Egyptian based Conlangs

At 10:56 PM -0400 12/15/98, Sally Caves wrote:

>I have out of the library Alan Gardiner's vast 1927 _Egyptian Grammar_.
>Unlike Budge, it seems, there is ample discussion of the complex Egyptian
>verb.  Lessons XXI through XXIII cover such things as the verb classes,
>voice, mood, tense, the prothetic, reduplication, bilateral/trilateral
>verbs, compound verbs, denominative verbs, the infinitive (if that's what
>Egyptian has), the infinitive as substitute for a noun clause (which is
>what Teonaht does in spades--including marking objects of the infinitive
>by a kind of genitive...all discovered after I had picked up the Egyptian
>book), the old perfective, etc. etc. etc. I, too, had a fancy for the idea
>of Teonaht borrowings from Egyptian, given the T's interest in Bastet and
>so forth.
I was going to mention this book -- one of my favorite baby-shower gifts.
There is also a dictionary by Faulkner, that is commonly used by students.
The Budge material is quite out of date (even the transliteration used
nowadays is different).

In the Brown bookstore I saw a recent teaching grammar in pre-publication
teaching draft -- unfortunately I couldn't afford the $50 to buy it.
Gardiner's grammar is good, but apparently you really want a copy with the
notes that you'd add to it during the course of being taught by an expert
-- many points need correction.

There's a very attractive book available from the University of Texas
Press, "Hieroglyphs Without Mystery", Karl-Theodor Zauzich (trans. and
adapted by Ann Macy Roth). This offers a baby introduction to the writing
system, vocabulary that would be useful for reading the kinds of short
inscriptions commonly found on objects you might see in museums, and some
grammar. It is pretty simple, but accessible and reasonably up-to-date.

There's also a grammar (that I've not seen) called "An Outline of Middle
Egyptian Grammar" by Helmut Brunner. This is recommended in the Zauzich
book.

>I also learned from this book that Coptic has "adjective-verbs" like "to
>be small," which is what the Teonaht "-ndi" verbs do, probably much less
>complexly.
One advantage of Coptic for the conlanger is that we have vocalizations for
the words, so that there's a bit more information there. On the other hand,
there's less room for creation.

Egyptian is a Semitic language, but even given that fact, some morphiology
is probably not well represented in the writing.

I've always wanted to do conlangs with hieroglyphic writing systems, but I
just don't have the stamina...

 -- David
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