Re: con-translation (was: Semitic/Celtic Ties)

On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 22:26:30 +0000 "Raymond A. Brown"
<raybrown@...> writes:
>>Okay....here's my evaluation of the Semitic explanations:
>>
>>"epioi" - i have no idea what this is supposed to mean, or how they
>got
>>"engraved monument".....the only words i know for "engraved" and
>>"monument" come from the roots HhRT and NTzB, respectively.
>Yep - in fact I forgot when I posted the original - which you quoted
>below
>- to explain that Gordon was working from a photograph of the
>inscription
>and read the first word as 'epiTi', not 'epioi'.
>[? = aleph; H = heth; T = teth; ` = ayin; S = tsade]
[Hh = heth; Tt = teth in my capitalized way of writing roots]

>Gordon read it thus:
>h-ptH = the engraved monument
>z-jtnt = which I have set
>`-nHt-j b-?rS jpj = over my resting place in Land of Beauty
Ah, that makes a bit more sense....the root PTHh "open" can be used to
mean carving letters on stone, like in the Biblical description of the
High Priest's clothes.

z-jtnt ("ze-jatanti"?) seems to be cognate to the Hebrew _she-natiti_,
from a root YTN (= NTN, "give") i guess...

`-nHt-j also makes sense, using a single-consonant affix (probably _`a-_)
for "on", like Aramaic's _?a-_, as opposed to the full Hebrew word _`al_.

>Steiglitz read it thus:
>h-ptH = the engraved monument
>z-jtnt = which I have set   OR  z-jTn?t = which I have erected
>Enete Bar-Sippai
I don't recognize the root from _jTn?t_....if the root is TtN?, then the
J- could be a causative prefix, like H- in Hebrew.

>Hope my transcriptions above help.
Well, i don't see how they got the Semitic consonants out of Greek
letters which include vowels....unless my extremely limited knowledge of
the Greek alphabet is messing me up here...

>>I don't know about the three symbols...they sort of look like they
>>could
>>mean "the engraved monument" in some kind of Chinese-style
>>ideographic
>>characters, although i don't see why it would use a symbol for "the"
>>at the beginning...
>Not likely, I think, to be ideographic.  They must, presumably, be
>ultimately derived from the old Linear A syllabary which was thought
>to
>have died out well before the end of the 2nd millennium BC.  However,
>the
>continued survival of the related Cyrpriote syllabary well into the
>Classical period, means we cannot rule out the local survival of a
>related
>syllabary in Crete.   But it seems to me unlikely that they'd simply
>be
>used to repeat the first word!
So it's not known what sounds the symbols stood for?  Where did the
previous conlang 'translations' get the sounds for the symbols from?

>[Rokbeigalmki translation snipped - but carefully noted :) ]
>>
>>The THREE SYMBOLS however, *aren't* Linear!
>>They're actually Rokbeigalmki letters, probably the signature
>>initials of
>>the three people involved, "Mouth", the Artist, and the Child:
>Ah - so their resemblance to the Linear A & Linear B scripts is purely
>co-incidental.  Or maybe the Rokbeigalmki script is ultimately related
>to
>the early Aegean scripts?
Well, it isn't exact :) -  The actual Rokbeigalmki character for [O] is a
circle bisected by a vertical line, so it's not exactly the same as the
second inscription symbol.  Although the first one is exactly the same as
the [&w].  The last one was a bit of a stretch, though :)

>[....]
>>
>>Therefore, it has been proven that the inscription is actually a
>public
>>record of the child "/&j/"'s divorce from his/her parents, "Ou" Mouth
>and
>>"Au" the Artist, signed with their initials, reading:
>>
>>_e! (ei!) fyao i zhesh-a - nyih tze bar sidfarit.  ou. au. /&j/._
>>
>>"(hark)! 'Mouth' and the Artist - not your jumpiest child.  Ou. Au.
>>/&j/."
>Just as I was getting used to the idea that it was proto-Elet-Anta -
>darn
>it! I'll have to revise things again - and look into the possibility
>of a
>connexion between the Aegean scripts of the 2nd millennium BC and the
>Rokbeigalmki script.  No rest for us researchers  :)
The Aegean scripts would have to be descendents of the Rokbeigalmki
alphabet, since it can be traced all the way back into pre-pre-history :)
(hmm..."traced back into pre-history"....is that an oxymoron?)


-Stephen (Steg)
 "hhalomot zeh b'emet"

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