Conlangery 132 Coptic (natlang)

Conlangery 132 Coptic (natlang)

Published: 2017-9-4

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Transcript

Speaker 1
Holiday go can Larry put Cassaday real life this out and they will do.
Speaker 2
Welcome to conlang I guess but constructed languages are the people who create them. I'm George Carlin. With me down the road A is William a.. Hello. And also down the road always is that we're quite happy to be here. Yeah. So we've got the ancient language nerds on me talking about Coptic.
Speaker 3
But before we get into that I want to remind people that the one laying the art of crafting tongues I believe is the correct title that is out now and we will link to that.
Speaker 4
You just go to conlang filmdom dot com and you should be able to find it. But we will link to that. William is in it. You see my face in it. We won't get to hear me unless you listen unless you watch the bonus feature. But it's very good and definitely the main feature you should show that to friends and family if you want to know what conlang is. And you'll learn some things yourself too.
Speaker 5
Yeah. And my cat is in it. Yeah actually. Really. Badger is badger you see bad you're bad you're sure that more in the Kung Lang year extra features that had to be cut to make a film of a reasonable time. Yeah.
Speaker 6
And and I think that that also the we have mentioned that they are doing in ergative.
Speaker 4
That's more. It's going to be sort of crowdsourced and be a little bit more technical if you want to get involved in that. You can contact Britain.
Speaker 5
Yeah I said it should be clear they're not doing that. They're waiting for other people who can do things with the footage because they're they've been doing this for two years and are exhausted now.
Speaker 4
Yeah yeah. They don't they don't want to do that but other people who can do that stuff makes sense. All right. So go to conlang from that come and get the get the movie. Yes. And so with that as a way we are going to talk today about Coptic Coptic is the I guess the most recent descendent of the ancient Egyptian language. It is I suppose it's what we might call it zombie language right. It's it's has no native speakers but it's still used as a liturgical liturgical language by Coptic Christians. Yes but it is sort of the latest development of ancient Egyptian.
Speaker 7
Unlike the previous thousands of years of ancient Egyptian It was not written in hieroglyphics or in demotic or any higher Delphic derived script it was actually written in a derivative of the Greek alphabet with a few extra letters I think.
Speaker 5
Yes yes. Greek with a few extra letters they say those extra letters came from demotic but I don't believe that because every character in demotic looks like different variations of three vertical stripes. OK. I'm exaggerating a little bit. Yeah. So they grabbed a few characters presumably from demotic and from. Yeah depending on the dialect. And then the script also went south and was used for old Nubian with yet two additional letters.
Speaker 4
All right. I'll let you guys continue. William or whoever else wants who wants to sort of introduce the language a bit more.
Speaker 5
Sure. So a quick reminder because this always confuses people but Upper Egypt is in the south lower Egypt is in the north. Right. And think think about how the River Nile flows and then you will start to make more sense. There are several modestly divergent dialects of Coptic. Sahid it is the earliest literary dialect. That's from Upper Egypt. And that's the one you're going to find as the standard in most textbooks and it is the best I like for a lot of older literature. Herrick became the standard around the eleventh century and that's from Lower Egypt and is in fact the current language of the church. It's a little bit in fact more conservative in some ways even though it concern the glottal stop and then one of the references we have for you is an old book that refers to a direct quote dialect excuse me Kilcash work. But these days we just call that fame.
Speaker 8
Why. Why are the two different names.
Speaker 5
I have no clue if I am it should have been the name from the get go because it's from the Oasis you talk I you. Thought that where the name besmirched came from. And then there are other dialects that things like I mean and some alchemy make and stuff which are represented in various kinds of literature. Most of the material we have in Coptic is related somehow to Christianity with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts that includes a lot of Gnostic Christianity both the Valentinian and Sathya and varieties and then some even Medicaid's them but that's impossible at present it in fact probably our biggest source of reliable knowledge from actual Gnostics about Gnosticism comes from the Nakumatt text. Let's see here. So some question that comes up from time to time are why do languages get simpler all the time. So that's not a good well conceived question because what they really mean is why do languages become simpler morphologically over time.
Speaker 5
And Coptic is my favorite counterexample. Rachael Gyptian middle Egyptian and old Egyptian were modestly synthetic languages while Coptic is effectively Poly's synthetic. All sorts of crazy stuff going on and you can trace the history through thousands of years of how auxiliary verb constructions turned into big scary or complex as over time a demonstrative adjective turned into separate articles turning says the Coppula. All sorts of stuff it's pretty well documented. We're going to talk a whole lot about the phonology of the language. You do need to learn the Greek alphabet and a few bits a few Astor's on but that's not too hard.
Speaker 9
I guess there may be something about the age of the sources.
Speaker 10
There are one of the documents I have is claiming that like every single consonant can be syllabic but I think that no part of the claim about the script.
Speaker 5
No there are the B L and R so there are five consonants that can be syllabic we call them we call them that Blenner consonants. And that is often but not always indicated by a superman or stroke. So there's a mark about the letter when it's acting so radically. Right. Because the Greek letter beta is one of those. I'm inclined to suspect that it was really pronounced like maybe I'll forget it for some time now. Yeah. Rather than stop by different sources give different examples for that. Yeah you know it's a lot of Ixtoc would be pretty surprising. Yeah think that be quite a trick. And most people just pronounce a short Schwamm when they encounter those when they're reading out loud as a Afroz Afro-Asiatic language Coptic ancestors had lots of regional and other sort of complicated Coogler sounds which have all gone away in the writing system we think there are traces of a glottal stop at the ends of syllables which is written in sahitya with double wobbles.
Speaker 5
Oh OK. Which is quite a trick and leads to complexity because they're good Lucy goosey with her about sounds are written. And that's the I think the only dialogue preserves that so a lot of those sounds have gone away.
Speaker 10
And then we have the additional letters which basically brings in like the rest of the sentence or are not not these sorts of sounds we expect there are a couple of things in the ring system and we do have to have an awareness of the writing system because a lot of the sources that we found give the Coptic example examples just in the Coptic alphabet. So you do have to learn it and there's a couple of things. There's like TS sound. There is one the lay you can put like a stroke across the towel and make it that right.
Speaker 11
That's a I guess sort of a diagram but actually is the syllable.
Speaker 12
Yeah yeah yeah it's. And the if you put of the.
Speaker 10
There's an old vowel and you put the letter that means like either work or you put those together. I think some some people are saying that's like an oo sound right.
Speaker 13
So.
Speaker 14

Oh but McCrann the wrong combination works the same way that it did in and I guess a Grieger and about's so it makes that sound.

Speaker 5
And we all read that etiquette stuff a lot of the conventions of Coptic spelling are read from ancient Greek and we should say that an enormous amount of vocabulary in Coptic is in fact just Greek.
Speaker 15
Funny spell funny especially the technical stuff you know theological stuff that you would expect with like these kinds of early religious texts. So a lot of it is just so technical you know a lot of the words straight from greek don't sort of merit the role of neologisms in conflict I guess.
Speaker 5
But they also borrowed things like conjunctions right and not just conjunctions but funky fun funky conjunctions that can really work in weird ways like post positives. So depending on the register and the audience for the copeck it can be very very influenced by Greek.
Speaker 16
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 14
And I would I wouldn't assume that you know that was true in how everyday people were speaking that they were throwing around you know men and day well I'm from Greek necessarily maybe maybe some of them but you know you certainly see that in the text but it's kind of crazy.
Speaker 5
And a lot of the text we're dealing with were probably translated from Greek anyway. So yes although we do we do have a native literature. I get theological in nature but is is you know we believe was written originally in Coptic. All right. So. Onto the grammar of water. So the pretty straightforward there are two genders in the expected Afro-Asiatic pattern masculine and feminine. It's not usually obvious what's what. You just have to memorize.
Speaker 17
And so the Afro-Asiatic so at least in them in semitic the usual way of marking feminine with some exceptions is like a T or an out.
Speaker 18
So black in the book after a root right and I believe it goes all the way back to Afro-Asiatic because in you know old and middle or Egyptian hieroglyphics scripts they certainly have that T in the most feminine words.
Speaker 19
And I think by the time Coptic comes wrote it has dropped out. Right.
Speaker 5
So it might well have. It might well have dropped out in middle Egyptian and it might have been learned writing but it certainly existed at some point you're writing.
Speaker 10
You can sort of predict which gender it is going to be in Coptic. By the final vowel. But it's not totally consistent is it.
Speaker 5
No and most nouns do not have a separate plural but there are a few dozens that have separate forms. And that does all of the internal vowel trickery that you expect of a member of this language family. Right. By the time you just rely on the articles and demonstratives of which the language is incredibly fond. So you always got clues really after gendered stuff. Adjectives are basically nouns. There are several attributive constructions you going to talk about you know the little girl. Yeah. The big dog. The majority use some sort of linking morphology that looks an awful lot like the article. And then there are a small number of exceptions for what I call the Dickson's specials. So big and small adjectives that mean a few adjectives be big and small have their own special behavior as always.
Speaker 17
OK. That I think of it linking particle you're talking about unless I'm mistaken you couldn't. We're not talking about syntax right now but I think you can have nouns linking paraglider two or additive linking particle noun some sort of almost tangible.
Speaker 5
Well they're not interchangeable because the one with the attribute first is focusing on one attribute but either order is possible without a difference in nuance.
Speaker 7
We should say we've since we mentioned gender already it looks like the main place where that group the gender agrees is on the definite article indefinite don't mark gender right.
Speaker 4
Mark number but the definite article in the singular marks the gender right. It's either take or pay.
Speaker 17
Right. And they're both. Nay the plural article.
Speaker 4
And Matt you had a nice note here that the word for King is Arrow. And where does that come from. So
Speaker 17
it comes from Petrow where the P was later misinterpreted as being the definite article. So people were saying Pat Pedro Petrow. And then one generation misunderstood that as hey arrow for the arrow.
Speaker 19
And Petrow you know original Petrow is is the word Pharaoh which goes back to this compound in an earlier Egyptian That means like great house. That's that's the whole story which comes from.
Speaker 4
Yeah. It comes to us through Greek which I presume is where it gets the sound right.
Speaker 17
Yes VI. Well the Hebrew. Probably. Probably I'm just thinking of the Septuagint but I don't actually I don't know the history of that word coming into English but it's something like the great wall somewhere.
Speaker 5
Yeah. So that's something I'd say about adjectives there are a few stative verbs and I'm just not going to bother with those. Propositions are fun. They are they are conjugated right when they go with personal pronouns. So we've seen this before.
Speaker 9
And he said the suffixes on the prepositions are the same as a few other person substanceless suffixes right. Yes yes yes. Those go on verbs. And also as you sit in the alienable possession to know.
Speaker 5
So the position is marked with a combination of the article plus the possessive marketplace the noun. OK. The but there are a few weird circumstances Riegert suffix is the most likely place for you to find the suffix pronouns is as the direct object of a transitive verb. OK. Or things that they call verbal AIDS and some of the grammars which are these state of verbs that are adjective like know like to be beautiful. You know he is beautiful. We'll use one of the suffixed pronouns. OK. All right. And then another thing about these propositions is they have one form for when they go with a noun and a different form when they have a pronoun suffix. And this business happens all over the language where what follows the word and how it would be linked in in in a two nation unit changes the shape of the word.
Speaker 5
So this happens to verbs this happens to certain sets of special adverbs like. Also it happens to the proposition like things that mean and it happens to propositions as I'm saying here and it happens catastrophic lead to verbs stems. Oh OK. So. So all sorts of things are going on as a result of causality. You know things that are squished into a single intonation unit will all be changed to fit. Yeah.
Speaker 11
Really fascinating but you know but it had all this variation. But you know native speakers the this unproductive way. I mean it's a little reminiscent of the last time I was on the show we talked about the old Irish verbs and how they are sort of all these like synchronic processes going on at once. And the speaker does no know how to do it know what operations to make.
Speaker 5
And then just on propositions there are a zillion proper propositions where you have the proposition and then an hour and then another noun you know like on the head of four on top of and things like that and there are many many many of those. All right. Matt you want to say anything else about other things before we leap into the terrifying edifice of the Coptic for oh I don't know I'm just looking over the notes that I have and I think maybe I can sort of introduce them as we go. OK. All right. So the Coptic verb is a whole lot happens on the Coptic Church. And what's marvelous about the Coptic verb is we have a really great history of how all of this started and happened. So if you want the best documentation ever on how you can take a slightly synthetic language and turn it into poly synthetic language read renos ancient Egyptian linguistic introduction.
Speaker 5
It starts at the early stage of the language and goes in the end and traces how this insanity we're about to discuss develops the incredible book. It is an incredible and just a great education in historical linguistics I think. Yeah. So you know if you're not interested necessarily in Coptic. He in a friendly way gives transliterations her everything. So you're not stuck having to learn a dozen writing systems to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 16
OK. So I've got to grab a few fundamental principles.
Speaker 5
One there are a zillion conjugations many of them represent dependent clauses in some way. Second they all have separate negative forms which are very predictable from the positive form.
Speaker 20
So you have I forget which form that starts with it in the positive and negative in the negative starts in shot in the positive and the med in the negative are in the positive in the negative. So you have to memorize all of this second or third rather. There are several Segal's stems associated with the root in simple intransitive verbs you have infinitives and things that are called state Ibbs. Some books call them qualitative. And then you have transitive verbs which have three stems depending on what follows then if there's nothing attached to them then you have the simple form you have something called the pronominal which means that a noun that is presumptively attached will follow and pretty personal which means that there will be one of these objects suffixes we were talking about before. And there's all kinds of vowel hanky panky that goes on in the ears and you have a few irregulars where you know there's just this little whisper the is all that's left of the verb stand.
Speaker 20
Right. In some forms and I'm not even going to talk about the insanity that happens once causative constructions are involved.
Speaker 21
OK. Right. Is it kind of complicated.
Speaker 20
Yes. So this pronominal form right when the verbs stem takes a different form. If an object noun is following that's only used sometimes you're just as likely to introduce the direct object noun with a special prop.. And I've never seen a grammar that does a good job of explaining the nuance that might come with choice. You know I still have at this point for English speakers the best grammar is probably Leighton's Coptic grammar. It's reasonably current but an awful lot of these old grammars are long lists of conjugation tables and a little bit about usage. Leighton's are a bit better about that fortunately but it can still be hard sometimes to find a really brilliant documentation on this language read we will link to a few older sources.
Speaker 10
You know there are kind of old the terminology is a bit weird because they're old and you know sometimes they're kind of lacking in examples but they'll get you some information right.
Speaker 5
Yeah but no means useless. The older stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 22
But yeah if you want really nuanced descriptions of what's going on and tactically pragmatically then get it right.
Speaker 5
And I think I'm Leighton's analysis of the verb. It clarifies things a bit in the old material you'll see lots of talk like the first to perfect the second or the first. I read the second part of it.
Speaker 20
And all you have to do with things that act like cobwebs which we'll be discussing. All right. So in addition to all of the stuff we've been talking about subject object marking is it coming before a noun. Different kinds of prefixes indicating tense and dependency things. There's a small number of adverbs senses that are also prefixes on the verb. And there are eight auxiliaries that are suddenly become part of the word complex as well. Things like be able to just will but also senses like succeed in or do something frequently.
Speaker 23
All right. OK. Sounds like a lot of typical sort of modal meanings and such.
Speaker 24
Right. Right. With a little a little aspect thrown in for fun. So with all this you can get quite a complicated or some of these different verb forms do things like sequencing and aspect. You know they do no more effectively than mean and and they're used in that sort of thing. We talked about how said what will typically happen is in the word complex you will have some tense aspect verb for marker like a simple pass is just are. And then you will either have the subject noun which is usually optically separate and then the verb or you will have a subject pronoun which then causes the prefix the subject pronoun and the verb to all clump together in one form. But all of this looks on paper like this is just a simple conjugation but many of these constructions are still what I call open where a combination of an actual relie conjunction and other intervening material then that tends to make art.
Speaker 24
And then all of the rest can have their own particular force. So it's not just that you have to memorize Oh this is you know perfect number two it might mean something else with different conjugation or conjunctions.
Speaker 25
OK.
Speaker 5
Tremendous complexity and subtlety is possible in this system. There are pages and pages in Leighton's grammar. What different conjunctions plus different forms me. All right. So we got this and then we have. To add to this we have things that laten calls conversions. They take your your normal conjugated verb which is already quite the thing and change their function a bit to them that are or three of them. One of them does relative position one of them is focus and one gets called the circumstantial which is just a whole lot like a conver and frequently follows conjunctions. OK so that's the fun part. So the relative ones are used where you expect you know the man who is talking is standing over there you know that sort of stuff. The focus one is what most of those second tenses are called in many descriptions.
Speaker 5
The focus forms do not identify the morphology which part of the sentence speak focused. It merely announces that there is some element of the sentence that's being focused. Now all of these conversions are marked by additional prefixes many of which interact in unpredictable ways with the other prefixes. I was talking about before. Needless to say your copy of 500 Coptic verbs is going to be very very large. Just because you get all this multiple pileups at the front end of the word complex. OK. And again I just can't sit here and start reading all of the different things these can do. We have some resources for you. I recommend you go look at those just to get a feel for all of the different things going on. If you get really deep into then you can go get latents grammar.
Speaker 5
All of Leighton's Coptic words that have come out of the last I don't know 20 years or so are usually pretty reasonably priced for materials of this sort so if you want to get them I recommend it. And then I've already talked about the Boids which are kind of like yours aren't. And that's all I have to say about the craziness of the verb.
Speaker 22
And that's not with like I mean that you actually took classes where you had to encounter these things so I took I took one class for one semester where I had encountered these things and we never got to really what I thought would be a satisfactory point in untangling all that stuff. So I appreciate your explanations to that.
Speaker 8
OK.
Speaker 21
So we got really super complicated verbs on top of some inflection on prepositions and such.
Speaker 8
So it seems like this language is you know definitely very synthetic and I like that you are sort of explain to me that sort of these auxilary got stuck onto the verbs and that's part of the the grammatical ization process.
Speaker 4
Yes some of the stuff that we have is not really clear that the auxiliaries are have become like part of the verb. At least when I was skimming it. So that's an interesting thing. And that's that's an interesting pathway to think about for grammatical ization is that we know that from previous you know episodes here I think we've talked about auxiliary verbs and sometimes you can have a small number of auxiliary verbs that inflect a lot more than your regular verbs do and they become the of inflection writing them. If those get stuck on to the regular verbs then you've suddenly got a lot more complexity morphological complexity. Yeah.
Speaker 26
Yeah yeah I think with conjugating internally so to speak if you're auxilary you know thing is gone onto to the front of over or right and that's a good point is because.
Speaker 5
Because a subject noun behaves differently than a subject pronoun we still have that process exposed a little bit more round because we still have some kind of proof some thing that was once a verb that is not being pressed by time. And then the subject and then the the the the lexical part of the verb and then everything else. George I'm surprised you didn't go looking at the numbers because I know you're interested in numbers. I
Speaker 27
managed to find it. Take a quick look. I noticed that.
Speaker 28
The numbers some of them have separate forms let me see if I can find it's on it's on page 17 of Plumley me.
Speaker 29
I know I passed it on one of my things.
Speaker 22
I don't remember much about the numbers. Do they do the Semitic thing. But he the Concord and masc. goes with some unknown person goes a minuscule amount or no.
Speaker 30
Do they not have gender for numbers.
Speaker 23
They do have gender for gender for lower numbers. They have gender for some numbers not all of them. OK.
Speaker 24
Let me see. They do. They do not seem to have that kind stick agreement. Yeah. OK.
Speaker 29
Where did I actually see the numbers. Yes. So Plumley page 17. Let me let me look at it and remind myself what I saw.
Speaker 5
Right so we got what we got simple numbers by themselves which to distinguish them and we have construct forms which again this is part of that Prosonic collapse.
Speaker 22
But we have to be pretty flexible with a different model. I know that's right. Everything
Speaker 10
is actually. Number four actually has masculine feminine in the construct. A lot of the numbers don't have construct forms.
Speaker 20
A lot of them don't. And then most of them have separate forms when they're combined with tens units.
Speaker 10
Yeah. And a lot of those when you when you get up like beyond 40 you don't have any gender differences young until you get up to 300 which has and.
Speaker 4
That's some interesting historical business going on.
Speaker 5
Oh yeah the numbers are a bit hard to see what's going on.
Speaker 4
And but a lot of it is expected is that you will you will expect if there's some sort of a distinction marked on the numbers the lower numbers are going to keep it longer than higher numbers at least they're great because they're more likely to show that so it makes sense that you know up to about 30 you've got masculine and feminine. And then after that it's Spidey and then then after 400 You never have masculine feminine looks like it has myriad system. Is that right. I see a simple route for 10000. So yeah. Yeah. And there is yeah there's special forms with with 10s.
Speaker 5
Since I'm looking at Plumley right now I was looking at the things he lays out the sort of craziness that happens to verb's. So let's look at I don't know why this is such a favorite. Lose the meaning lose the simple absolute form of that verb is ball. And then the form that is called the constructs here but means that it goes for now. Now is its bell. And in fact the epsilon is in parentheses so much that you can blow up. But for a pronoun it's ball so a short oh and then the qualitative or the state of form is they do.
Speaker 11
Yeah. Those all those like outloud rows so to speak. That's pretty consistent I think. I
Speaker 18
mean if you have an Omega a long Inver what do you call it.
Speaker 15
You know the ending was form that you're going to expect like a Shortly before it was published before now and sort of the more a pronoun. So it's pretty productive.
Speaker 27
So I'm I'm guessing that that Coptic doesn't have anything like the triliteral roots that you find in Semitic languages.
Speaker 9
Right. Did earlier Egyptian know that.
Speaker 5
I mean you have things that look like they're made of three consonants but you don't have this productive. You don't seem to have this highly productive tweaking in the very earliest stages of the language you get hints in something. It's called the state of I think it's not glamorous it's a sort of a remnant of the old system. But that falls away very quickly. And so you do get these changes but they look a lot more like a block than the full bore.
Speaker 15
Try that or root system and then it's just a single vowel that is being changed qualitatively or quantitatively or taken out altogether in some idle everything being jumbled around. Yeah right. Right.
Speaker 14
Yeah I noticed that if you look and look. And like when he's reconstructing the really early Egyptian stuff like the old Egyptian It does look it has a very like Semitic sense too.
Speaker 19
And you know that's the Aparajita link but it does look like like a lot more Semitic at that point as you would expect.
Speaker 8
OK. I was just curious because I know that you know ancient Egyptian phonetic component of the script did not really encode vowels right. Correct
Speaker 12
correct.
Speaker 8
And I think that you made a note that actually having Coptic written in the Greek alphabet gives us more information about Egyptian vowels than we would have otherwise right.
Speaker 13
Yeah. It has helped so much in recreating the phonological and morphological system of you know how the vowels would have worked in like the hieroglyphic stages of the language that we otherwise understand pretty well.
Speaker 31
We don't know what the actual words sounded like or whether that was whether or what what vowels they were and Coptic just shut so much light on them because the Greek alphabet does write vowels although the vowels were tortured horribly.
Speaker 5
I mean there's a lot of books. There's a lot of work still to get from what Coptic preserves rose to what institution probably was based on hints from things like names as preserved by Greek or better yet you know Akkadian material.
Speaker 32
Right. And we're not at a point I think where Egyptologists have abandoned that sort of traditional method of reading hieroglyphic transliterations where they just throw in like a short E everywhere. I mean I think they still do that it's not like we it's not like anybody is reading hieroglyphic Egyptian outloud. Based on what we based on topic knowledge you know I mean we've got a long way to go.
Speaker 5
Yeah. Matt you want to talk about some of the less sort of substrate Optik.
Speaker 19
I would love to. So Coptic was you know the Egyptian language but in the I guess what the seventh or eighth eighth century probably started being drastically replaced by by Arabic speakers borrowed a lot of their aspects of their Coptic language into the Arabic that they spoke and you can still see that in a lot of features of modern Egyptian Arabic. So
Speaker 32
for example a syntactic example would be so classical Arabic modern standard Arabic tends to front w h words like English. So if you're asking a question that involves who or what or where the who or what or where word is the first word in the sentence. Not so in Egyptian Arabic where they in Coptic they did not French the that H-word and so Egyptian Arabic doesn't do it now either. So like if you're going to ask in Classical Arabic where do you live to a single male person. I in Tuscany so I know where where do you live. But in Egyptian Arabic I'd be into second fayn. So you live where. So the where word fain go which comes from classical FIH I not in like where that word takes the spot that any like locational adverb were not and not just any W.H. work. So you live where you live in Cairo you live down the block. And
Speaker 31
so it takes it it goes like where any any location goes doesn't get fronted because that's not a thing that they do.
Speaker 19
Also the demonstrative adjective and Egyptian Arabic followed and now instead of instead of precede it. So in classical Arabic. So this book would be heads Al-Khattab. Literally this book had this I'll keep her but in Egyptian Arabic you say archetype. So the book this and evidently that comes from the Coptic aspect. And of course as happens with any substrate situation you get tons of Egyptian vocabulary into Egyptian Arabic which has been circulated into like Arabic everywhere and many other languages.
Speaker 32
So so the Arabic word for crocodile tins comes from Coptic N-SA which comes from which was like a well-attested you know Egyptian word for crocodile. I'm not sure why it picked up the T. That might be a definite article thing like the Pereiro Antro. You can go crocodile masculin but I'm not sure. But anyway so there are a bunch of those giving Egyptian Arabic in some kind of Coptic flavor. So that's interesting.
Speaker 21
And that sounds a lot like you know common substrate effects. This is the kind of thing when you think about substrate affects. I think the thing to always be aware of is substrate affects on a language come from people who didn't speak that language learning to speak it. Right
Speaker 4
. It's sort of. Right. It's sort of in Italy. It may track with second language errors and you know that if someone who speaks to in situ language learns W.H. movement language they often leave the W word in situ right. So that's that's going to be a common thing to transfer OK w h word insitu.
Speaker 31
That's the technical term. OK good. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean you can imagine a generation where you know like the newly born generation is like their native speakers of Arabic but their parents speak Coptic and they speak some Arabic as like their second language.
Speaker 32
And so the kids you know even other native speakers of Arabic they're picking up all of this like Coptic colored Arabic from their parents and from older generations and they're speaking this way with their peers.
Speaker 31
And so even though they're native Arabic speakers they've got tons of you know Gothic features in their speech and that's how substrate language has passed things onto super straight languages.
Speaker 5
Superzoom can't say a word. I figured it didn't work. OK. You know what I mean.
Speaker 32
What else. Yes so I guess while we're on the topic I'd like to mention this book that I picked up when I was in Egypt it's by Ahmad Abdelhamid Uther. It's called from Pharaoh's lips ancient Egyptian language in the Arabic of today. It's this cool little book of like the isms I guess it is mostly vocabulary and sort of like archaic phrases that survived into modern Egyptian Arabic. That said I would give it the caveat that I would try and it's not really like academically rigorous even though I believe it's published by the American University in Cairo press and some of the connections that they make are probably little more than wishful thinking but a lot of them are like obviously sound. So it's just it's just really interesting. But take it with a grain of salt. But I would recommend that book if you're interested.
Speaker 24
So let's just Sturge have anything else to say with language we can transition to have a quick discussion of some references.
Speaker 28
Yeah. Did you wait. Did you go over converts here.
Speaker 5
Well I mean I talked about them in general so kind verb's kind of hard. We've got have we done an episode and got rips out of think so I think we've been you've been we. Yet we talk about well we've talked about them before because they come up and I other like which condoms are these. So.
Speaker 33
Anytime I talk about finiteness and verbs I always make some listener angry.
Speaker 5
So let's just think of finiteness a finite verb versus a non-finite verb as a finite verb is one that can indisputably at all times stand on its own.
Speaker 33
Right.
Speaker 5
I see cloggers are verb forms that are less finite and typically do things that we associate with dependent clauses in English or other European languages. So you might have. And in this sense they're kind of similar structurally to the way the Greek and Latin used participles like have having gone to the store I went home soon.
Speaker 22
What's what's the I mean what's the difference between like a conver and a participle.
Speaker 30
I mean because a participle like especially in Greek can convey so much information now not a person obviously but number and aspect. And so what sort of entry in that and or conver.
Speaker 20
It's purely instructional I think there are things that the main difference is that a principal can be attributive or predicative up hundreds or not are not used as attributive is OK. There are and with an.
Speaker 24
A participle. It agrees with the noun somewhere typically where as Conder herbs are almost always the same subject. Interpretation
Speaker 5
from from the Matrix clause the main clause. To search is there is usually in Africa you get complicated situations we encounter that in fact do mark a person because it's the truth. But they still can't be used alone. That's the big thing is that they cannot be used and that they have to be attached somehow to a matrix clause and relate to that matrix clause in some way either temporally like you know while talking to you. I was trying to read the book or the other example I get you know having gone to the store I then went home. And then you get marvelous languages at the caucuses which have dozens of them that mean things like Because in and before and after and you know the more the more and all of that all of those possibilities will have to do a whole episode on conver.
Speaker 4
So I just want it back. So sounds like could be worth it.
Speaker 24
Yeah we definitely will. We definitely will do. But my point is in you have all of these forms of the verb that can be used alone but then you have this conversion as unladen calls them that turns them into something called circumstantial which to me looks and smells like a kind of conver of a sort that is quite common in other African languages spoken not that far south. So which is why I might be which is why I'm inclined to say if we're going to say all the marvelous things that go on and on Marduk are Congreve's then that maybe that's what's going on here as well.
Speaker 5
So finally inflected fully inflected but still dependent.
Speaker 22
Now that would maybe if those two affected each other that maybe would be like an aerial feature because because Coptic did not get because from Afro-Asiatic presumable right. So
Speaker 5
yes it's definitely an area of future where we have some crucial languages and something Afro-Asiatic and sound wherever it is we're putting to the end these days. It's about two different language families quite unrelated to each other you know due to aerial effects all have things that look like Congreve's.
Speaker 27
Well yeah that's definitely interesting. We'll
Speaker 4
have to we'll have to when we do the the conver episode. You'll have to talk about those other languages too.
Speaker 5
Oh yeah. I mean yes. They're very good especially in Africa. They're pretty fascinating.
Speaker 28
Yeah. Congrats. Well I guess we can move on to sources first. We've talked about Coptic a little bit. We have a note here but I don't think we mentioned why it's called Coptic yet. Oh Matt.
Speaker 22
Yes so Coptic. I don't know how that word came into English. Probably through French or something. I have no idea. But
Speaker 26
anyway it comes ultimately from Arabic the which itself comes from just the word Egypt. I agree with those. So it's just the Arabic word for Egyptian. Basically that was borrowed from the Greeks from the Greek word for Egypt which comes from this like whole thing.
Speaker 30
But that is not the Coptic name for itself. So the Coptic word for Coptic is well it's this to mention them to mentor them in Camy which is the best scientific version of it I believe. And it basically means the like abstract noun thing of the people of Egypt Camy is Egypt right.
Speaker 21
There is this abstract noun prefix which I guess it's sort of can derive a whole lot of things.
Speaker 30
Oh yeah yeah. It's super productive.
Speaker 21
I mean but you know in this case it is it is making it sort of the language. That's right. It's interesting because we all sort of when we're doing our conlang it's like it's not like the biggest thing you do but one thing that you do is you have to figure out what's the name of your language and this is another thing is just like this with something related to the people of this place right. Right. I mean it's sort of like one of the standard ways of deriving it. But but then Coptic itself is an exit name just from ultimately from Greek.
Speaker 5
Yes right. Right. One thing. So this is word for any change in language in kata or for the Coptic language in Coptic is another example of an interesting historical process. Asian and Middle Egyptian are dominantly suffix saying all sorts of hanky panky. Coptic is prefix and including including including not just the subject conjugation and other wackiness that happens at the front of the fire but a bunch of nominalism and durational processes happen through prefixes rather than suffix.
Speaker 26
So Camy is Egypt's rather man.
Speaker 22
So RAM is the one of the construct forms of Rome a man's soul. And then came the people of Egypt. And is that the linking particle people of Egypt meant when men came in like the abstract thing of people of Egypt and then to the duck article on the front. Too many of them in the abstract thing of people of Egypt. And it's this whole thing demeans Egyptian language basically.
Speaker 4
You know there's a whole lot of the Slavic markers so it might be more like to mount room.
Speaker 24
Maybe they are right. It can be very.
Speaker 5
Especially with Sahid because the only hint of the glottal stop is written with double vowels but sometimes it's hard to interpret because a bunch of core vowel sounds are written with two vowel characters anyway. Right. So it takes two borrowing the Greek alphabet at a stage when everything was turning into the same sound. So. So it had some complexities. Knowing where things are or you could just learn a dialect that doesn't write at all. OK so if for some reason you wanted to learn Coptic we have some free references we have Plumley who someone just took this old book and turn it to John PTF which is searchable which is not the kind of basic but still pretty good. Where is the other book that I linked to Rife's compendious grammar of the Egyptian language as contained in the Coptic Sahid and benchmarked dialects.
Speaker 5
That's from the middle 18:00. It's still OK. And it gives it look. I mean writes things out a bit more and more conveniently then probably does. Right. But it is. It is old and Costic is way of things but it also gives more of the dialect information whereas Plumley is mostly focused on Sahi. If you actually want to learn to read Coptic mandarin's introduction to Suhayda Coptic is the best text book available. It has lots of exercises. It has reasonable vocabulary list at the end of each chapter. It's really good to work with on your own and it has a nice reader with notes at the end.
Speaker 22
Pretty good. I think you still want to supplement your study with what was going to say maybe explanations from laten. I haven't looked too closely but I think it be using lammed and you might be wanting a little bit in that department of like explanations of the more subtle grammatical stuff that we talked about. But but yeah it's great for first art.
Speaker 5
So they were laten in addition to this grammar he's written which is marvelous wrote 20 lessons. And one is an introduction to God to get 20 lessons or something like that. Yeah. Some of them like the Coptic in 20 Westerns or something. That's that's hard going. It moves pretty fast. It's pretty dense. It's small and does not include the reader. However he does have an entirely separate book that is just a reader of Coptic which is pretty good and has a nice vocabulary in it so you could use that. And then the crown is still the standard dictionary if you only speak English and that's available online for free because it is out of copyright.
Speaker 27
Oh OK. So that's all great stuff. And
Speaker 10
we will link what we can and just give you your titles.
Speaker 25
Yeah right. And for you know some things you might have to buy. But but I think that.
Speaker 28
Can sort of wrap up our show for today.
Speaker 4
It's very interesting and I learn some new things I hope that our listeners have learned new things about Coptic.
Speaker 28
Any final words before you go.
Speaker 26
Matt I don't know I would I would really recommend the look in our book just if you're like vaguely interested in Egyptian linguistics. It's just ancient Egyptian a linguistic introduction.
Speaker 24
It's like indispensable for us aka I mean it's a great education all by itself just in historical linguistics if you're not interested in that I might suggest that they don't seem to have it but I might suggest to the LCAC or the s.c.s lending library that they get a copy of the book it's not very expensive as these things go but it seems like useful looked at around and like you said like Egyption.
Speaker 30
I mean so Coptic went extinct like totally like when only a couple centuries ago. 17:00 Yeah. And so before that I mean it's just spend like four to five thousand years of history that we've got linguistic history. And so you know obviously there's tons of interesting stuff that can happen over 4000 years. So. Wow. Yeah yeah. So it's it's unique. OK. All right. Well that's it for me. Any
Speaker 28
final thoughts William.
Speaker 24
No nothing that hasn't already been said.
Speaker 10
All right.
Speaker 3
I am going to say finally check out all the resources we're going to link to you and we will also link to the conlang documentary called Watch that.
Speaker 34
Watch this special feature you'll share the main feature with your family and that's a great thing to have around now. And with that I'm just going to say happy life.
Speaker 35
Thank you for listening to con Langer. You can find our archives and show notes at conlang dot com can also follow us on Facebook Twitter and Tumblr. Our web space is provided by the language creation society. Our site was designed by Bianka richer and our theme music is Bydel device library is under a Creative Commons Attribution noncommercial share alike license. You are free to use our show for any noncommercial work as long as credit is provided to the podcast and use similar creative commons like. Conlang areas supported by our listeners. Please visit K3 on dotcom slot on Langar. You give your support. Thank you.

Conlangery Podcast/Conlangery 132 Coptic (natlang) (last edited 2017-09-12 11:52:18 by PeteBleackley)