Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence

Transcriptions and Phonetics

TRANSCRIPTIONS AND PHONETICS RECONSTRUCTIONS T he reconstructions of Nostratic, Afroasiatic, and Indo-Hittite follow those of the scholars upon whose work the relevent chapters are largely based. These are Allan Bomhard and John C. Kerns for Nostratic; Vladimir E. Orel and Olga V. Stolbova for Afroasiatic; and Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjac*eslav V. Ivanov for Indo-Hittite. Their reconstructions are similar but not identical. All use an apostrophe after stops p’, t’, k’ to indicate emphatic, sometimes glottalic consonants. Their precise nature is unclear but they are neither voiced nor unvoiced. When quoting Bomhard and Kerns and Gamkriledze and Ivanov, I use a capital H to signal a “laryngeal” of uncertain precise quality, as they have been lost in all branches of Indo-Hittite (except Anatolian). H is not necessary for describing the super-family of ProtoAfroasiatic because distinct “laryngeals” >, œ, h, ˙ and ∆ have been preserved in several of its families. The diacritic [h] after a stop indicates a phonetic not phonemic, or meaningful alternation. EGYPTIAN The orthography used in Egyptian words is the standard one used by Anglo-American Egyptologists and in previous volumes of this series, xviii BLACK ATHENA the only exception being that the sign traditionally transcribed as k≥ is written q in this volume. Whatever the exact sound of the Å in Old and Middle Egyptian (3400– 1600 BCE), it was used where Semitic names contained r, l, or even n. This consonantal value was retained until the beginning of the New Kingdom. In Late Egyptian (spoken, 1600–700 BCE), it appears to have become an >aleph and later, like the Southern English r, it merely modified adjacent vowels. The Egyptian ˆ corresponded to the Semitic >aleph and yo\d. >Aleph is found in many languages and in nearly all Afroasiatic ones. It is a glottal stop before vowels, as in the Cockney “bo>l” and “bu>E” (bottle and butter). The Egyptian ‘ayin, which occurs in most Semitic languages, is a voiced or spoken >aleph. The Egyptian form seems to have been associated with the back vowels o and u. In early Egyptian, the sign w, written as a quail chick, may have originally had purely consonantal value. In Late Egyptian, the stage of the Egyptian spoken language that had most impact on Greek, it seems to have been frequently pronounced as a vowel, either o or u. The Egyptian sign transcribed as r was more usually rendered as l in Semitic and Greek. In later Egyptian, as with the 3, it weakened to become a mere modifier of vowels. The Egyptian and Semitic h≥ was pronounced as an emphatic h. It appears that the sign conventionally transcribed in Egyptian as h° was originally a voiced g;. In Middle and Late Egyptian, it was devoiced to become something approximating the Scottish ch in “loch.” The sign transcribed as h_ was pronounced as h°y. In Middle and Late Egyptian, it was frequently confused with s¨. s¨ used to transcribe a sign that originally sounded something like h°. It later was pronounced as sh or skh. As mentioned above, q represents an emphatic k≥. The letter t_ was probably originally pronounced as ty . Even in Middle Egyptian it was already being confused with t. Similarly, d_ was frequently alternated with d. In Late Egyptian, voiced and unvoiced stops tended to merge. Thus, there was confusion among t, t, d_, and d. Egyptian names Egyptian divine names are vocalized according to the most common Greek transcriptions, for example, Amon for >Imn and Isis for St. Royal names generally follow A. H. Gardiner’s (1961) version of the Greek names for well-known pharaohs, for instance, Ramesses. TRANSCRIPTIONS AND PHONETICS xix Coptic Most of the letters in the Coptic alphabet come from Greek and the same transcriptions are used. Six other letters derived from Demotic are transcribed as follows: v s= ] h° j j [ f ; h / c= Semitic The Semitic consonants are transcribed relatively conventionally. Several of the complications have been mentioned above in connection with Egyption. Apart from these, one encounters the following. In Canaanite, the sound h° merged with h≥. Transcriptions here sometimes reflect an etymological h° rather than the later h≥. t≥ is an emphatic t. The Arabic letter tha\’ usually transcribed as th is written here as ty . The same is true of the dha\l, which is written here as dy . The letter found in Ugaritic that corresponds to the Arabic ghain is...