Manu Wrote:
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>

Quote
I don't need to read any of the ancient
> words because Egyptologists already translated
> them and the original authors always said exactly
> what they meant. When an ancient said "osiris
> tows the earth by means of balance" this was
> exactly and literally what he meant.
>
>

>
>

Quote
But then scrambling English sentences
> doesn't necessarily affect the meaning
> dramatically.
>
>

>
>
> The verb form "tows" has four six pieces of
> information embedded in it:
>
> 1) The present Tense
> 2) Indicative Mood
> 3) Active Voice
> 4) Gnomic Action
>
> 5) Inflected for Number
> 6) Inflected for Gender
>
> e.g. as opposed to:
> Osiris towed/will tow (tense)
> Osiris would tow (subjunctive mood)
> Osiris was towed (passive voice)
> Osiris is towing (imperfect action)
> Osiris is towed/had towed/has towed
> (stative/perfect state)

> In your theory of the Egyptian language, where is
> this information contained? It cannot be parsed
> according to you. Where is it? If it is pure
> context then how does your theory predict
> different contexts to mark this information are
> coded?

Ancient Language was wholly distinct from the language we are speaking. It was like computer code and needed very few words and no parsing at all to convey meaning. They simply defined a perspective and then meaning existed in this context. All these parts of speech and are mostly just the need of the translator to put it in the form that modern language speakers can understand. Obviously they differentiated tenses because "osiris went" is completely different than "osiris goes" or "will go" but mostly they just said what they meant. 'Osiris tows the earth by means of balance" is perfectly good (ancient) grammar so far as I know, but the sentence comes from a later era and the fact that the grammar is good is pure coincidence. While sentences rarely mean the same thing in ancient and modern language they can appear identically.

I'm hardly suggesting that the Pyramid Texts translations follow proper ancient grammar. They don't. I'm saying that when each term is solved by context the literal meaning implied in the translations is very close to author intent. Just as I have greater difficulty seeing alternative meanings to the one I've found in these words I know for certain that you will have difficulty as well. You've spent years trying to zero in on what the author was talking about and have studied these words and their various appearances. It's not a question of you necessarily being wrong about any given translation or interpretation so much as it is a possibility that I am right and current understanding is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. When I say it was meant "literally" this is just the best English word to describe how to find the meaning in it. "Swnnt moves about the land nine times in the night" can only be understood by English speakers when it's realized the this is referring to a sound wave which occurs nine times in (a specific) night.

"Tefnut makes the earth high under the sky by means of her arms" is pretty literal but it should never be forgotten that Ancient Language can't be translated into English because each sentence can have only a single possible meaning. Even when you define each word in an English sentence it can still have many meanings because every word in English is "defined" rather than "named". Each word in English is symbolic rather than representative. Each sentence in AL must reflect reality to have any meaning at all. "Downward lifts the earth toward the sky by means of ropes" is the closest approximation to what the author was thinking but the approximation isn't always so close to the way we think.

I don't know if you can make anything of this or not. But keep in mind that I am not so familiar with the various glyphs and means by which these were translated. If I'm right then not only have they never been translated but they can't be "translated" and this is the reason they make no sense to us. This is the reason they don't dovetail with the book of the dead or even appear to share the same formatting and grammar. This is all further obscured by the fact that the authors of the book of the dead had access to all this writing and emulated the authors. Then to really make it hard to see, much of the Pyramid Texts has been translated in terms of the book of the dead. Linguists had no choice because there simply wasn't any concurrent writing to solve words that appeared a single or a few times in the PT. The fact that so few words existed actually complicated the problem rather than eased it. In this environment it was hard to notice that there were no words of cognition, superstition, taxonomies and that the language breaks Zipf's Law.

No doubt the grammar was pretty simple and was pretty "natural". Some of the rules can be deduced from the translations but others will require work by scholars who understand author intent.

Perhaps for this to work I'll have to show what I believe an utterance meant to the author and you'll have to show me why I'm wrong. There are a few utterances I believe I understand almost "perfectly". I should suggest a short one since they become quite complex but #690 is one of my favorites. I often suspect that the PT is a sort of poetry and is thereby far more complex than most everyday speech. It's hard to imagine the average man being able to follow all these even if they grew up speaking the language. But much of it is situational and all of it requires context and perspective. It would be far easier for a 5 year old Egyptian than anyone living today.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 17-Nov-18 20:55 by cladking.