[GlyphStudy] Allen 2009: Collation 8.10 - 8.18

-------Original Message------- From: Vyvyan Pinches Date: 20/07/2011 10:02:50 a.m. To: GlyphStudy@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [GlyphStudy] Allen 2009: Collation 8.10 - 8.18   Just a couple of notes on context to supplement Grant's extremely useful and detailed responses to the questions, and solely because I have a copy of the Sinuhe text, which is the source of two of the questions:           8.10  Xr zH n jb=k [n=k]                 This is part of a communication  from the King of Egypt to Sinuhe in which he essentially pardons him for having gone AWOL and says "Come home, all is forgiven". It says that his deserting Egypt and  traveling from country to country was OK because it was "subject to the advice of your heart to yourself". Allen omitted the final n=k, which would perhaps have made the quotation a bit clearer. So the sense is something like "According to what your heart advised you to do". or "According to the dictates of your heart" So there is a sense of actively following advice, but I don't think this is at all obvious from the bare quotation.                 8.11               Here Sinuhe is describing how a marauding tribesman had planned to make off with (the actual word is HAq - "to plunder" but sometimes with the added sense of "carrying off"- see Faulkner p.163)  his herds of cattle "under the tent of his tribe", so there seems to be a sense of motion towards. The idea of driving cattle into a tent seems a little far-fetched so it is quite likely that the tent is being used figuratively. in the sense of a corral or whatever. Another text of Sinuhe.apparently spells zH as in the previous quotation, but the idea of this barbaric chieftain following the advice of his tribe is a little too democratic to be plausible.              Hardly essential knowledge at this stage, but I thought it might help to satisfy your curiosity.     Vyv. From: "grant.hicks@comcast.net" <grant.hicks@comcast.net> To: GlyphStudy@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wed, July 20, 2011 1:02:16 AM Subject: Re: [GlyphStudy] Allen 2009: Collation 8.10 - 8.18   My comments are below in green.  I hope they're helpful.  -Grant From: "ANGELA MANN" <manna1@btopenworld.com> To: "glyph study group" <glyphstudy@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 1:16:10 AM Subject: [GlyphStudy] Allen 2009: Collation 8.10 - 8.18 [1 Attachment]   [Attachment(s) from ANGELA MANN included below] The collation for Allen 8.10 - Allen 8.18 is attached and up in the Files.   Lots of questions this week for someone to answer, please.  I have inserted Allen's answer where it differs from the homework. Angela   8.10. Xr zH n jb.k -  "taking the advice of your heart" or "taking the advice of your conscience" (Allen = with (literally, "under") the advice of your heart)  QUESTION 1: The literal translation is "under the advice for your heart", which Allen translates as "with....", but this does not seem to me to convey the sense as given in the book for the preposition Xr. The sense I get is it is more like the English use of under in the phrase "under the advice of a doctor". I originally translated this exercise as "taking the advice of your heart" as "taking" implies that the advice is currently being used. In fact, you could even say "under the advice of your heart" in English. So, why is the "activeness" of being "under the advice" softened to being just "with the advice" in the answer? I can't speak for Prof. Allen, but "under the advice of your heart" doesn't sound like idiomatic English to me, so if I were translating this I'd have to choose some other way of expressing what the Egyptian author meant by Xr.  It's not clear to me, in any case, that Xr necessarily expresses the "activeness" that you see in it; I think we'd have to know a lot more about the nuances of Middle Egyptian usage before we could be sure that, in fact, "with" is an inappropriate (or "softened") translation of Xr in this phrase.  Prof. Allen is an expert and has such knowledge, and furthermore he knows the context where this phrase originally appeared, so I'm (at least provisionally) willing to accept his interpretation, although I sometimes wish he were a bit fuller in his explanation of exercises such as this. QUESTION 2:  The phrase Xr zH n jb.k and Xr zH jb.k should mean exactly the same thing (according to what we've learned so far). So is it fair to presume that Allen used the indirect genitive in order to sucker-punch people like me who spent a lot of time figuring out that zH n jb.k is not a grammatical prepositional phrase? I doubt Prof. Allen has much interest in delivering sucker punches.  What he is interested in is providing exercises that both test and reinforce the knowledge that you will need to read Egyptian texts, and let me assure you the indirect genitive shows up all the time (more, I believe, than does the direct genitive). 8.11:  Xr zH n wHjw.f -  lit. "under the tent of his tribe";   Trans: "in the tent of his tribe" (Allen = under the tent of his tribe)  QUESTION: Is Xr zH n wHjw.f to be interpreted simply as some guy in a physical tent belonging to his tribe, or could it be more abstract, such as "within the fold of his tribe". Something like how we might say "within the bosom of his family"?  Possibly, although the translations given in Faulkner's dictionary for zH all seem to be strictly literal.  I think you'd have to look at the source text for this exercise to be sure.  The Egyptians were not averse to metaphorical and idiomatic meanings, and many of them are surprisingly similar to English idioms (though, wouldn't you know it, I can't come up with an example just at the moment), so I wouldn't rule out your alternative interpretation entirely. 8.12:  nfr n.f m hrw pn r sf -  better for him day this with respect to yesterday It is better for him today than yesterday Grammar n.f: preposition+dep. pronoun: for him hrw pn. noun + demonstr. pronoun masc. sing.: this day (today) r sf: preposition + ? Question: What kind of word is "sf"? It's a noun.  However, Allen points out (§8.14) that nouns of time can be used all by themselves as adverbs, and gives sf as an example.  Whether it's being used adverbially in this sentence is an open question.  Given that it's the object of the preposition r, you could say that it's nominal; on the other hand, it occupies a position in the sentence that's parallel to m hrw pn, so you could say it's adverbial.  (Egyptian was actually somewhat less grammatically scrupulous in comparisons than English is.)  8.14: wr n=f irp r mw  -  He has more wine than water (More to him wine than water) I suppose wr here is an adverb, as per 8.14, used in a comparative mode, thus being translated as more.  But could it be an adjectival sentence with irp as the subject, as per 7.2. It would be nice to have everybody's opinion This is an adjectival sentence.  The literal meaning is something like "Wine is great to him in comparison to water", where "great" is a predicate describing "wine".  From what I've seen, adverbs don't tend to occupy initial position in a sentence, and I'm not sure how you would parse this if you took wr to be adverbial. 8.15: ntf pw m mAat -  lit. "It is him in the way things aught to be";   Trans: "It is him in maat" (Allen = It is he, in truth - ie, It is really he)  QUESTION: I have strongly resisted translating "mAat" as just "truth", when Allen himself has included an entire essay about how mAat really means something more like "truth, justice, and the Egyptian way", so does this sentence not carry a much more authoritative declaration of the fact that it is "him"? I.e. more along the lines of "It is him, I swear by all that is sacred and holy on my mother's grave cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die"? mAat carries a lot of baggage, but then so can "truth" (think of Jesus' "I am the way, the truth, and the life").  Not every meaning a word can have needs to show up equally every time the word is used.  Faulkner translates m mAat as "truly", so Prof. Allen is at least in good company. Also, Allen gives the answer to this as "It is really he." Is that grammatical in English? Shouldn't we say "It is really him"? Yes it is.  Hyper-grammatical, in fact, in the sense that things like this are said exclusively by people who take their grammar very seriously indeed.  The "he" in this sentence is what's known as a predicate nominative, so it makes a certain amount of sense that it be put in the nominative (or "subjective") case.  The fact that most people wouldn't be caught dead saying "it is really he" doesn't change that. 8.16:  r bw Xr(j) nTr -   Trans #1: (sentence fragment) "to the cemetery".  [bw Xr(j) nTr]: prepositional phrase "the lying under the god place" Trans #2: (sentence fragment) "to the tomb of the god" [Xr(j) nTr]: nfr Hr construction "the one that has lying under (it) the god" {bw [Xr(j) nTr]}: reverse nisbe: "the place, the one that has lying under (it) the god" (Allen = to the place where the god is - S8.8) QUESTION: Is there any reason to prefer one of these translations over the other? (The question refers to Trans #1 and #2, not Allen's translation.) Mostly, context.  In §8.9 Allen gives an example of a nisbe that can be read either "normally" or as a nfr Hr.  His use of the word "normally" indicates that the direct nisbe is more frequent than the reverse (at least for his example, imy pr), so probably the thing to do would be to read Xr(j) nTr as in your translation #1 unless the context suggested otherwise. 8.18:  HqA pw n rTnw Hrt  -  this ruler of Upper Retenu (Allen = He is the ruler of Upper Retenu)  Questions 1. pw: Allen translates "pw" as article "the", but only the -A - series of the demonstratives "...weakened to definite articles in the spoken language ..." (Allen 5.10 4).  pw should still be a demonstrative, or? No, he translates it as "he is".  See §7.9.  The article "the" is actually unexpressed in the Egyptian, but was supplied by the translator because English requires it.  On the other hand, I've seen texts (e.g. Shipwrecked Sailor) where pn/tn is used in a way that suggests "the" rather than "this", so it may be going too far to say that only the -A series weakened.  What is true is that it was the -A series that gave rise to the Late Egyptian definite article. 2. Hr: up (the sky determinative indicates to favor "up"  to all other possible translations of Hr) I am not sure about this, can anybody comment? Well, it indicates the nisbe, although 1) the nisbe just means "that which is upon", which can also be "chief, having authority" in addition to indicating physical or geographical "up"-ness, and 2) according to Faulkner the nisbe can appear without the sky determinative.  What's really noteworthy here is that the word has a -t ending, which indicates that it's an adjective agreeing with rTnw, and so must be the nisbe. 3a. Hrt: is female of Hr, used because Retenu is a city (geographic area) -- correct or incorrect? It's the feminine not of Hr (which, as a preposition, doesn't have a gender) but of the prepositional nisbe Hrj.  You're right about rTnw. 3b. Are all country names feminine? Why is "rTnw" not written as "rTnwt" ? Allen says (§4.4) "... proper names of places, such as countries and towns ... are often treated as feminine, regardless of their ending."  This implies that not all are, but offhand I can't think of an exception.  We'd have to know more about the etymology of rTnw (is it a native Egyptian word?  a borrowing from a foreign language?) before we could know exactly why it looks the way it does. __._,_.___ . __,_._,___