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Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

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Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#2
The etymology for most of those "cognates" seems quite strained when you consider that even reconstructions of Proto-Germanic roots can be controversial. Especially when you only have a single sound to match, it is very easy to come up with bullshit "correspondences" that are mere coincidence.

Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#3
This is so bad that I don't even know where to begin. It's incoherent, completely ignores any accepted method of linguistic analysis, makes absolutely no explanation as to how conclusions are being made and it doesn't even attempt to support them in an way.

It's literally just gibberish.

Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#4
Most languages have common utterances for mother/father and other family members. This is because these are easy, early sounds a baby can make. Some variation of da, ma, pa, na occurs fairly universally.

There’s a pretty good episode of Lexicon Valley on this topic (see cavebabies say ‘mama’)

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html

Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#7
I agree with every comments posted so far (not convincing examples, incoherent writing, lack indications about the languages used, lack of formal method) but the worst offender is probably the lack of references. Even if the post is bad in itself it could leads to interesting papers and authors but it didn’t. Only one authors is referenced in the text. This is not enough.

Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#8
Some of this is mistaking just how much we know of Egyptian phonology, which is actually very little. For some proper names, we have more context into how they may have actually sounded based on transscriptions into Greek and Latin. But for every other word, we flat out have no idea on vowel sounds, because they were not written. Because of this, a couple sounds known as semivowels are sometimes transcribed as if they were vowels. For instance, in mother, the second glyph of a chick (𓅱) is marked as a U, but would be more appropriately be W. Same with the reeds (𓇋), which are sometimes marked as I but are rather Y. (And, in this article, apparently also FE...)

I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language. Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

EDIT:

Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation for how the article arrives at feathav using the same signs. I'll just link the most comprehensive one:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-of-Middle-Egy...

When you search, the relevant entry is the "plants 12" result.

Re: Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

#9
post #6

Columbia pop-linguist McWhorter suggests strong verbs in Germanic languages may have been a Semitic influence.

That seems quite a stretch, when proto-Indo-European ablaut explains the exact same phenomenon. Also, Germanic strong verbs tend to be relatively primitive vocabulary -- go, sleep, drink, sing... So it's also explainable that these forms could develop prior to more standardized forms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb#Origin_an...

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