This seems to be Ancient Week at the Hattery; after Greek and Latin shorthand and the Canaanite comb, we come to Enheduanna, the Woman Who Was History’s First Named Author, as the NY Times puts it (archived):
It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.
Suddenly, the ancient Mesopotamian priestess, who had been dead for more than 4,000 years, was a hot topic online as word spread that the first individually named author in human history was … a woman?
That may have been old news at the Morgan Library & Museum, where Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near Eastern antiquities, was about to offer a tour of its new exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C.” Babcock was thrilled by the attention, if not exactly surprised by the public’s surprise.
Ask people who the first author was, and they might say Homer, or Herodotus. “People have no idea,” he said. “They simply don’t believe it could be a woman” — and that she was writing more than a millennium before either of them, in a strikingly personal voice. […] “It’s the first time someone steps forward and uses the first-person singular and gives an autobiography,” Babcock said. “And it’s profound.”
Enheduanna has been known since 1927, when archaeologists working at the ancient city of Ur excavated a stone disc bearing her name (written with a starburst symbol) and image, and identifying her as the daughter of the king Sargon of Akkad, the wife of the moon god Nanna, and a priestess. […]
The exhibition, on view until Feb. 19, is also a swan song for Babcock, who will retire next year after nearly three decades at the Morgan. […] He sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects from nine institutions around the world — as part of the Morgan’s long history of exhibitions on women writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson.
It’s also a tribute to a long chain of woman scholars, including his teacher, Edith Porada, the first curator of J. Pierpont Morgan’s celebrated collection of more than 1,000 seals. […]
Some scholars have questioned whether Enheduanna wrote the poems attributed to her. Even if she was a real person, they argue, the works — written in Sumerian, and known only from copies made hundreds of years after her lifetime — may have been written later and attributed to her, as a way of bolstering the legacy of Sargon the king.
But whether Enheduanna was an actual author or a symbol of one, she was hardly alone. The recent anthology “Women’s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia” gathers nearly a hundred hymns, poems, letters, inscriptions and other texts by female authors.
That “Some scholars have questioned” link goes to Eleanor Robson’s Twitter thread:
Enheduana’s had three lives: 1. as a real-life woman in southern Iraq, c.2300 BC; 2. as a figure in Sumerian literature 600 years later; and 3. as a 2nd-wave feminist icon of poetry since the 1970s. These three lives are often confused. I’ll try to disentangle them here.
Archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered this stone disk in the temple of the moon goddess Ningal at Ur (southern Iraq) in 1924. A hefty 25 x 7 cm, it shows a priestess in a long robe and tall hat making an offering in front of the ziggurat, with male assistants […] The personal seals of Enheduana’s hairdresser, steward & another servant were also found at Ur. She was certainly a real, powerful woman. But all the “evidence” that Enheduana composed Sumerian literature comes from 600 years later, from scribal schools of the 18th cent BC. […]
In the late 60s, when these works were first translated, it made intuitive sense to identify Enheduana as their author; but less so now. Why? First, six centuries is [a] LONG time, even in antiquity. We can now trace how much Sumerian literary language evolved in that time. All the surviving cuneiform manuscripts of Enheduana’s works are in 18th-cent style Sumerian, not 24th-cent style (not obvious in 1960s). We *could* be missing earlier manuscripts, of course, in the earlier linguistic style. BUT they would be necessarily be so different that the best we could say is the 18th cent versions were thorough rewritings of Enheduana’s originals (cf. modern-language Beowulf). Also, two of the Temple Hymns (c) are to temples built by/for kings of Ur (Shulgi and Amar-Suen) who lived 200 years after Enheduana.
More generally, we now have lots of Sumerian hymns that feature kings and princes as characters in them. We never say Sumerian kings and princes composed their own poems: they had poets to do it for them. The same then applies to Enheduana. So, maximally Enheduana was the first known literary *patron* (not poet) in world history; minimally, she gained that status 600 y later.
Enheduana-as-feminist-poet was conceived in 1976, when anthropologist Marta Weigle attended a lecture by Assyriologist Cyrus Gordon. In 1978 Weigle edited a themed issue of a new women’s studies journal /Frontiers/, on women as verbal artists. Weigle’s introduction was called “Women as Verbal Artists: Reclaiming the Sisters of Enheduanna.” So very late 70s! So very second-wave feminist, which did a lot of “reclaiming” women (“sisters”) in the historical record at that time. […] Then in 1983 poet Diana Wolkstein & Sumerologist Samuel Kramer co-wrote the book Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, still in print today.
Which seems plausible but not (to me) conclusive; just because kings and princes didn’t compose their own poems doesn’t mean this particular priestess didn’t (though of course the point about the anachronistic Temple Hymns is well taken), and the texts sound as if they were written by a woman (though of course she could have been a patroness of female poets, and I don’t deny there have been plenty of men who wrote well from a woman’s point of view). I would say “maximally Enheduana was the first known literary *patron* (not poet) in world history” is excessively skeptical; maximally, Enheduana composed some but not all of the work attributed to her (and of course not in the form we have it). At any rate, it’s great to see this attention being given to women as early creators of culture!
A few scattered thoughts:
1. The question of the relationship between Old Babylonian (OB) “literary” texts, which were produced in the context of scribal education, and previously existing written or oral traditions is a thorny one. As Robson points out, lots of historically attested people appear in OB texts, some in first others in third-person, but only Enḫeduana has been suggested to be the author of the texts that she appears in. A few texts are attested before the OB period, and the presence of myths about Gilgamesh (and his ancestors) in the scribal curriculum might be attributable to the ideological concerns of the Ur III dynasty, whose fall marks the transition to the OB period. So it’s certainly possible that these texts are older than the OB period, although that doesn’t mean they were composed by Enḫeduana, or that they even date to the Sargonic period.
2. In terms of the anachronisms, “The Instructions of Shuruppag” is first attested in the Early Dynastic period (~27th century BC), but the OB versions contain a lot of additional material (interestingly, none of the advice regarding kings or duties related to temples is present in the Early Dynastic version). If some of Enḫeduana’s texts were updated to reflect contemporary concerns, they would not be the only ones. (I say this not really knowing anything about the stylistics of the Enḫeduana texts. It’s entirely possible that the grammar is so OB that it’s unlikely to have anything left of an earlier composition.)
3. “Written from a female perspective” does not necessarily mean “written by a woman.” “The song of the lettuce,” (during the Bronze Age, even domestic lettuce contained a white latex sap that oozed out when the leaves were cut) for example, describes sexual pleasure from a (divine) female perspective. However, given what we know about the demographics of OB scribes, it’s unlikely that a woman composed the text.
My love is like a green, green lettuce …
“Written from a female perspective” does not necessarily mean “written by a woman.”
Of course not, as I said. But one must avoid going too far in the opposite direction and assuming that “written from a female perspective” automatically means “written by a man.”
My love is like a green, green lettuce …
But not so sappy as before…
Enḫeduana
Thank you! ḫ is not h!
what we know about the demographics of OB scribes
What do we know about them? And what do we know about gender roles in Enḫeduana’s time? Because, as I read it, Robson’s skepticism rests on the assumption that female writers back then were possible, but exceptional. Is that supported, or is she projecting from later times (including our own), just as the second-wave feminists she makes fun of presume an ancient feminist idyll?
Thank you! ḫ is not h!
Well, because the transcription of cuneiform is based on OB+ Akkadian, which lacks an [h], there’s usually no information lost by using “h” instead of “ḫ.” (Unless you’re trying to talk about the reconstruction of [h] in Sumerian.)
“Possible, but exceptional” seems to be the case for the Mesopotamian Bronze Age. Female priests* (en priests were often the opposite gender of the deity they served) were very common, but most wouldn’t need to be literate in the Sargonic or the early OB periods. Starting in the later OB, as more ritual texts were written down (and the tradition of comprehensive Sumerian language teaching seems to have ended), the need for some level of literacy might have increased.
But one must avoid going too far in the opposite direction and assuming that “written from a female perspective” automatically means “written by a man.”
Agreed. But I think Robson’s point (which I’m inclined to agree with) is that, from what we know about the historical Enḫeduana, she would have fit into a historically attested pattern of royal patrons of written compositions rather than an unattested pattern of en priests composing religious poetry.
My point was that, given an established tradition of writing from a (divine) female perspective in OB Sumerian texts,** being written from a female perspective isn’t as strong evidence of female authorship as it would be in other cultural contexts where such a thing was otherwise unattested.
*There wasn’t any Sumerian or Akkadian word for “priest,” so the group of “people who served the gods in a temple” would have also included people with bean-counting responsibilities.
**Which is itself interesting! As generations of disappointed women can attest, in many cultures men do not regularly consider, much less render into culturally legible artistic forms, the existence of active female sexuality.
We do not really know how old Sargon was when he usurped the throne, and that may be an important piece of information. Sargon the Great was base born, and we have no information about what languages his children learned when they were young. Sargon’s native language was presumably Semitic, but we do not know whether his daughter would have grown up as a speaker of Akkadian, or whether (if she was born later) she might have been equally fluent in other liturgical languages of Mesopotamia.
[edited to add]
an established tradition of writing from a (divine) female perspective in OB Sumerian texts
any or all of which could have been written by women, if you don’t start with 19thC european christian presuppositions.
[end edit]
i don’t think a scholarly tradition that spends more than a century insisting that lines like (for example) “i’ll take my pleasure with you / as once i had such joy / with jesse’s son, my people’s prince / that bethlehem boy”* must be read as heterosexual has any credibility to say anything about who ancient writers were.
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* solomon ibn gabirol, translated by raymond scheindlin in The Gazelle
from what we know about the historical Enḫeduana, she would have fit into a historically attested pattern of royal patrons of written compositions rather than an unattested pattern of en priests composing religious poetry […] being written from a female perspective isn’t as strong evidence of female authorship as it would be in other cultural contexts where such a thing was otherwise unattested.
Yes, and nobody’s saying (nobody here, anyway) that the author must have been female; I’m perfectly willing to accept that the odds are against it (whatever that might mean in this context). What I’m objecting to is Robson’s assumption that the author could not have been female, which is the only way I can see to read “maximally Enheduana was the first known literary *patron* (not poet) in world history.”
Also, what rozele said. There is a long and depressing tradition of scholars insisting that anything truly outstanding, revolutionary, etc. must have been created by a man. (Robson, of course, is not a man, but it’s hard to escape the burdens of a sexist tradition.)
It might be splitting hairs, Robson is not saying the author could not have been a woman. She merely takes a strong position that it was not Enḫeduana. The named men that appear in the first person in the OB scholastic corpus (Šulgi, for example) are just as unlikely to be the authors of the texts they appear in as Enḫeduana.
any or all of which could have been written by women, if you don’t start with 19thC european christian presuppositions.
It’s true. But that’s also true of any other text in the OB scholastic corpus (which I don’t intend in a glib way; I suspect we agree on the importance of highlighting the presence of women in the formation of OB literary culture). All I’m saying is that, given the gender dynamics of the OB scribal profession, it’s likely that men were involved in the redaction of the written versions. Just because we live in a patriarchal society does not mean that instances of patriarchy in other societies are a projection of our own biases. (And to be fair, everyone here is starting with 21st century presuppositions.)
@rozele
here is a full translation by I. Zangwill:
—
Come up to me at early dawn,
Come up to me, for I am drawn,
Beloved, by my spirit’s spell,
To see the sons of Israel.
For thee, my darling, I will spread
Within my court a golden bed,
And I will set a table there
And bread for thee I will prepare,
For thee my goblet I will fill
With juices that my vines distil:
And thou shalt drink to heart’s delight,
Of all my flavours day and night.
The joy in thee I will evince
With which a people greets its prince.
O son of Jesse, holy stem,
God’s servant, born of Bethlehem!
—
But it seems to be a related image in the poem “for a marriage” by the same author that the People of Israel are a princess and the Messiah (or some other leader/deliverer) is a long awaited or yearned for prince. So even if the male author identified with and enjoyed same-sex attraction (I agree the poem in this translation allows or even supports this reading), here the I of the poem would really seem to be female.
Zangwill’s translation bugs me. He morphed this deep, elegant poem into a bouncy iambic ditty, and added sugary filler. It reads Disneyfied.
The Hebrew is here. It’s an eight-line poem (with alternate lines forming the acrostic שלמה ‘Shlomo’, the poet’s given name). In this particular poem the verb forms referring to the speaker are not gender-specific. But other of Ibn Gabirol’s poems are, unambiguously, love poems from one grammatically masculine person (to be precise) to another, and some are pretty hot. Shmuel Hanagid, Yehuda Halevy, and Ibn Ezra all wrote lust poems addressed to other men. So that should be the default interpretation.
He also wrote poems which very clearly are addressed to God. The similes and language separate the two.
There’s a long tradition, starting with the Mishnaic-era discomfort with the Song of Songs, to excuse love poetry as being addressed by the people of Israel to God or whatever. That works just fine for Haredi folks nowadays, who read and respect the Medieval poets, who also wrote some of the best-known religious Jewish poetry of any era.
The “For a Marriage” poem switches from third person to first person for two lines, and then back (which I personally find a bit clunky), so it’s clearly an excursion: by and large the poet speaks in the third person, addressing God in wishing the bride well. Zangwill’s “Restore the tortured People” is entirely his invention (no doubt owing to the tradition of seeing a religious context in everything of Ibn Gabirol). The original only says מְעֻשָּׁקָה ‘wronged one’, ‘stolen one’, ‘oppressed one’, or such, with a singular feminine referent (after the unique usage of this form in Is. 23:12).
(I have other reasons to dislike Zangwill. I am glad I don’t have to like his translations.)
Back to the “dawn” poem, Scheindlin also took unwarranted liberties with it. I am now inclined to read it as religious allegory after all. First, “Come to me at dawn, my beloved, for my soul thirsts to see the people of my nation” is straightforwardly read as leaving the house to go to communal prayer. The middle four lines, with the golden bedding, bread and wine, could be read either way, literally or allegorically. The last two lines say something like, “Here I’ll rejoice in you (m.) the joy of my nation’s prince, son of your (m.) servant Jesse, head of the Bethlehemites.” On the one hand, David could be a symbol for handsomeness. On the other hand “your servant Jesse” must mean that the addressee is God, and “rejoice in you the joy of David” could then refer to David dancing before the tabernacle (Sam. II 6, 5 and 14).
This is not like Ibn Gabirol’s poem תְּבֹרַךְ מִבְּלִי קֵצֶה ‘Be blessed without an end’, with lines like “he set fire within my body from end to end, and I came to the river of desiring him, which went past my neck and head” etc. When he wanted to turn the heat up, he could be direct about it.
Are there any references to the properties of salad 3,800 years ago? It isn’t super easy to figure out….
Maybe
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-021-00831-0
it’s a bit odd to me to see the idea of a theological reading of an andalusi love poem as somehow at odds with its literal erotics: part of what seems to have made the star poets of that tradition into stars is their skill at working with the inseparability of the two. ibn arabi was the one who articulated that most explicitly as a philosophy, but it’s just as true in the hebrew wing of the tradition*. which was part** of why i picked that particular ibn gabirol as my example: because it’s such a tour de force of 100% eroticism and 100% theology – and it admits no contradiction, or even tension, between the two, as often as people try to impose them on it***.
—
given the gender dynamics of the OB scribal profession
echoing Y: from what sources? read through what analytic frameworks based on what assumptions?
.
* and in the romance wing as well, if we understand (as we should!) juan de la cruz, teresa of avila, and the troubadors & trobairitz as all falling within the andalusi poetic world. but plenty of folks still have trouble getting from tarab and ‘ud to troubador and lute, without even bringing in how the two great spanish erotic catholic poets were from “new christian” families…
** another part being the precise homoerotics of its use of david. the ending positions the speaker specifically as either jonathan or saul: the two people in a position to offer royal comforts to david, who were respectively david’s most important lover and a creep of a john who liked watching david dance. it’s a particularly zesty move to pair the redemptive theological aspects of the poem with a gesture that parallels god with the dynasty founded against divine preference and later stripped of divine favor. and going there is such an andalusi specialty!
*** in stark contrast, i’d say, to Shir haShirim itself, which has no theology in its text. maybe that shift is part of what adonis has written about as the modernist revolution in arabic poetics in this period****; i’ve gotta reread that book of his sometime.
**** in this period, hebrew poetics is arabic poetics.
…imperishable (compared to a prime minister)!
The mention of Beowulf raises an interesting point — with that poem, we have enough understanding of the metre to detect points where more archaic forms have been linguistically updated (not translated as such, merely modernized in spelling). There’s similar evidence from scribal errors, and taken together they suggest that Beowulf was composed some two-to-three centuries before the one surviving copy. Which, while a long time even in the Middle Ages, isn’t actualy very remarkable. (I’m afraid I don’t find six centuries all that remarkable, for that matter — do we have any reason to think our records of Sumerian are so thorough that the lack of earlier copies has any relevance at all?)
Maybe these things do all point to a ‘late’ date for those poems. Wikipedia quotes one specialist as saying that ‘surviving sources show no traces of Old Sumerian… making it impossible to posit what that putative original might have looked like’ — unfortunately following that back to its source gives no further information or references, just this bare assertion.
Judging from a few YouTube videos about cuneiform from the British Museum, we have no idea how thorough our records are – entire unknown languages might be hidden in the British Museum’s collection, the curator said.
Somebody should create a few jobs in that field. (And in a long list of others. *sigh*)
fellow new yorkers (and potential visitors):
i went to the show at the Morgan yesterday, and very much recommend it if you have the time & money (the robber baron’s heirs want a couple of sawbucks from you*, but be aware: the Morgan does do free admission for EBT/SNAP benefit-holders through the Museums for All program – show your card at the ticket desk!).
the wall-text made me cranky (but that’s almost always true), but the actual materials were fantastic. an abundance of cylinder seals related to inanna and/or enheduanna; an array of sculptures, vessels, and a reproduction of the “Uruk vase”; and the absolute showstopper of queen puabi’s funerary regalia.
what i found most moving, though, was the tablets with parts of The Exaltation of Inanna. it’s a wonderful thing to be able to see these hunks of clay marked with a reed almost 4000 years ago to hold words that as far as we know were already half a millennium old, and to know them for some of what’s made it possible for me to have read those words (at least in translation).
it’s well worth the visit!
.
* the super-rich being the only examples of a hereditary tendency towards criminality ever found, after all.
Thanks for that report — if I were in NYC, I’d definitely go!
I like this: “It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.”
I am not sure if I like this: “as word spread that the first individually named author in human history was … a woman?”.
established tradition of writing from a (divine) female perspective in OB Sumerian texts,**
Unsurprisingly in the Bible too. The Praise of Wisdom in Proverbs and Sirach.
Not sure that I’d describe Proverbs 9 as writing from a female perspective: “wisdom” there is a personified abstraction, balanced by “folly” further on; both words happen to be grammatically feminine in Hebrew. Nor do I think that the composer of Proverbs would have been happy to have these personifications interpreted as goddesses.
Proverbs 31 features The Ideal Wife, who may be very nice but isn’t divine and doesn’t tell us what she herself thinks. (The passage is preceded by a few verses in which Lemuel’s Mum gives him a talking to.)
“wisdom” there is a personified abstraction
What I mean is possible formal parallels with the texts from the region that ə spoke about.
Otherwise there are Song of Songs etc.
Actually we do name girls after abstractions (Faith, Hope, Grace)
Proverbs 8, Sirach 24, respectively.
Proverbs 8 is more like it, admittedly, though still a personified abstraction … but I see your point about formal similarity.
I see that the Kusaal version calls the abstract lady Aya’am and Abaŋir, from ya’am “common sense” and baŋir ‘understanding” along with the A- that marks (almost) all Kusaal personal names. (A kind of spoken capitalisation.)
I’ve come across Amɔrya’am “Has sense” as an actual Kusaasi name (of a girl.) “Prudence”, effectively …
Actually we do name girls after abstractions (Faith, Hope, Grace)
Some of it is probably down to the martyrs Faith, Hope, and Love (and their mother Sophia, which of course means Wisdom but doesn’t usually get phrased that way). All four (including Sophia) are fairly common female names in Russian.
Apparently in the Latin version (and consequently the English version) they were named Faith, Hope, and Charity, but the Greek version of the third name is Ἀγάπη, which does appear to mean (a kind of) love. I’m not sure where the confusion came from.
There’s no confusion: “charity” is from Latin caritas, used for ἀγάπη in the Vulgate; the Authorised Version uses “charity” in 1 Corinthians 13. The word has changed its English meaning since then, that’s all. A cynic might feel that this is because charity (in the modern sense) is a whole lot easier than ἀγάπη.
In accordance with Eddyshaw’s Law of Words Derived from Latin, the Latin caritas does not mean “charity” (in the modern sense.)
The word ἀγάπη in the sense in question is supposed to have been, if not a Christian innovation, at least popularised by Christians.
(This may account for the slightly odd Latin caritas instead of the straightforward word amor.)
Danish has tro. håb og kærlighed — also a common or royal variety tattoo for sailors (well displayed on the King’s left forearm). It symbolized the feelings of a married couple during separation, archetypically when the husband was posted overseas or was a long distance sailor.
And kærlighed here is not romantic or carnal love, even though we use the word for all the kinds.
Latin translators certainly didn’t think ‘amor’ appropriate for the senses of ἀγάπη present in the NT, and even in the OT used ‘caritas’ for אַהֲבָה in many contexts (such as in the Song of Songs) where ‘amor’ might seem plausible. The Septuagint routinely uses ἀγάπη in such contexts as well, but it is probably well on its way to becoming the general word for ‘love’ at that point. But in English, by the time of the Authorized Version the use of ‘charity’ is definitely a choice which is not automatic, as Tyndale had already gone for ‘love’, e.g: “Though I spake with the tonges of me and angels and yet had no love I were eve as soundinge brasse: or as a tynklynge Cymball.”
Though I spake with the tonges of me and angels
Anachronistic #metoo ! Or a 16C typo that has propagated like a rabbit left to its own devices ? It’s in half the electronified Tyndale versions I find in the internet.
In Proverbs 8 Wisdom is feminine and represents itself in several different guises almost all of them feminine: Understanding, Prudence, Knowledge, Purpose. But there is also Architect/Craftsman which is masculine. But the whole thing is very far from anything human. It also contains like half of the Christian theology.
I didn’t notice the ‘me’. I wonder if it should be mē (and also evē for ‘even’), where the diacritic should obviously be expanded as ‘n’ (or ‘m’ potentially where relevant), but no one realised when digitizing.
“The word ἀγάπη in the sense in question is supposed to have been, if not a Christian innovation, at least popularised by Christians.”
What did Greeks, and Latins feel to their children?
@J1M, you are right, I meant Charity! And honestly confused Charity with Grace.
I think I once even asked here how come that ἀγάπη > caritas – exactly having this three girls in mind.
“Amɔrya’am “Has sense”
have.3sg sense?
What did Greeks, and Latins feel to their children?
The Greeks felt στοργή; what with their patrii sermonis egestas, the Romans had to make do with amor (or, indeed, caritas.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storge
confused Charity with Grace
That’s like confusing a donation with the question of whether it is tax-deductible. I imagine businessmen straighten this out for themselves before contributing their mite. God helps those who help others.
the tongues of 𒈨 and angels?
unrelatedly, the not-exactly-autoiographical central character of a set of grace paley’s short stories is faith – i don’t recall a hope or charity turning up to round out the trio. both of their names are markers of being part of the first cradle-tongue anglophone generation of their families.
“What did Greeks, and Latins feel to their children?”
I mean, what words were appropriate in this context and which one(s) was common?
I totally lack cultural knowlege about both peoples:(
PS. @DE, sorry, poseted it before noticing your answer. Thank you!
car[aim], car[u/af], karout/karet* are fine.
—
as a populariser of Breton I have to note that most people here have heard that ar sistr zo graet ‘vit bout evet, hag ar merc’hed ‘vit bout karet but did not notice/understand.
What did Greeks, and Latins feed to their children ? Not Fruit Loops, I’m pretty certain, but what?
Amoryam sounds Mediterranean rather than Kusaasi:/
“caritas” suonds too derived for something primordial (but maybe I’m wrong).
“caritas” suonds too derived for something primordial (but maybe I’m wrong).
By what criteria do you categorize a word as “sounding primordial” ? Something like “has at most two syllables”, perhaps ?
have.3sg sense?
Not exactly.
Although I’ve written it in accordance with standard word division conventions, it’s really three “words”: A mɔr ya’am.
Ya’am (so written) is actually a different word, “gall” (as in “gall bladder”), which has fallen together with the originally distinct yam “common sense” in most Oti-Volta languages. They’re still distinct in the closely related language Farefare, respectively as ya’am and yɛm.
Mɔr is “have”, a member of the minor imperfective-only conjugation. The Toende dialect uses tar, instead, cognate with the Mooré tare: the highly-recommendable Mooré film Yaaba actually features a (male) character called A Taryam, which means the same as Amɔrya’am.
Kusaal verb phrases don’t agree with any arguments at all, so it’s not 3sg specifically.
The A probably arose from an “indefinite human” pronoun (like Hausa a) historically and actually does pattern like a personal pronoun to a great extent, but now works as a “personifier”; it precedes all Kusaasi personal names except for a few based on adjective stems. Kusaasi personal names all have meanings, which are transparent in the sense that it’s obvious what the words mean in themselves, though you often need a good bit of background cultural information to see why someone might be called that [I had colleagues whose names literally meant “Shrine”, “God”, “Pot”, “Rubbish Tip”, “Stranger”, “Friday” and “Little Nail”, for example.]
Most personal names are based on single nouns, but a can precede entire verb phrases or even complete clauses, in which case it takes the position of either a subject (as here) or possessor of the subject. This construction also turns up quite a lot as a way of nominalising clauses, especially in proverbs and the like, e.g.
Adaa yɛl ka’ tiimm.
a-TENSE say NEGATIVE.HAVE medicine.NEGATIVE
“Did-say has no remedy.” (i.e. there’s no use crying over spilt milk.)
Ba wa’e nɛ ana kʋʋ m nua yir, ka ba pʋ wa’e anɔɔs bɛ yirɛ.
they go FOCUS a-IRREALIS kill my chicken house, and they NEGATIVE go a-chickens exist house.NEGATIVE
“They go to Will-kill-my-chicken’s house, they don’t go to Chickens-are-there’s house.”
(i.e. rich people are not always marvels of hospitality.)
Stu, “primordial” is the feeling, the form is derived (a transparent abstract noun from carus/cara).
I mean “God is love” and “God is ….ing/….ness/…” (from some ….) read somewhat diffeently.
That’s the ontological doctrine “things started out simple, and became more and more complex”. It’s a familiar consequence of addiction to analysis, which applies the doctrine in the other direction.
These matters have been chewed over for thousands of years. They keep turning up in undigested form because ontogeny recapitulates philosophy.
Amoryam sounds Mediterranean rather than Kusaasi
I have wondered whether it’s a sort of repurposing of Maryam(u) “Mary”, but the example I know of is not Muslim (not many Kusaasi are), and, as I said above, there’s an exact parallel in the Mooré personal name A Taryam.
And honestly confused Charity with Grace.
Grace (as well as Faith and to a lesser extent Hope) is a common-ish (US) English female given name, while Charity in that context is noticeably archaic (and Love is straight-up rare). So I assumed it was referring to that. I’m not actually sure offhand what would “grace” correspond to in Russian.
[EDIT: looks like the Russian word for “grace” is благодать (literally something like “goodness-giving”), which is AFAIK not used as a name. The tradition that the English name Grace belongs to is known as virtue names; other extant examples include Felicity and Joy.]
In Russian Amoryám and Amaryám (when stressed this way) are indistinguishable, but less so for Semites…
Maybe not so important with a short vowel (there are already miriam and mariam).
Repurposing still could happen when it became feminine rather than masculine name… It could be influence of “Mary”.
“Kusaal verb phrases don’t agree with any arguments at all, so it’s not 3sg specifically.”
@DE, thank you!! I haven’t read your grammar yet, but I thought so (your examples on LH). So it was an indirect request for an explanation:)
“Most personal names are based on single nouns, but a can precede entire verb phrases or even complete clauses” – Aha! So it is a rare situation when a translation “one, who….” is actually literal?
I’m not quite clear exactly how the A- of personal names relates to the VP/clause personifier use synchronically, though it seems clear that it must be the “same word” historically. There are a few other personal names based on entire VPs or entire clauses too, though they’re not very common; my favourite remains the birth-circumstance name Atiimbɔdigya “Medicine’s-got-lost”, which as a pure clause nominalisation would be parsed “he/she whose medicine’s got lost”; as a personal name, it probably commemorates someone else’s medicine going astray (but, alas, I never asked.)
The a- plus single noun construction is not confined to personal names, but elsewhere it seems normally to have a very similar sense, as with Aya’am “Wisdom” in the translation of Proverbs that I cited. In fables where animals talk it is used with common nouns for animals, as in Abaa “Mr Dog, Br’er Dog, Dog.” To make things more complicated yet, it’s an inseparable part of some ordinary nouns for animals, e.g. amus “cat”; you can show that it’s the same particle, because it drops after any possessor NP, just as the A- of personal names does, but there’s no hint of personalisation: amus is just “cat”, not “Cat.”
I think it’s most plausible to take the construction with a following noun as appositional, but nothing really turns on the question in practice anyway synchronically.
.
The external sandhi of this a- is different from the a- seen in Kusaal numbers, e.g. anaasi “four”; this latter is certainly from *ŋa- historically. The “personifier” is most likely from *ɲa- or *ɲɪ-, which would make it cognate with the Mooré 3sg pronoun yẽ, unstressed a; there’s no phonological problem with this identification, at any rate.
I had an interesting correspondence with John Turl, creator of the “Ghana Place Names” site, about some Farefare place names with A-. I was initially dubious about the analysis of these, because in Kusaasi territory there seem to be exactly zero places named after people by name, but he did a lot of investigation into the matter; it seems that the Farefare place names do indeed incorporate the “personifier” particle, but that they are (sort of) divine names.
One of them is Apusarega, which in terms of its components is pretty certainly based on the word for “young woman who has not yet given birth” (pu’asadir in Kusaal.) I hadn’t come across anthropomorphic gods locally, either, but it transpires that the Farefare name shrines after a person when the win “spiritual individuality” of a person has taken to dwelling there after death. In the case in question there turn out to be actual shrines to bear this out, and a pair of neighbouring hills called (with preceding A-) “Young-Woman” and “Male-Hill” (or “Big-Hill.”) I think the couple in question sound as if they are likely to be mythological rather than historical, but still …
So, like renard. Or like Baby Russian мишка “bear”, from the bear’s personal name, Михаил Потапович.
Come to think of it, I suppose that there’s no real need to complicate the issue by proposing that A- plus noun is appositional: it could be possessive, just as it is before clause subjects, so the name “Atiga” Atiig should be taken not as “he/she-who-is-a-tree” but “someone who has a tree” (sc. as a sigir “spiritual guardian.”) This makes more sense of the fact that the A- drops after possessor NPs, too: ti Tiig “our (family’s) Atiga.” In fact, that makes a lot more sense semantically too … moreover, A- doesn’t drop after a NP in apposition: o zua Asibig “his friend Termite” …
So: possessive before nouns, subject before verbs. Simples!
[Apologies for the thinking aloud … drasvi is responsible …]
So, like renard
Yes. There are a number of oddities about Kusaal names for animals, which sometimes suggest that there is a story behind them that one has missed out on somewhere; e.g. akɔradiem “praying mantis”, which has the literal meaning “Hyena’s Parent-in-Law.” I’m just not seeing it …
no problem. In Russian it means: “drasvi is not irresponsible”. Or “drasvi’s in charge”.
@DM, I’d say diminutive rather than baby talk.
@J1M, actually first I was going to list English names and thought about “Grace” as a name that does not have a Russian analog. But then I thought, why not just give the Russian list and when I typed “Faith, Hope…” I checked if the order is the same as Russian and tried to remember the third one.
I couldn’t and I thought maybe Grace? I remember that some weird shift happened to the third name.
@DE, “stranger”
I actually wanted to say that Xenia is seen as a virtue name, but another explanation that it is the same as Barbara and Ghriba, that is “alien”.
Ghriba is a name of many North African synagogues (with tales about a strange girl or woman) also it appears in a Kabyle fairy tale (at least in the version of it in the song by Idir).
And there are many Sidi Ghrib.
I am really curious about its background. Maybe Xerîb or Lameen know somehting.
stranger
It’s an apotropaic name in Kusaal, in fact. Quite a number of traditional names reflect the horribly high incidence of infant mortality, and are given either to throw the malignant spiritual forces responsible off the track, or as the celebration of success in having done so. Names like Atampʋʋr “Rubbish Tip” and Arʋk “Pot” reflect a strategy of pretending to said forces that you don’t really care enough to bury the dead child properly (in some cultures, this is because a string of stillbirths is thought to be due to a revenant spirit reincarnating over and over, and the idea is to discourage it from coming back again, but I don’t think the Kusaasi think of it like that.) Asaan “Stranger” and Asaandʋ “Stranger-Man” as names can be that, or they can reflect another strategy, pretended adoption of the child by an outsider; in the same way, you get names like Anasaapuak “European Woman” (also found as a birth-circumstance name for a child delivered by a European midwife.)
Personal names are (traditionally) given by the father a few days after birth, after he consults a ba’a “diviner” about suitability. They’re all meaningful, but as I say, you often need to know a fair bit about the culture to see how.
Sadly, does not explain the synagogues (one famous in Djerba, several more in Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Morocco unused now due to emigration of Jews) and Sidi Ghrib and stories:(
‘Anasaapuak “European Woman”‘
Must be a boy’s name:)
Well, there’s (supposedly) a St. Barbara, and a St. Xenia, so people with these names are named after the saints.
Virtue names aren’t a thing in German; there are people named Felicitas or Felizitas, but they’re named after one or both of the saints with that name (one of Rome, one of Carthage). Likewise Sophie/Sofie/Sophia. The cardinal virtues are rendered Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, and these are not used as given names – I have, to my enormous surprise, come across a Lene Liebe Delsett, but she’s Swedish, and I’m not sure how her name works in the first place. …Also, Glaube “belief, religious faith” is masculine.
…Secular virtue names are a thing in the form of Viktoria (rare nowadays) and Gloria (very rare), perhaps also Viktor (currently moribund, but formerly fairly common). They showed up in the 19th century.
Is, but the saint’s name also came from somewhere (and must have an original meaning and synchronous interpretations at various points of time).
Of course for Russians it is just “girly name originating with some saint”. Dim. Ksyusha. (for more perverse minds the founder of the haplogroup X…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia_of_Rome:
“Xenia, originally born Eusebia, was the only daughter of a wealthy Senator in Rome. She and two devoted servants of hers, left to avoid an arranged marriage. She escaped to Mylasa, on the island of Kos, where she accepted name “Xenia” (stranger)”
For even more perverse minds there is Inostrancevia:)
Must be a boy’s name
Apparently you can be an Inuit man called Arnaq “Woman”; the tradition was that when someone died, their name (usually a common noun) could not be used until a child was born, who would then be given the name. Regardless …
Kusaal personal names in -puak “female (of a human being)” always belong to females, though. I’m sorry to say that a lot of them are just adaptations of names given to boys, so the younger sister of Awin is likely to end up as Awimpuak; technically this actually means that the siblings have the same sigir “spiritual guardian”, the win (“soul”, kinda) of a forebear on the father’s side of the family; if she’d been a boy she’d have been Awimbil “Little Awini.” There’s no rule that says you’re only allowed one sigir per family, though. And some unfortunate persons don’t have a sigir at all (Europeans, for example.)
For some reason, girls are more likely than boys to be given day-of-the-week names like Atalaata “Tuesday”, though. In fact, only “Friday” and “Saturday” seem to be regarded as appropriate for boys. (No idea.)
@DM, sorry, I realised what you meant. No, I don’t mean that Xenia is a modern “virtue name”. I meant that it could be seen so historically, but there is an objection (it could originally mean “stranger”).
Heh.
For some reason, girls are more likely than boys to be given day-of-the-week names like Atalaata “Tuesday”, though. In fact, only “Friday” and “Saturday” seem to be regarded as appropriate for boys. (No idea.)
Likewise in English (Robinson Crusoe; Weld; Addams).
Weirdly, I was thinking of this recently (suitability of days of the week as nicknames and gender associations).
Inostrancevia is very cute, but Glanosuchus is even more so. Can I have one, Mom? Can I? Pleeez?
Sundays include many Nigerian men and a few Western women.
Понедельник Петрович Семёнов,
Пятница Петровна Семёнова,
Воскресенье Петровно Семёново….
(Monday is masc. Friday is fem. Sunday is neuter.)
Or Воскресенье Христово (where Христово is a surname)
More times: there are Layla/Leyla or Persian Sepideh. I don’t know if the latter originated as a time of the day (there are related Russian Sveta, Indian śvetā) but presently it’s dawn (or shortly before it).
more complicated yet, it’s an inseparable part of some ordinary nouns for animals, e.g. amus “cat”; you can show that it’s the same particle, because it drops after any possessor NP, just as the A- of personal names does, but there’s no hint of personalisation: amus is just “cat”, not “Cat.”
It’s obviously because cats are persons.
perhaps also Viktor (currently moribund, but formerly fairly common).
Not that moribund – the name has been revived by post-Soviet immigration to Germany, like Waldemar (seen as German equivalent of Vladimir).
It’s obviously because cats are persons
While this is obviously correct for cats, it works less well for storks, crows, toads, grasshoppers, agama lizards, bush babies and praying mantiseseses.
Amus is actually a loanword (cf Hausa mussa “cat.”) Another term for “domestic cat” is dɔɔg biig “hut child.” I don’t know what the story is behind that one.
It’s possible, looking at my list of animals in a-, that this a- is really just a “derivational” prefix; quite a lot of Kusaal nouns have such prefixes, which are nearly all of no specific meaning; however, certain semantic groups of nouns are especially prone to being prefixed, notably those referring to smaller animals, birds and insects (the cross-linguistic “creepy-crawly” phenomenon, I guess), e.g. dayuug “rat”, lilaaliŋ “swallow”, silinsiung “spider.”
It would mean that the dropping of a- after possessor NPs would have to be explained as analogical, but that’s not too implausible, really. (Kusaal would be a great language to use for teaching linguistics students about analogical levelling in morphology: lots of clearcut cases …)
One or two of these a- animals turn up with syllabic n as the prefix instead in Toende Kusaal, too, which is probably a point in favour of this analysis, though n as a prefix is itself only seen in personal names in the Agolle Kusaal of my informants. Life is so complicated …
A human speaking about crows and persons. How homosapiential. Caw:/
About Leyla, Sepideh etc. – maybe I associate times with women. Not “вторник” – making it a girl’s name is like introducing another lexeme “вторник without the declension”. On the other hand, a freind of mine has a Ветер “wind” among his students and a friend of mine gave birth to a Север “north” (when she returned form Novaya Zemlya).
making it a girl’s name is like introducing another lexeme
Which indeed it is. Of course, all these things would be much simpler if people would only follow the lead of Kusaal and Mooré and actually mark all personal names as such explicitly: A-Ветер, A-Север …
While this is obviously correct for cats, it works less well for storks, crows, toads, grasshoppers, agama lizards, bush babies and praying mantiseseses.
Are those the same agama lizards proverbially known for wearing trousers?
Of course the very name “bush babies” implies a tradition of (semi-)personhood in at least some culture. Crows are of course famously smart, though I’m not sure if the Kusaasi would have recognized that. Not sure about the others.
EDIT:
and actually mark all personal names as such explicitly
Of course in English (and Russian) that’s what the capitalization does, except 1) we’re also using it for some other stuff and 2) it interacts with the capitalization of sentence starts. [And of course 3) we don’t pronounce it.]
IIRC German was briefly doing the same thing, but very quickly (within decades) moved on to capitalizing all nouns.
I vaguely recall that Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform had a particular sign for introducing a name…
A-Ветер, A-Север …
А Хули…
I vaguely recall that Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform had a particular sign for introducing a name…
𒁹 for male personal names, 𒊩 for female personal names.
Are those the same agama lizards proverbially known for wearing trousers?
Could well be: that one is (in Dagara) bandaa “margouillat”, which (I believe) is indeed the same creature as the Kusaal abangia or atiwindaug (also baŋ.)
The actual exact formal equivalent (apart from noun class) of the Dagara word in Kusaal, bandaug, means “crocodile”, however. I have no data on trouser-wearing among crocodiles as such, but the Bisa ethnic group are said to believe that they are descended from crocodiles, and they certainly do wear trousers. So there you have it.
“Which indeed it is.”
It feels less so when you call a man Ветер.
It is morphologically the same, and at first you will remember the semantics well (maybe even each time you address him, then in situations like this one (when you tell that you know someone called Ветер)).
And only with time you create an entry “Ветер – my friend’s student” (e.g. my first association with Рим is ريم – a girl I know – and only then Rome)
But when a pretty girl is Вторник she’s a красивАЯ Вторник, красивОЙ Вторник, красивУЮ Вторник…
if people would only follow the lead of Kusaal and Mooré and actually mark all personal names as such explicitly
In Lojban that’s the case: every name, whether “native” (meaningful) or “foreign” (meaningless) is prefixed by la, lai, la’i. These are respectively the individual article (la djan ‘John, some Johns’), the mass article (lai djan ‘an aggregate of Johns’), and the set article (la’i djan ‘a set of Johns’). As an exception, the article can be and usually is omitted if the name is prefixed by the vocative particle doi (doi djan ~ doi la djan ‘O John’). The second construction is useful when you want to address people conjunctively (doi la djan e la djordj ‘O John and George’, where *doi djan e djordj would be ungrammatical.
Online Tyndale: “Though I spake with the tonges of me and angels and yet had no love I were eve as soundinge brasse: or as a tynklynge Cymball.”
anhweol said: “I wonder if it should be mē (and also evē for ‘even’), where the diacritic should obviously be expanded as ‘n’ (or ‘m’ potentially where relevant), but no one realised when digitizing.”
Well spotted, that’s exactly what it is in the 1534 edition of Tyndale’s New Testament. This particular stupidity didn’t exist until the 21st century, as far as I can tell. Similarly there’s also “it is good for a ma not to touche a woman”, etc.
At the same time, the online text correctly decodes a couple of sigla that I’d never encountered before: in that verse “and” is actually a symbol that must be an “et” ligature though it’s not like the later ampersand, and “tonges” is actually “tong” followed by a curly loop that represents “es”, occasionally used by the printer in other verses such as “God hath chosyn the weake thinges of the worlde to confounde thinges which are mighty.” I suspect the online Tyndales were derived by OCR from some modern printed edition that already expanded all the sigla except for the macrons, but irritatingly, I couldn’t find any source acknowledgment.