The Rise of Coptic.

Jean-Luc Fournet’s The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity looks like a very interesting book, but I’ll probably never read it (it’s expensive, and Coptic is far from the center of my interests); fortunately, Amazon allows me to see the start, and I’ll quote some of it here in case anybody is intrigued or has something to say on the topic:

It is a particular aspect of the relations between Egyptian and Greek that I would like to examine here: the way in which the Egyptian language, in the new form that it took on during Late Antiquity in Christian milieus, namely that of Coptic, developed and attempted to undermine the monopoly that the Greek language had held for centuries as the official language. What I will analyze, then, is a very specific domain of written culture. […]

I will focus in this book on documentary sources and, more specifically, on those produced within a context regulated by the law and the state […], which in Egypt had long been subject to the monopoly of Greek, namely legal texts that the ancients called dikaiōmata, as well as texts pertaining to the judicial and administrative domain. Our task will be to establish the chronology and mechanisms whereby Egyptian came to enter the domain of regulated writing, thus acquiring an official dimension and becoming an actor in public written culture, to the detriment of the monopoly that Greek had acquired for itself. […]

As is well known, a consequence of the Graeco-Macedonian conquest of Egypt and the establishment of the Ptolemaic Dynasty was the institution of Greek as the official language. This situation remained unchanged when Egypt came under Roman domination (30 BC). In the name of a very Roman type of pragmatism, the new power did not attempt to break with the previous linguistic tradition; rather, by availing itself of existing structures, it accepted that the administration continued using Greek while introducing Latin into it under certain circumstances (some documents originating in the army or regarding it, as well as those related to Roman citizenship). Compared to Greek, Egyptian—the language of the large majority of the population—was employed in multiple written forms depending on the context, of which only one was in common usage: Demotic (as opposed to Hieratic, which was reserved for the writing of literary and religious texts, and hieroglyphics, which were restricted to epigraphy). Even though the last example of Demotic is a graffito left on a wall at the Temple of Philae (452), its “natural” use disappeared much earlier. This writing ceased to be used in letters and tax receipts during the middle of the first century and, except in Egyptian temple environments, no longer served for legal transactions as well after the first century. I will not dwell on the cause of this disappearance, which was the economic decline of temples: Roger Bagnall shed light on this almost thirty years ago. What is of interest to me here are its sociolinguistic consequences. Apart from the temple milieus, the population no longer had a form of writing its primary language at its disposal, and from the first century found itself in a situation of collective “agraphia,” condemned to having to make use of Greek for its written communication. The only way to escape this linguistic schizophrenia was to reinvent a new form of writing. The former system was intrinsically bound to temples (which imparted its teaching through “Houses of Life”); and while temples continued to writhe in their death throes, Christianization, which was gaining significant ground during the third century, triggered this reinvention. In a context characterized by the hegemony of Greek and a departure from writing systems derived from ancient hieroglyphics, the new Egyptian writing could only be Greek. Following experiments (called “Old Coptic”) that had already been performed by Egyptian priests who were increasingly unable to master the ancient Pharaonic writing, Greek graphemes were borrowed. To these were added others, for rendering phonemes specific to Egyptian that Greek letters could not express. The process was certainly neither organized nor linear, but among the multiple trials that were attempted independently, one came to be one step ahead of the others. It spread through stages and mechanisms unknown to us, and spawned Coptic in the traditional sense. […]

What is now certain is that the use of Coptic for nondocumentary purposes tends to precede that for documentary ones. Moreover, we note that it does not take on the form of works in the traditional sense but rather that of annotations to Greek texts, Graeco-Coptic glossaries, or school exercises in Greek sets or bilingual writing exercises. We are therefore faced with a subliterary usage intended for learning oriented toward Greek or based on Greek. […] The few pieces that are available and the absence of irrefutable provenance must encourage us not to come to overly definitive conclusions. It is nevertheless tempting to think that the first generations to use Coptic (in the latter half of the third century) lived in urban milieus—the very same ones that led to the formation of municipal elites—or in villages that were significantly Hellenized. […] It was not until several decades later that this writing, once it had been perfected and had proven itself, seems to have spread to the least Hellenized milieus (monastic ones in particular), which apparently used it for documentary purposes, to communicate among themselves.

The situation is fascinating, and I’m glad it’s being studied.

Comments

  1. There is a hint here of a collapse of the pagan temple system before any great blossoming of Christianity. Perhaps this was also true in Greece and Anatolia.

  2. Eitan Grossman, an Israeli linguist, has recently been showing that Coptic, a language studied intensively for centuries, is a gold mine for new insights in historical linguistics and typology. His personal story is a fun read, too.

  3. Yes, it is:

    The first year course in Coptic was probably the most challenging course I took in my entire BA. The professor, Ariel Shisha-Halevy, was – and is – a radical thinker, who showed me that most of what I thought I knew about language was just a collection of prejudices. I don’t want to eulogize someone who I still see often, so I’ll just say that I kept studying Coptic because I wanted to keep hearing what Shisha-Halevy had to say. I also ended up studying Welsh, Irish, Greek, Somali, Yiddish, Ge’ez, Sidamo, and a little Swahili and Polish, but I was mostly focused on Ancient Egyptian in all of its phases.

    I wanted to keep studying, which meant I had to do some more degrees. I was lucky enough to come into the field of Egyptian linguistics when a lot of the established scholars were a bit tired from some titanic clashes about the nature of the Ancient Egyptian verbal system. This meant that those of us working on the later phases, from Late Egyptian to Coptic, could work on new topics, and I think that our teachers were happy to encourage us in this. Also, a lot of us were reading functionalist and typological literature, which gave us a different perspective. All in all, the community of linguists working on Ancient Egyptian and Coptic is a tremendously exciting and supportive one, and it’s a privilege and a source of ongoing happiness to be a part of it.

    And “gold mine for new insights in historical linguistics and typology” is enticing!

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    There is a hint here of a collapse of the pagan temple system before any great blossoming of Christianity.

    Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians attempts to prove the opposite, suggesting that the idea that classical paganism was moribund anyhow is due to Christian wishful thinking, selective reading of the evidence and/or propaganda, along with the history-is-written-by-the-victors syndrome. It’s years since I read it, but I recall finding it at least very interesting, illuminating and entertaining, but perhaps with a hint of its own kind of wishful thinking.

  5. John Cowan says

    Apart from the temple milieus, the population no longer had a form of writing its primary language at its disposal, and from the first century found itself in a situation of collective “agraphia,” condemned to having to make use of Greek for its written communication.

    That’s pretty misleading: certainly knowledge of writing in any form was not widely dispersed among the population. It should probably read “administrators and lawyers”, though from the -4C to the 2C, Demotic was also a literary script. I do not think it would be le mot juste to say that English lawyers were condemned to write (increasingly bad) French from 1066 to 1658 (Coke’s Institutes said it was almost no longer spoken).

    (Today I learned that a zygote still in vitro (not yet implanted) is legally en ventre sa mere [sic], both for the purpose of taking property under a will or by intestate succession and as the victim of a tort.)

  6. There must be some irony in the fact that a French professor, with numerous previous publications in French, apparently felt compelled to write this book in English. Or maybe that gives him special sympathies with the beleaguered Egyptians forced to write in a foreign language.

  7. David Marjanović says

    Or he simply wanted to reach a larger audience.

    the least Hellenized milieus (monastic ones in particular)

    That surprises me.

    suggesting that the idea that classical paganism was moribund anyhow is due to Christian wishful thinking, selective reading of the evidence and/or propaganda, along with the history-is-written-by-the-victors syndrome.

    Interesting. I’d have thought Christian wishful thinking would have produced “the land was full of devil-worshippers up to the moment that the Church Triumphant arrived” rather than “the Church won unopposed in a vacuum”.

    en ventre sa mere [sic]

    Invisible Latin genitive!

  8. Yes, simple apposition without a preposition is a normal way to indicate the genitive in Old French.

  9. ə de vivre says

    @dm, re. (non-)Hellenized monks,
    In the East Syriac context, “Christian learning” constituted an intellectual discipline that was seen as separate from, and often at odds with, Greco-Latin education. Important monks often knew Greek, and there was certainly intellectual activity that engaged with the Greek intellectual tradition, but there wasn’t a tradition of monastic study of pagan classics like what eventually led to the development of the university in Western Christianity. It wouldn’t surprise me if (Christology aside) the situation was similar in the Coptic context.

  10. David Eddyshaw says

    Bentley Layton’s Coptic Grammar, a work which I myself find profoundly irritating because of its stylistic quirks, but is nonetheless well regarded by experts, says

    There are almost no secular intellectual, educational or technical works in Coptic nor belles lettres. For access to such literature, Egyptian readers would have turned to the broader and more varied literature available to them in Greek or Arabic, languages to which Coptic was always politically and socially subordinate.

    He says also that there is a conspicuous absence of systematic theology and works by the great Church fathers, “which would have been read in Greek, Arabic or Syriac, if at all.”

    On the other hand he mentions abundant legal and business documents, school texts, and personal letters both secular and religious.

  11. Trond Engen says

    It was not until several decades later that this writing, once it had been perfected and had proven itself, seems to have spread to the least Hellenized milieus (monastic ones in particular), which apparently used it for documentary purposes, to communicate among themselves.

    This is interesting because it’s pretty much the opposite of what I’d expect. Monasteries in all religion were powerful institutions. They interacted with the leading classes in politics, business, law, etc, It woudn’t have surpised me if they were early hellenophones that none-the-less clinged on to an increasingy quaint and ornamental form of the ancient language.

  12. A little off topic, but found a cool video of someone pronouncing ancient languages. I didn’t notice Coptic, but they had Middle Egyptian. (I am not sure how accurate the pronunciations are)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUphYFUFnsY&feature=youtu.be

  13. Athelstan John Cornish-Bowden says

    About 20 years ago I bought Champollion’s Grammaire Egyptienne for 158 francs in a supermarket. (Yes, a supermarket! It’s always a good idea to check the book section of a French supermarket, because sometimes you’ll find some very surprising and interesting offers.) I was very surprised at how far he could get with the language only a few years after he could read hieroglyphics. Later I realized that Coptic, which Champollion probably knew already, was the essential key.

  14. David Marjanović says

    Yes, Champollion studied Coptic first.

    “Christian learning” constituted an intellectual discipline that was seen as separate from, and often at odds with, Greco-Latin education.

    I’m just surprised that Christian learning wasn’t itself in Greek, like the New Testament, the Septuagint, the Church Fathers and whatnot.

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    Coptic, which Champollion probably knew already, was the essential key.

    Very much so. There’s the famous story of his deciphering the cartouche of Rameses (on the basis of signs with phonetic values known from cartouches for the Ptolemies) when he realised that “SUN” + m + s reflected Coptic re “sun” and verb form mose “be born.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Champollion#Names_of_rulers

  16. ə de vivre says

    I’m just surprised that Christian learning wasn’t itself in Greek, like the New Testament, the Septuagint, the Church Fathers and whatnot.

    Churches in the East had fewer scruples about translating religious texts than in the Latin West. The literate traditions in Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac (as the Edessine standard of Eastern Aramaic) came into being essentially as extensions of the churches whose liturgies they recorded. The question of the role that texts in Greek played in an interesting one. There are commentaries on Aristotle in Armenian, Syriac, and Georgian, but AFAIK there was no translation project like that for Arabic that would have made entire texts of Aristotle’s available in translation. In those cases, being on the outer limits of Greek culture and a lack of a tradition of Greek paidea educational organization meant that being literate didn’t automatically mean acquiring a Greek cultural identity. In Egypt, with its much more significant Greek population, I wonder if Christianity appealed precisely to those who weren’t already socially privileged, and therefore less likely to be invested in Greek culture.

  17. I remember reading an interesting comment about Rus reception of Greek culture after Christianization.

    There were many Rus intellectuals who could read Greek, considerable number of books were translated into Slavonic (and there were even more books translated into Slavonic by Bulgarians).

    But…

    The topics they were interested in seemed to be very narrow. For example, there was little interest in Ancient Greek history, culture or philosophy. Very few literature works were translated (for example, they didn’t bother translating Homer!)

    They were mostly concerned with works of Christian authors, geography, world and Byzantine history, things like that. From ancient history, they translated Judean War by Flavius Josephus.

    This lack of cultural sophistication is blamed for the strange turn Russian history took after fall of Constantinople.

  18. @SFReader: Different Christianized (and, although to a less pronounced degree, Islamized) cultures have varied tremendously in how much they preserved elements of their previous pagan religion and folklore as part of their culture. Consider the almost total absence of Germanic myths in the later culture of England. (This is due, no doubt, in large measure to the Norman conquest, but the key fact is that retention of pre-Christian culture is highly contingent; the arrival of a French-speaking upper class is merely the specific contingency responsible in this case.)

  19. I’d say it firmly predates the Norman conquest: Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo? ‘What does Ingeld [a famous hero of legend on both the English and the Norse side] have to do with Christ?’ was written by an English scholar to an English bishop. Quite otherwise was the attitude of the Church both in the North Germanic lands and in Ireland. That’s why Tolkien wanted to invent a mythology for his country, because it had none surviving except in scraps.

  20. @John Cowan: I don’t think I follow what you are trying to say.

  21. David Marjanović says

    Consider the almost total absence of Germanic myths in the later culture of England.

    Or for that matter Germany.

  22. David Eddyshaw says

    On the other hand, a fair bit survived in Welsh tradition right up to the eleventh century and the Mabinogi(on), albeit very heavily euhemerised; and all the more so in Ireland, of course. Lugh of the Long Hand/Lleu Llaw Gyffes is still going strong in the stories, for example, long after he founded Lyon for the Gauls. (Still, in the Welsh version his mother has to put a geas on him in order for his epithet to get explained.)

  23. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    I suppose you are being facetious in saying that Lugh Lamhfhada = Lugh Longhand instead of Lugh Longarm. Old Irish has both “hand” and “arm” for the word lam, and it would surprise me if Welsh had only “hand”.

  24. David Eddyshaw says

    Welsh llaw is specifically “hand.” Our forebears were uncertain as to how to attach them to the body before they discovered the Roman bracchium and borrowed it.

    Lleu Llaw Gyffes is “Lleu of the Skilful Hand”; in-universe, his mother is tricked into giving him the name* by admiration of his accuracy in hitting a wren with a stone.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lleu_Llaw_Gyffes#Lleu_and_the_tynghedau_of_Arianrhod

    WP says of Lugh: His most common epithets are Lámfada ([ˈlaːwad̪ˠə], “of the long hand,” possibly for his skill with a spear or his ability as a ruler) and Samildánach (“equally skilled in many arts”).

    *They are a troubled family.

  25. Trond Engen says

    Cool Hand Luke.

  26. David Eddyshaw says

    The archetypes endure …

    Lleu is luckier than Paul Newman, though. Eventually. Comes of being a god, I suppose.

    (Synthetic women: they’re nothing but trouble. There’s a moral there; probably ecological.)

  27. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    The cite for the explanation of the epithet in Wikipedia is Koch. Do you know where he gets it from? The explanation that “skilled with weapon” > “long hand” appears to me ad-hoc.
    Here is lamfota from eDil:

    ḟota: is hé . . . leithinchind lamfota, TBC-LL¹ 5400. In n.pr. Lug(aid) Lámḟota: airemh Logha Lamhfoda for na Fomhoraibh, TBC St. 570. As nickname: Osbrit lamfota, BDD 116

    There is also Feradach Lamfota in the book of Leinster. Whatever about Lugh and Feradach, I don’t see why a Saxon ally of convenience Osbrit/Osberht/Osbert would get an epithet “skilled with weapons”–longarmed would seem better than either this or longhanded.

  28. January First-of-May says

    “of the long hand”

    Many centuries later, and with similar uncertainty on epithet meaning, there’s George of the Long Hands (or possibly “Arms” – Russian uses the same word for both… modern Russian, anyway, not sure if it already did back then), traditionally founder of Moscow (though IIRC he mostly just happened to get tied up in the oldest attested mention) and less famously of about two dozen other towns in the general vicinity.

  29. David Eddyshaw says

    Talking of handy gods, there’s Huitzilopochtli “Left Hand Like a Hummingbird.”*

    He’s not a nice god though. Not a woobie like our Lleu. And as for their mothers: whatever you think of Arianrhod as a parent (and she’s not an ideal mother), she’s surely not as bad as Coatlicue.

    *Per Richard Andrews’ Introduction to Classical Nahuatl; WP is wrong. (Astonishing, I know.)

  30. John Emerson says

    I have been told that to the Aztecs the hummingbird is a fierce warrior who darts on and stabs you before you know it.

  31. John Cowan says

    Brett: I’m saying that England was already suppressing its native mythology in the monasteries by the 8C, long before the Conquest.

    Welsh llaw is specifically “hand.”

    Indeed, its Latin cognate is palma, which when borrowed into English displaced the OE cognate flom. None of these have ever meant, as far as our evidence shows, anything but ‘hand, palm’, so the Irish sense is I suppose an innovation. Wikt’s only quotation for it is a 9C gloss on lacertus ‘lizard’, viz. doe láme.

    JE: Perhaps that is why their human-sacrifice-taking expeditions were known as ‘flower wars’.

  32. I think, lacertus ‘arm’, rather than ‘lizard’.

    P.S.and the gloss, with the manuscript’s page.

  33. It is nevertheless tempting to think that the first generations to use Coptic (in the latter half of the third century) lived in urban milieus—the very same ones that led to the formation of municipal elites—or in villages that were significantly Hellenized. […] It was not until several decades later that this writing, once it had been perfected and had proven itself, seems to have spread to the least Hellenized milieus (monastic ones in particular), which apparently used it for documentary purposes, to communicate among themselves.

    I think, TE’s and DM’s questions need some context.

    Diocletianic Persecution 303–311
    Constantine the Great 306-337 (rule, of course)
    Council of Nicaea 325

    Anthony the Great 251 – 356, claimed by the Wikipedia to be the first guy called “monk”:)
    Pachomius the Great 292 – 348, claimed by the Wikipedia to be the first guy called “abb[ot]”.


    As for Christology, from the life of another founder, Sabbas, just 5th century:

    He then transferred the Armenians from the little oratory to performing the office of psalmody in the Armenian language in the church built by God, telling them to recite the Gospel and the rest of the sequence in the office on their own in Armenian and then join the Greek-speakers at the time of the holy sacrifice in order to partake of the divine mysteries. But when some of them tried to recite the Trishagion hymn with the addition “who was crucified for us” concocted by Peter nicknamed the Fuller, the godly man was rightly indignant and ordered them to chant this hymn in Greek according to the ancient tradition of the catholic Church and not according to the innovation of the said Peter, who had shared the opinions of Eutyches

    But it is some 150-200 years later and the Holy Land. (from)

  34. Not a “milieu” yet. Not the modern sort of it.

  35. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    Here is Ètain from Togail Bruidne Da Derga :

    Batar gelglana sithfhota na méra. Batar fota na láma. Ba gilithir úan tuindi in taeb seng fota tláith mín maeth amal olaind.

    The first sentence recalls her bright-clean longlong [sithfhota] fingers. The second sentence says without elaboration that her hands were long [fota]. The third sentence says with a lot of comparison (foam of waves, flour, wool) that her flanks were soft, long, slender and bright (or white). The following sentence concerns her thighs but should not concern us (or indeed the very august cleric who wrote this all down).
    If you wanted, you could argue for arms instead of hands because fingers-arms-side-thighs has less discontinuity than fingers-hands-side-thighs, but taking the other sources into account, it would appear more likely that long hands were singled out as a mark of beauty or martial prowess. So I apologise for doubting our resident Saoi ????

  36. David Eddyshaw says

    Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant hapus i bawb, by the way. (I am moved to patriotic fervour by the strains of Hen Wlad fy Nhadau being rendered lustily by my colleague next door.)

  37. P.S.and the gloss, with the manuscript’s page.

    Wow, that’s great, and you can click on a link there to get the analysis of the Old Irish.

  38. doé “The upper arm from shoulder to elbow, humerus (oppd. to lám arm in general and rig forearm).”

  39. Also, Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant hapus to all the Davids here!

  40. Yes, that is cool. And note, you can link at “DIL” in doë 2 [DIL] and have DIL entry in another tab.

    And it is well programmed, I mean, it works instead of loading and then working.


    by her hands not from the arse grow, some russians would say abotu the programmer

  41. Still for many years this line is a mystery for me.

    Cid ríagail fo-certa forsna traigthib is ing má ‘d-chotad égoir n-indib acht ci tórmaisead feóil ná fortche foraib

  42. (That’s a quote from Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, for those following along at home.)

  43. John Cowan says

    And in these piping times of peace, may no one ever bid you eat your leek.

  44. PlasticPaddy says

    @drasvi, hat
    I think the idea is that you can only make her feet and steps look less perfect by putting shoes on her, along the lines of the woman who wore only a few drops of perfume…

  45. David Marjanović says

    The following sentence concerns her thighs but should not concern us (or indeed the very august cleric who wrote this all down).

    Thread won.

    Dewi Sant

    Oh. I was only aware of Dec. 11th and 29th.

  46. David Eddyshaw says

    Not only was he actually real, he was even a native of the country he’s patron saint of (suck it up, England, Scotland and Ireland!)

    However, worthy as His Bishopness surely is, the coolest-named St David must surely be

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_the_Dendrite

  47. @PlasticPaddy, wow. This makes sense!

    Stokes’ translation goes: “Justly straight and beautiful the two heels. If a measure were put on the feet it would hardly have found them unequal, unless the flesh of the coverings should grow upon them.”

    More modern translation: “Short and white and straight her shins; fine and straight and lovely her heels. If a rule were put against her feet, scarcely a fault would be found save for her plenitude of flesh or skin. ”

    Finally the Russian translation – and I knew the author in person – suggested that her skin swole up in water!

    It is not how you compliment a lady at all. (there is a joke though: “you have beautiful legs, especially the left one”) But what you just said makes perfect sense.

  48. Stu Clayton says

    along the lines of the woman who wore only a few drops of perfume…

    ???? “You can leave your hat on” ????????

  49. David Marjanović says

    June 26th! So close…

    Dendrite.

  50. David Eddyshaw says

    The immediate associations for me are different; unfortunately there seems to be no St Norbert the Neurone, nor even a St Auxentius the Axon.

  51. “Axon” does sound for all the world like a Byzantine title.

  52. David Eddyshaw says

    My favourite Byzantine title (apart from “Domestic of the Excubitors”, obviously) is probably “Silentiary.”

  53. Trond Engen says

    David, den dritten.

  54. My favourite Byzantine title (apart from “Domestic of the Excubitors”, obviously) is probably “Silentiary.”

    I mean, how can you choose just one? Nobelissimos, Proedros, Vestes, Anthypatos, Protospatharios (note that Ivan the Russian was a protospatharios), Dishypatos, Apoeparchon, Ostiarios, Spatharokoubikoularios, Nipsistiarios, Protallagator, Eparch, Exarch… You don’t even have to pay them if you give them a resounding enough title!

  55. David Eddyshaw says

    David, den dritten

    Den vierten is the best:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV_of_Georgia

    I mean, how can you choose just one?

    How indeed? Those Byzantines gave good title.

  56. There should have been a Synaptic Synod.

    (Of course, all synods are made up of synapsids.)

  57. St Norbert the Neurone, or close enough.

  58. David Eddyshaw says

    Involved in the origin story of Dr Demento, no less.
    (I don’t really follow Marvel Comics, though.)

  59. ktschwarz says

    its Latin cognate is palma, which when borrowed into English displaced the OE cognate flom

    That’s folm, most famous as what Grendel left behind in Beowulf’s grip, together with his earm and eaxle. Found mainly in poetry, so probably it was already falling out of everyday use even before the Normans. (Nitpick: palm (of the hand) was borrowed into English from French, rather than directly from Latin.)

    Meanwhile, palm (tree) had been borrowed into Germanic from Latin way back, and was later reinforced in English by the French influence.

  60. David Marjanović says

    Palme in German, though, so if it was borrowed before the HG Consonant Shift, it’s been completely replaced.

  61. PlasticPaddy says

    @dm
    Could some early borrowed words have been subject to retention of the P sound due to coexistence of a Latin form that would be heard regularly in Church? If not, does this mean that the names Peter, Paulus, Philipp and words like Palme and Bischof (partly sound-shifted!) were all borrowed (or restored) after the sound shift?

  62. David Marjanović says

    I think all of those were either borrowed later or restored (often immediately, though I don’t think anyone was named Philipp before the 18th or 17th century).

    Bischof is wholly shifted.

    There are words like Pech “pitch, bad luck” that may have been borrowed in a Middle German area where part of the shift didn’t reach, and spread south later.

    The forms Tebit and Teniel are attested from OHG times (to my great surprise). And concerning a much later vowel shift, paradise first became Paradeis and was then restored to Paradies.

  63. Owlmirror says

    Protallagator,

    Now I’m envisioning a quiz: Byzantine title or Archosaur?

  64. minsourator

  65. David Marjanović says

    Paralligator is an archosaur.

  66. ktschwarz says

    Palme in German, though, so if it was borrowed before the HG Consonant Shift, it’s been completely replaced.

    D’oh, right, I saw “Originally < classical Latin palma” and naively thought it was borrowed in classical times. No, rather, it was borrowed *in parallel* into all Germanic languages via Bible translations. According to the OED quotations, palm trees appeared in English only in religious references (Palm Sunday, palmers, etc.) until the age of exploration. Still, the palm tree did get into English before the palm of the hand.

    In other palm-related etymology, date (fruit) is via French and Latin from Greek δάκτυλος, probably from Aramaic diqlā or some other Semitic language, altered by folk etymology for its finger-like shape. More at Balashon.

  67. I forgot to elaborate on my earlier comment about Germanic mythological elements being virtually completely absent from English culture for a very long time (in a way that Celtic elements were not). It is certainly true that, even in the European Dark Ages, there was a strong move to drive out older pagan Germanic elements, and similar moves existed in much of continental western and central Europe as well. However, the old Germanic gods and spirits were ultimately swept away much more fully in England than, say, Germany. In modern times, it was possible for Richard Wagner to write a hugely popular operatic epic based on Nibelungenlied (and older parallel works like the Volsung’s Saga), but no one in England could have written something like Das Rheingold in 1869; it would have been perceived as utterly foreign. To take another example (which I read fairly recently) from a similar time period, when H. Rider Haggard published Eric Brighteyes in 1890, he included a introduction and explanatory remarks for readers who he expected to have no prior knowledge of pagan Norse/Germanic culture at all.

    However, I think the survival of more Celtic elements actually makes sense in contrast. Celtic folklore probably remained more prominent in England, because the country was continuously in contact with Celtic societies to the north and west. Even though Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland were Christianized relatively contemporaneously with England, a substantial amount of Celtic folklore was preserved in such places, and the non-Germanic insular peoples retained the legends and stories as a part of their distinctive Celtic identities.

  68. In modern times, it was possible for Richard Wagner to write a hugely popular operatic epic based on Nibelungenlied (and older parallel works like the Volsung’s Saga), but no one in England could have written something like Das Rheingold in 1869; it would have been perceived as utterly foreign.
    I think the big difference is that epics like the Nibelungenlied survived into the High Middle Ages. They were cleansed of the old gods – when Wagner wrote his operas, he had to import the “back story” about the pagan gods from Norse myth – but the basic stories of Siegfried and the dragon, of his deeds and death, and about Kriemhild’s revenge had survived as part of the national heritage.
    One reason for this survival was that Germany was christianized about two centuries later than England (with a major contribution by English missionaries). Not that there were no attempts to erase the old myths – famously, Charlemagne had ordered the old myths to be collected, only for his son Louis the Pious (the name says it all) to have that collection destroyed. The other reason was that, when the time came for the things the nobles liked to listen to to be written down, in the High Middle Ages, the German nobility was native, with a tradition of listening to the Germanic epics, while the English nobility was Norman French, with similar interests to French nobility, which included Arthurian romance, but not the Germanic epics.

  69. David Eddyshaw says

    I just recently found out that the town of Carlisle/Caerliwelydd also owes its name, if indirectly, to Lugh/Lleu the Manually/Brachially Gifted:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luguvalium

  70. Celtic myth in the form of Arthurian romance was also quite popular on the continent; among the popular works of medieval Germany are several that involve knights of the round table. It’s special place in English mythology is due, IMO, to that it was ready-made local material to be used for building national myths starting from the Elizabethan age (the valiant king and his knights defending the sceptered isle from invaders). The Arthurian myths then opened the door for other Celtic myths.

  71. David Eddyshaw says

    This guy

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lludd_Llaw_Eraint

    who seems to be the god Nodens dressed down a bit, also has the “hand” thing going on.
    (Nodens was familiar to me from Arthur Machen’s excellent The Great God Pan.)

    The WP article wrongly claims that “Ludgate” in London is named after him, but the truth is duller:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludgate

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    building national myths starting from the Elizabethan age

    Well before that: Le Morte Darthur was one of William Caxton’s best-sellers.
    Elizabethan myth-building centred on The Faerie Queene, a vastly more respectable tale than Malory’s.

  73. Rodger C says

    the truth is duller

    The truth seems to be unknown.

  74. Lars Mathiesen says

    Blame the romanticists. In Denmark Oehlenschläger wrote Guldhornene in 1820, and then they “discovered” Saxo and the sagas. Before 1800 only philologists knew about that stuff, after 1820 every school child knew about Tor og Odin. Germany had die Brüder.

    I guess the British were busy with more important stuff at the time, like inventing the climate crisis.

  75. I guess the British were busy with more important stuff at the time
    *cough*Ossian*cough*

  76. J.W. Brewer says

    There were, perhaps not by coincidence, Danish scholars involved in the early 19th-century revival of Beowulf as a text English-speakers might actually have heard of in school, after seven-hundred-plus-years of having been forgotten. But then the English got into it themselves.

  77. David Marjanović says

    However, the old Germanic gods and spirits were ultimately swept away much more fully in England than, say, Germany. In modern times, it was possible for Richard Wagner to write a hugely popular operatic epic based on

    …Romanticism and nationalism. After the Middle Ages, I don’t think the Nibelungenlied was widely known before the early 19th century, and, as mentioned, Wagner had to import the gods wholesale from Norse myth because we still don’t know if most of that stuff ever even existed in West Germanic.

  78. David Eddyshaw says

    Even though Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland were Christianized relatively contemporaneously with England

    Surely not? The Brythons, at any rate, were Christianish since Roman times, though admittedly that may have been more those fancy-pants perfumed Latin speakers in the towns than the rugged sheep-loving peasantry (“pagans” being called “pagans” for a reason.) Even so, there’s plenty of specifically Christian vocabulary among the Latin loanwords in Welsh, for example eglwys “church”, pregeth “sermon”, allor “altar”, pechod “sin” …

    Gildas bangs on at length about how crap our (Christian) priests were, but at least we had some:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Excidio_et_Conquestu_Britanniae

    We even grew our very own major heretic:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagius

  79. David Eddyshaw says

    (Mind you, Pelagius may have been Irish. Per WP, Jerome thought it might all have been the fault of the porridge. Scotorum pultibus praegravatus.)

  80. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were christianised under strong participation of missionaries from Ireland. In a nutshell, it went like this:
    1) Roman Britain became mostly Christian.
    2) British missionaries christianised Ireland
    3) With the Anglo-Saxon invasions, the east of Britain became mostly pagan again
    4) The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms then were re-christianised by missionaries from Ireland and the continent.
    I don’t know what the sequence was for Celtic Scotland, but I suspect a combination of Irish mission and Christian immigration from Ireland.

  81. Owlmirror says

    Jerome thought it might all have been the fault of the porridge.

    Breakfast of Champions Heretics . . . !!

  82. David Eddyshaw says

    Celtic Scotland

    Ystrad Clwyd and Gododdin, at any rate, don’t seem to have been very Christian in the sixth century. Of the three most famous missionaries of that time, Kentigern was a Briton

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mungo

    Columba was assuredly Irish, and Ninian seems to have been a pious figment* (the best kind of missionary, being the cheapest to maintain):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninian

    *Or possibly a misprint.

  83. i.e. mere empty calories.

  84. David Marjanović says

    pechod “sin”

    …so that belongs to the Classical-ish layer, where the Classical distinction of a and ā is maintained as a vs. o. In Proto-Romance it was already gone.

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    The g of pregeth “sermon” remains velar, too, despite the fact that the word is from praeceptum (which also shows that Welsh didn’t preserve Latin length distinctions in unstressed syllables. Non omnia possumus omnes.)

    Cf cwyr “wax”, from cēra.

  86. David Marjanović says

    The palatalization is a later development, absent in Sardinian and partly in Vegliot and the like. But I guessed it was from praedicātum, like German Predigt*; that would require a few much later developments (and probably still wouldn’t work then).

    * Well, that’s feminine, so it might be from the plural praedicāta.

  87. @David Eddyshaw: Nodens gets mentioned a few times in Lovecraft, especially in in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where he is the lord of the night-gaunts. (Nodens is mentioned six times in the text—three times as “archaic Nodens,” twice as “hoary Nodens,” and once as “immemorial Nodens.”) I don’t think it had previously occurred to me, but given how strongly Lovecraft was influenced by The Great God Pan, it seems likely that Lovecraft’s mentions were intended specifically as homages to Machen.

  88. John Cowan says

    Probably. Nodens appears in three Romano-British inscriptions, and Tolkien wrote an article “On The Name ‘Nodens'”, where he connects it with the Irish Nuadha and the Welsh Nudd (later Lludd; the king of the Underworld is Gwyn ap Nudd, and both versions bear the epithet “Silver-hand”), and conjectures that Nodens is etymologically ‘the trapper’, ‘the snarer’, or ‘the hunter’.

  89. ktschwarz says

    Welsh llaw is specifically “hand.” Our forebears were uncertain as to how to attach them to the body before they discovered the Roman bracchium and borrowed it.

    Much like the early English, who had feet but no legs (only bones, having neglected to bring the Germanic BONE-LEG colexification with them from the continent). They had to make do with shanks, until the Vikings arrived bringing legs.

    Are there languages besides Irish where a word specifically for “hand” has broadened to include the arm? It seems like there should be. The OED’s “hand” and “foot” entries are recently updated and have notes on Caribbean use of “hand” for the entire arm and “foot” for the leg; they think that’s “probably after a West African language; compare Igbo aka, Twi nsá, Kongo kôko, etc.”

    That’s external influence, though; what about examples from internal development? PIE *ǵʰes- is reconstructed as ‘hand’ but some of its descendants include the arm, even as early as Ancient Greek, where χείρ (source of “chiral”) could mean both hand and arm, and so does its Modern Greek descendant.

    Among the Indo-Iranian descendants: Old Persian dasta is ‘hand’, vs. Modern Persian دست (dast) ‘hand; arm’. Also Sanskrit हस्त (hásta) ‘hand’, vs. Marathi हात (hāt) ‘hand; arm’. Caveat: this is all from Wiktionary, I could be missing something.

    Are there any cases of going the other direction, narrowing from ‘hand, arm’ to just one of them?

  90. January First-of-May says

    There’s some relevant discussion in this recent thread (after a map focusing on words for “hand” and “arm” in various European languages), though I don’t recall if it touched on this subject in particular.

  91. David Marjanović says

    having neglected to bring the Germanic BONE-LEG colexification with them from the continent

    I’d have thought that’s a recent innovation of part of German, and bone meaning “bone” alone while “leg” is included in “foot” is the original situation.

    Are there any cases of going the other direction, narrowing from ‘hand, arm’ to just one of them?

    That’s probably very common.

  92. John Emerson says

    This thread is still alive, so I thought I’d ask: how Christian is Beowulf. I read a few passages with some care and then skimmed quickly through the rest, mostly in translation. and the conclusion I came to was: not very. I found monotheism and rejection of demons, but the former seemed mixed with sun-worship, and to my knowledge pagans weren’t fond of demons either. And besides that there was one explicitly Christian passage (as I remember) but it didn’t seem at all well integrated into the rest of the poem.

  93. “How Christian is Beowulf?” is a question on which you can seemingly find an almost unlimited range of views.

  94. John Emerson says

    I I can safely stick with “not very”, while suggesting that those who claiming that it is deeply Christian are delusional?

  95. ktschwarz says

    Germanic BONE-LEG colexification … I’d have thought that’s a recent innovation of part of German

    OED s.v. bone (updated 2018) says:

    Etymology: Cognate with Old Frisian bēn bone, (also) leg (West Frisian bien bone, leg), Old Dutch bēn leg, bone (Middle Dutch, Dutch been), Old Saxon bēn bone (Middle Low German bēn, bein leg, bone), Old High German, Middle High German bein bone, leg (German Bein, now chiefly in sense ‘leg’), Old Icelandic bein bone, (lower) leg, Old Swedish, Swedish ben bone, leg, Old Danish, Danish ben bone, leg; further etymology uncertain.

    As both senses (‘bone’ and ‘leg’) appear to go back to Germanic, it has been suggested that the word originally denoted a long bone of the leg, perhaps specifically the femur. However, a suggestion that the word is related to the Old Icelandic adjective beinn ‘straight’ cannot be either substantiated or disproved, as that word is itself of uncertain origin and without parallels in West Germanic.

    So it sounds like both senses are attested in all branches of Germanic at earlier stages, but it was narrowed to ‘bone’ very early in English, and to ‘leg’ in Modern German. They also note the very slight evidence for bān referring to the leg in Old English: only a few ambiguous quotations for the word itself, plus a couple of compounds, bān(ge)beorg and bānrift, meaning ‘leg covering, greaves’.

    while “leg” is included in “foot” is the original situation

    In Germanic? Why? I haven’t found any support for that in any dictionary; that is, if someone says their “foot” is broken in any Germanic language, then you know the break is below the ankle — except Caribbean English, or Surinamese Dutch (etymologiebank.nl indicates the same broadening happened to voet there, and I wonder if that’s also a substrate language effect).

  96. Lars Mathiesen says

    In Danish, FWIW, a bone in a living body is a knogle (an MLG borrowing, cognate with knuckle of course), while the material (used in crafts) as well as bones in meat are still ben. Ivory is elfenben, for instance.

    But fish always have ben, I think — it’s hard to tell because you only talk about them when the fish is food, I never heard of a vet treating a broken fish bone. They don’t have legs anyway, so no scope for confusion…

    Which long bone do people break most often? If it’s the femur or the tibia, there is a natural way for ‘breaking your bone’ to specialize into ‘breaking your leg.’ Also those are the bones that will immobilize you most severely if you break them. So I would not find it weird if the sense transferred in that direction in PG, but that’s not evidence.

  97. PlasticPaddy says

    @ktschwarz
    The “foot” word in the sense of leg is attested in North Germanic (ON, Elfd). and according to etymologiebank.nl, ” — In vele dial. (o.a. Noord-Holl., deel Zuidholl. kust, Utrecht enz.) is voet ook ‘been’ gaan betekenen…”. Middle English has “grete fote” = leg and “litel fote” = foot. So it could be a North and Coastal Germanic thing, but saying there is no support in any dictionary (even for German DWDS lists a meaning “foot or leg of a small animal”) is a bit extreme.

  98. Stu Clayton says

    In Danish … the material (used in crafts) as well as bones in meat are still ben. Ivory is elfenben, for instance.

    Eisbein

  99. ktschwarz says

    Lars, interesting — Danish makes a distinction that English “bone” doesn’t.

    PP, thanks, I should’ve said “as far as I can understand from a brief look at DWDS and etymologiebank”; I skimmed etymologiebank too quickly and forgot to look at Kroonen. (The best way to get the answer to a question is to post the wrong answer.) I did see “die Maus hat vier Füße” in DWDS, but thought that was sufficiently minor that if you have to make a binary choice — does Fuß include the leg, yes or no? — then it’s no. But of course that’s an oversimplification.

    Middle English “grete fote” (or “grete hand”) was a calque from Greek and Latin, and only ever used in anatomy and medicine. Not a language-internal development.

    So the preponderance of the evidence is still that Proto-Germanic *fōt- did not originally include the leg (and neither did PIE *pṓds), but it did broaden to include the leg in some branches — and those include Icelandic, Faroese, and Yiddish, which I forgot to check before.

    People! Legs and feet are not new! You’ve already got words for them, why do you keep changing them???

  100. Trond Engen says

    Northern Norwegians too can break a foot above the knee. When my youngest brother was about six, our Northern Norwegian father used to take him walking in the local hills every afternoon. When my brother got tired they sat down on a rock by the road, took out a chocilate bar from the rucksack, and said Det er ikke så lett når man har så stutte føtter “It’s not easy work with such short feet”.

  101. David Marjanović says

    So it sounds like both senses are attested in all branches of Germanic at earlier stages, but it was narrowed to ‘bone’ very early in English, and to ‘leg’ in Modern German.

    Interesting.

    I was going with generic Bavarian (as I mentioned in the other thread), where “leg” is vaguely included in “foot” as in Trond’s example, the cognate of Bein (where it still exists) means “bone” exclusively, “arm” is vaguely included in “hand” and the cognate of Arm doesn’t exist. Bein meaning “bone” survives in Standard German in the fixed phrases Stein und Bein and Mark und Bein, in Elfenbein “ivory” (dentine isn’t bone, but whatever), in Gebeine for bones as remains of people (…oddly, that’s a plurale tantum of what would already be a collective), in the anatomical names of a lot of bones (Nasenbein “nasal”, Stirnbein “frontal”…; note that a broken nose is more likely to be expressed with Nasenbein than with Nase regardless of register), in the recently obsolete word Fischbein “whalebone” (now Barten pl.; basically hair, more or less like a rhinoceros horn) – and my impression is that knöchern “made of bone” surpassed beinern in frequency only in the 20th or perhaps late 19th century, but I’m not going to fire up Google Ngrams at this time of the night. Unspecified Bein as a material for crafts probably shows the same development vs. Knochen.

    People! Legs and feet are not new! You’ve already got words for them, why do you keep changing them???

    Happens to heads, too. One reason is dysphemism.

  102. It is linguists nightmare.

    A language where nothing ever changes since Homo heidelbergensis, the only 21st century semi-addition to (global, of course) vocabulary is “iPhone” (the previous being “e-mail”).

  103. ktschwarz says

    Thanks Trond! There’s another hole poked in my hasty over-generalization. So how did this patchwork come about? Did fótr include the leg only in parts of Old Norse? Or did it include the leg in all of Old Norse, but narrowed back to the foot in some descendants?

    The CLICS table of LEG-FOOT colexifications lists about a dozen modern Indo-European languages where the reflex of PIE *pṓds includes the leg, e.g. Romanian, Modern Greek, Persian. I guess we can’t be too sure whether it originally included the leg or not, considering that there’s no other reconstructable PIE word for ‘leg’.

  104. I guess it’s time for lahwaz to make an appearance.

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