Souag on Arabic Colloquial Folk Etymologies

 Scholars routinely lament the lack of a really good, scholarly, dictionary of etymology for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. Even more wanting are decent studies of etymology for the spoken colloquials; there are many dictionaries, but few that are very helpful for etymology of distinctive dialectal terms. Instead there are many websites that offer assumptions with no sourcing cited, and many of these are popular folk etymologies. Linguistics blogger Lameen Souag has a very interesting post at Jabal al-Lughat on this theme: "Arabic Substrate Etymologies as Urban Legends."

As he notes:

In Arabic as in English, social networks have a constantly flowing undercurrent of poorly sourced, manipulative stories being shared and reshared by people who vaguely think they sound right. Over the past, say, five years, I've noticed the emergence of a linguistically interesting new subgenre within this miasma of lies and half-truths: etymological tables purporting to prove the massive contribution of Berber, or Syriac, or (more rarely) Coptic, or perhaps some other pre-Arab substrate to the local Arabic dialect. These tables, in my experience, never cite an academic source, and rarely cite anything at all; closer examination generally reveals a farrago of correct etymologies and bad guesses. 

He links (included in the post, and all in Arabic) to social media posts for Berber, Coptic, and Syriac, and then examines some of the assertions, finding some of them valid, others unsubstantiated, or just plain wrong, concluding:

The optimistic take on this is that it shows that there's a real public demand in the Arabic-speaking world for information on etymology and on substrate influence. The pessimistic take is that people just want "information" confirming what they want to believe - in this case, that they're not really that Arab after all. (The converse case also exists, of course - recall Othmane Saadi - but I haven't seen as much of it circulating on social media, though that may just reflect my own bubble.) The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

But read the whole thing, especially the case studies. I should note that Dr. Souag himself started a blog on the historical origins of Algerian colloquial (الأصول التاريخية للدارجة الجزائرية), but there have been no posts since last year.

Sham al-Nassim

Today is Sham al-Nassim, the ancient Egyptian spring holiday celebrated on the Monday following Coptic Easter Sunday. It is not a Christian holiday; its origins are said to be with the Ancient Egyptian Shemu or spring holiday, later in the Christian period localized around Easter; Muslims celebrate equally with Christians and, until their exodus in the Nasser era, Egyptian Jews.

It's usually said that only two Egyptian holidays date back to the days of the pharaohs:  Sham al-Nassim and Wafa' al-Nil in mid-August, which marks the Nile flood (though the Aswan High Dam ended the annual inundation in the 1960s.) Both, like so much of Egyptian history, center on the Nile. On Sham al-Nassim Egyptians picnic on the river, stroll in parks, gardens, or the zoo, and eat seasonal foods: a dried salty fish called fassikh, green onions, lettuce, tirmis (lupinis), and (a borrowing from Easter? Or vice-versa?) they dye colored eggs. (See the photos below.) Even the foods may be ancient. Supposedly Plutarch somewhere wrote that the Ancient Egyptians had a spring holiday involving dried fish, lettuce, and onions, but I've never found a citation to confirm that story, beloved of Egyptian websites, even government ones..

Sham al-Nissim delicacies (Al Kahira-Cairo-LeCaire)

Even the name is interesting. In Arabic sham al-nassim means "smelling the breezes," a delightful description of a spring day on the river. But if it is truly a descendant of Shemu, that Ancient Egyptian word meant "harvest." In Ancient Egypt, the harvest was not in the fall as in most agricultural societies; it was in spring and summer, before the Nile rises in August. Shemu is presumably the origin of the Coptic word for "summer," Shom, and despite the appropriate "smelling the breezes" meaning in Arabic, likely the origin of the Sham part of Sham al-Nassim. This should of course in no way deter anyone from using the day to smell the breezes.

Easter Greetings (to East and West Together, This Year)

Most years I have to do two sets of Easter Greetings since some Middle Eastern and most Western Christian readers celebrate on the Latin date, while most of the Middle East observes the Eastern date.

This is one of the years when the dates coincide, however, so I can offer Easter greetings to Christian readers everywhere on the same date.

And since today is Good Friday, I thought I'd link to an earlier post about an Egyptian musical historian who claims that the Coptic Good Friday hymn Golgotha is a survival of the tune used to bury the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and thus may be "The Oldest Tune in History." That is debatable at best, but here is the hymn with Coptic and English subtitles:

A Coptic Christmas Hymn

As promised, we'll be noting many of the traditions of Eastern Christianity as the Eastern date for Christmas approaches next week. A Coptic hymn to the Virgin, E Parthenos:

Neirouz: Coptic New Year, 1730

Long before September 11, 2001, September 11 marked a less grim date: new year in the Coptic calendar. This is sometimes referred to as "Egyptian New Year" because the Coptic calendar, being solar, has long been used by Muslim Egyptians for agricultural purposes; the ancient Egyptian new year began after the height of the Nile flood, usually in August; the later Coptic calendar descends from the ancient one, and the first of the month of the Coptic month of Tut today coincides with September 11 in the Gregorian calendar. (And the month of Tut echoes the ancient Egyptian name Thoth, for the god of the same name.) Today marks the first day of the Year of the Martyrs 1730 (the Coptic calendar dates from the persecutions of Diocletian, not from the birth of Christ).

For unclear reasons, Coptic New Year is known as Neirouz, which seems to echo the Persian Nowruz which is in the spring. Some think an ancient "feast of the rivers" (Ni-Yarouou) somehow was conflated after the Arab conquest with the Persian word. Whatever the origin, a happy New Year to Copts (and those living by the Egyptian agricultural year).

It is also the Ethiopian New Year, by the way.

Punic Survival Part Five: Did Punic Influence Arabization and Maghrebi Darija?

 I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

For four posts now we have examined the question of whether Punic, the Phoenician language of Ancient Carthage and its colonies, survived as a spoken language (presumably alongside Berber and Latin, throughout the life of Roman North Africa. Some have argued that the presence of a Semitic vernacular in North Africa actually made the adoption of Arabic smoother, and some Punic enthusiasts have even gone so far as to argue that Punic influence can still be found in the spoken dialects (darija) of North Africa, along with Maltese (which, though today considered a separate language, has a grammatical structure comparable to North African Arabic dialects, though its Semitic vocabulary includes many borrowings from Romance and from Greek). Let's look at each of these assertions in turn.

It has often been noted that while the Arab conquests swept as far east as India and Central Asia and as far west as southern France, Arabic did not become the spoken language in all of that vast area; though Iran, India, and Central Asia became permanently Muslim, they retained or soon regained their original Persian, Turkic, or Indic vernaculars, though with a large input of religious and legal terms from Arabic. (Even in areas that did not remain Muslim, Arabic had a lasting influence; consider the huge presence of Arabic-based words in Spanish, and the entire Maltese language.)  But neither did Arabic remain limited to the Arabian Peninsula: it became firmly established from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Persian/Arab Gulf.

As far back as the era of Ernest Renan the idea was floated that Arabic remained established in those areas which already spoke a closely related language. Renan was an early comparative Semiticist; today the Semitic languages are understood not as a separate language family but as a sub-family of closely-related languages within the broader "Afro-Asiatic" language family (comparable to the way the Romance or Germanic or Iranian languages are embraced within the broader Indo-European famiily).

Although non-Semitic languages have always existed in the Levant and Iraq (Sumerian, Hittite, Armenian), it is indisputable that for more than a millennium before Arabic spread outside the Arabian Peninsula, closely related Semitic languages were dominant: first Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian, and later Aramaic/Syriac. There is little doubt that the spread of Arabic was greatly aided by the prior presence of a closely related language in Aramaic/Syriac; the Nabatean script, for example, originally was used to write Aramaic but gradually adapted to Old North Arabian, the immediate ancestor of Classical Arabic.  And early Arabic was sometimes written in the Syriac alphabet, the texts known as Karshuni in Arabic (Garshuni in Syriac). Arabic simply supplanted (though to this day not completely, for we have discussed modern Aramaic here frequently) the older, closely related language. In Jewish communities across the Arab world, various forms of Judeo-Arabic supplanted or were established alongside Hebrew and Aramaic.

The establishment of Arabic in Egypt and North Africa raises other questions, though. Last August my vacation postings examined why Coptic, which once was more entrenched than Aramaic, had died out as a spoken language while Aramaic has not. There are multiple reasons, but clearly Egypt is an Arabic-speaking country with only small pockets of Nubian and Siwi Berber speakers. If Arabic only took hold where Semitic languages were spoken, Egypt would seem to be a huge exception. And so would the rest of North Africa, though the survival of the Amazigh or Berber languages in the Maghreb show that Arabic is not as thoroughly entrenched as it is in Egypt. To this Maghrebists such as Georges and William Marçais and others have pointed to the survival of Punic as a factor facilitating the adoption of Arabic. But Punic was never spoken in Egypt, so what about Egypt?

Ancient Egyptian, and its later form Coptic, are not unrelated to Semitic; like the Berber languages and some other Saharan languages they are part of the broader Afro-Asiatic family, so one could say that Arabic took root because the languages were still related; that could also apply to the Berber languages of North Africa, regardless of any Punic survival. The Berber languages, while Afro-Asiatic, are much farther removed from the Semitic group than is Egyptian. Though not itself considered part of the Semitic sub-family, Egyptian has features that seem more Semitic than other Afro-Asiatic languages outside the Semitic group. Some basic vocabulary (including numerals an pronouns) are closely kin, as are some triliteral roots.

This question of whether Arabic put down deeper roots where Semitic languages were already spoken underlies much of the debate about the survival of Punic, and you can find, for example, an online discussion of some of the issues here.

But the question of Punic does not end with whether its survival made the adoption of Arabic easier. There are those who argue that a Punic substratum can still be identified in the colloquial dialects of North Africa (plus Maltese).  At first glance this seems extreme, but there is definitely a detectable Coptic substratum in colloquial Egyptian, and plenty of Berber loan-words in North African Arabic; could there be a Punic substratum as well? This argument today is primarily identified with the Algerian-born linguist Abdou Elimam, who is a strong advocate of treating the darija of the Maghreb as languages independent of if related to Standard Arabic.

At least one of Elimam's articles on Punic influence on Maghrebi can be found online: Du Punique au Maghribi: Trajectoires d’une langue sémito-méditerranéenne, published in Synergies Tunisie No. 1, 2009, pp. 29-38. The article (obviously) is in French, and while I believe he has written more extensively on this subject, I presume this summarizes his arguments.

Now Elimam is a Sorbonne-trained linguist and I certainly am neither, nor do I find anything impossible about the idea of an identifiable substratum of Punic in Maghrebi dialects of Arabic, but I am struck by several things. First, there is the rather tiny corpus of actual Punic texts, most of which tend to be tombstones, funerary inscriptions, and the like; Punic is a form of Phoenician but the total corpus of Phoenician texts is not great either, and the fact that we know as much as we do about either language is based in part on their extremely close resemblance to Hebrew. And all of these language are themselves relatively close to Arabic.

At the end of his article, Elimam presents a table showing vocabulary in common between Punic and Maghribi. These include Ab for father, Um for mother, bny for build, and so on. But wait: those are all good Arabic as well as good Canaanite (though modern Hebrew pronounces the first as Av today). For life he notes the similarity between Punic hayim and "Maghribi" hayat, but the latter is of course perfectly good Arabic as well. (To be fair, not all his examples are this obviously equivalent to Standard Arabic, but most are.) I have to say that this particular article doesn't completely convince me, but perhaps if I read more of his work I'd be persuaded.

UPDATE: By happy coincidence,  Lameen Souag just addressed Elimam's claims as well, as he notes in a comment below, though the blogpost is in darija.

I know this long discussion of Punic and Arabic may not have been everybody's cup of tea; on to other subjects in my remaining vacation posts, and back to normal blogging on Monday.

Claudius Labib: A Would-Be Coptic Ben-Yehuda

Claudius Labib

During my pre-vacation blogging last summer I did a three-part report on the question of why Coptic died out except as a liturgical language, while Aramaic survived in isolated pockets as a spoken (if threatened) language today: you can find that series here: Parts 1 , 2, and 3.

In Part 3 I remarked towards the end, referring to Coptic:

While there have been attempts to revive it as a spoken language, like most other such attempts at revival for national or religious reasons (Welsh among non-native speakers, Irish outside the Gaeltacht), has had only limited success. People already speak Arabic, the language needed for daily life. The great exception in the history of language revival, Hebrew in Israel, remains exceptional because there was no other common language to turn to.

Today I want to talk about the man behind the main effort to revive Coptic, Claudius Labib. I've previously posted about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who almost single-handedly forged modern Hebrew (few towns in Israel lack a Ben-Yehuda street) an restored an ancient language. As I noted in the quote above, he had the advantage that the Jewish diaspora returning to Palestine had no single language in common.

Labib dreamed of reviving Coptic, but faced a huge problem; every Egyptian Copt already spoke Arabic, so he faced the problem that those seeking to revive dead (Manx, Cornish) or shrinking (Irish, many Native American languages) face: competing with the dominant tongue essential to daily life. Most Copts knew no Coptic, save for some liturgical responses or hymns; Jewish males had to learn at least enough Hebrew for prayers and their bar mitzvah reading. It's still something of a miracle that Ben-Yehuda succeeded; it's little surprise that Labib failed.

But as I started to write about Labib I was struck by the parallels with Ben-Yehuda: they were nearly exact contemporaries, for one: Ben-Yehuda 1858-1922, Labib 1868-1918. Both were lexicographers, providing important dictionaries of the languages they sought to revive. Both sought to persuade or compel their own families to speak only the chosen language, though in Ben-Yehuda's case this caused serious problems.

There's not a lot in English on Labib: this post of a short biography and bibliography is most of it, and the source of the photo above. More links in Arabic can be found here. You can find at the first link many of his publication, including online versions of the five extant parts of his never completed Coptic-Arabic lexicon, grammars of Coptic (he favored his own variant now sometimes called the "Claudian" dialect), works on Coptic words surviving in Arabic, etc. He wrote mostly in Arabic or (naturally) Coptic, but some of his works are in French. I refer you particularly to the first link for the fullest information on the man.

Ironically his son, Pahor Labib, has a Wikipedia English entry while Claudius does not. Pahor was a prominent Egyptologist and Coptologist who ran Cairo's Coptic Museum from 1951 to 1965.

Armenian Christmas/Orthodox Christmas Eve

Today in the Latin Christian calendar is the Feast of the Epiphany, "the twelfth day of Christmas," (and I hope all those drummers drumming aren't keeping you up). More to our point here, it's also the day Armenian Christians outside the Holy Land celebrate the Nativity. (Those in the Holy Land have to wait twelve more days.)

For different reasons (the Gregorian/Julian calendar difference), tonight marks Christmas Eve and tomorrow Christmas Day in the tradition of the Orthodox and most other Eastern churches, so greetings to all whose celebration is today, tonight, or tomorrow.

The Coptic Christmas hymn E Parthenos, (the virgin: parthenos  is of course from Greek), with . English subtitles.

"The Oldest Tune in History"?

The Egypt Independent has a provocative piece on Coptic music entitled "Humming the Oldest Tune in History."

The title refers to the assertion made in the article that ritual music from Pharaonic Egypt was often incorporated into Christian liturgy by changing the words but retaining the Pharaonic tune. Given the frequency with which Western "pagan" customs were "baptized" into Christian customs and symbols in Western Europe (Easter eggs and Christmas trees among them), and given the continuity of the Egyptian language from Demotic into Coptic in Late Antiquity, and Coptic use of some Pharaonic symbolism such as the ankh, there doesn't seem to be anything incredible about it. I'll admit, I'd like to know the documentary sources for these assertions, though:

Talking about Coptic music is in fact a conversation about the pharaonic musical heritage formulated over the millennia, according to composer George Kyrillos, a deacon at the Virgin Mary Church in Maadi and the first person to musically document Coptic hymns successfully.

“Coptic music is part of the world’s cultural heritage, just like the [Giza] pyramids,” says Kyrillos.

The origin of the “Calvary” hymn sung on Good Friday every year, for instance, is a pharaonic melody that priests played as they buried the ancient Egyptian kings. Early Copts, familiar with the tune, continued using it on Good Friday, when Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and burial is remembered.

Similarly, the Coptic Orthodox Church inherited most pharaonic prayer hymns with the introduction of Christianity into Egypt, despite the pagan origins of the original tunes, according to Christian faith. They were passed on sonically from one Coptic generation to the next.

During Ramadan, we discussed a somewhat similar claim about a Muslim Ramadan chant.

While I don't know if these claims have any solid basis in evidence, it's intriguing, though I'm also unsure if that would make any of these hymns "the oldest tune in history."

The one specific claim  made, though, refers to Coptic hymn sung on Good Friday to mark the burial of Christ, saying it preserves the Pharaonic tune for the burial of a Pharaoh. The Egypt Independent article refers to it by the Latinate term "Calvary," but it's more normally called "Golgotha," Coptic adopting the Aramaic place name.

The Egypt Independent  article lacks any recorded examples, but YouTube  comes through. The first of these clips has the Coptic text and the English, with a background of religious Passion imagery; the second shows the hymn in context of the Coptic Good Friday ritual.

Now That You Have the Demotic Dictionary, You Need a Grammar

I'm sorry for an omission. I posted a link to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago's Dictionary of Demotic Egyptian, now available online. A great many other media (The New York Times, BBC, etc.) did the same, usually trying to link Demotic to something their readers might have heard of ("one of the languages on the Rosetta stone," "Cleopatra would have known it,"), etc. I did about the same amount of explication that they did.

But then, I may have forgotten my audience. This is a blog where my three-part "Why did Aramaic survive while Coptic is only a liturgical language?" series (here, here, and here) was in response to a question from a commenter on the blog. (And after all, Demotic evolved into Coptic by adopting the Greek alphabet, with a few Demotic characters, but they are two phases of the Egyptian language.)  I realize I have ill-served those of my readers whose first response may have been, "first dictionary of Demotic Egyptian, great. But how am I going to learn to actually speak Demotic if I don't have a decent grammar to use with the dictionary? What if time travelers abduct me and drop me in Ptolemaic Alexandria tomorrow?" For those of you hoping to be able to converse with Cleopatra, I was neglectful.

I may have failed you, but the Oriental Institute at U. Chicago has not. Egyptologist Janet H. Johnson, longtime Editor of the Dictionary (and whom I knew many years ago when she and Donald Whitcomb were digging the port of Quseir in Egypt), has also written Thus Wrote 'Onchsheshonqy - An Introductory Grammar of Demotic.

Once again, through the generosity of The Oriental Institute, the text is available online as a .pdf.

So now you have pretty much all you need to teach yourself Demotic. Except maybe tapes to show you how to pronounce 'Onchsheshonqy. Seriously, though, I want a copy.

Chicago's Demotic Egyptian Dictionary is Online

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago has completed work on its landmark dictionary of Demotic Egyptian. The work, edited by Janet H. Johnson, is being made available to the public online, as the Oriental Institute has also done with its monumental Assyrian Dictionary, which I blogged about a while back. 

To access the Demotic dictionary online or download it, or read more about it, go here.

Demotic, the simplified script used for everyday purposes, reflects the daily language of Egypt as opposed to the formal language of the hieroglyphs; Demotic was the third language, along with hieroglyphic Egyptian and Greek, on the Rosetta stone.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part III: When DID Coptic Cease to Be Spoken?

I'm on vacation until tomrrow. This is the last of my vacation postings. Part I of this post appeared August 10. Part Two appeared on Friday. 

In our previous discussions we've tried to talk about some of the factors that have kept Aramaic a living language (if a minority one) while Coptic, the late version of one of the world's oldest languages, has been reduced to merely a liturgical language in the Coptic Church. It's an important question, and I hope our discussion has been informative, but it also begs another question: when did Coptic cease to be spoken on a daily basis?

Language survival is a major issue these days, and linguists are struggling to record disappearing languages before they die. Sometimes one can be quite specific about when native speakers ceased ti exist. Thus the death of Ned Maddrell on December 27, 1974 is recorded as the passing of the last native speaker of Manx.  Of course, written languages never really die. Manx has its enthusiasts, and though they did not grow up speaking it, they hope to revive it. The Vatican has an agency that coins new terms in Latin as needed for ecclesiastical use, and people still publish in Latin. Similarly, since the 19th century there has been something of a revival of Coptic, and some enthusiasts can speak it for communication, not just for liturgy. But that's not what is meant by a "living language": when, exactly, did Coptic cease to be a tongue that people learned at their mother's knee, spoke as their first language for daily affairs, even if they also spoke Arabic? 

The question is actually not easily answered. If you go to the "Coptic Language, Spoken" entry in The Coptic Encyclopedia, you'll find a string of evidence coming as far down as the 19th century, but there are skeptics about how some of this evidence should be interpreted. No one doubts that Coptic was in widespread use down to Fatimid times when, as noted in the last entry in this series, the Caliph al-Hakim sought to forbid its use. Coptic was often used alongside Arabic down to the 11th or 12th centuries, when Coptic inscriptions start to disappear. From the 13th century or so, the picture is more obscure. From that article:

In the fourteenth century, a remarkable work entitled Triadon, a didactic poem in Sahidic Coptic, appeared by an anonymous writer, possibly an Upper Egyptian monk. The original poem was in 734 verses, of which only 428 survived, with an Arabic translation that is somewhat artificial and not always clear. It was an attempt to glorify the moribund Coptic language and eulogize biblical personalities and Coptic saints.

In the fifteenth century, the Arab historian al-MAQRIZI (d.1441) points out in his famous work Al-Khitat wa-al-Athar (On History and Geography) that women and children in Upper Egypt knew almost no other tongue for communication but Sahidic Coptic (Vol. 2, p. 507). Again in the same work (Vol. 2, p. 518), while discussing the region of Durunkah in the province of Asyut, he mentions that the inhabitants of the Upper Egyptian Christian villages were all conversant with the doctrines of their faith, as well as with the Coptic language.

In the sixteenth century, according to statements made by the famous Egyptologist J. MASPERO in 1909, the Copts still spoke Coptic. During the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), it is tradition that a priest and an old Coptic woman were introduced to a seventeenth-century French tourist as the last Egyptians who were thoroughly acquainted with Coptic as a spoken language. Afterward, Coptic survived only as the language of the liturgy. Moreover, the Dominican traveler J. M. VANSLEB points out in the account of his
travels in Upper Egypt in 1672-1673 that Anba Yu‘annis, archbishop of Asyut, introduced to him a certain Mu‘allim Athanasius, who was the last Copt to be conversant with the Coptic language as a speaking medium in the country. Nevertheless, the English writer James E. Quibell reports in the year 1901 that the Reverend David Strang of the American mission at Bani Suef informed him that when he first came to Egypt some three decades before that date, Coptic had been spoken in Upper Egypt within living memory. As a concrete example, a certain Jam Estephanos, an old man from Qus, stated that he remembered as a boy hearing his parents converse in Coptic, which was probably true of the
inhabitants of both Qus and Naqadah (Worrell, 1942, p. 306). W. H. Worrell quotes an oral tradition about Coptic in the village of Ziniyyah, a village in the same neighborhood. A carpenter by the name of Ishaq is credited with the importation from Asyut of Coptic to Ziniyyah. One Tanyos, a Coptic-speaking person, came to Ziniyyah from Naqadah, where he died a centenarian around the year 1886. Another by the name of Muharib, who also spoke Coptic, came from Naqadah at the age of eighty. Khalil abu Bisadah, who knew spoken Coptic from his parents at Ziniyyah, is said to have been taught written Coptic by both the aforementioned Tanyos and Muharib. He continued to live at Ziniyyah until his death around the year 1910. From Naqadah again, a certain Mityas came to share the teaching of Coptic at Ziniyyah with Khalil abu Bisadah. At Farshut in the nineteenth century, the cantors and priests spoke only Coptic within the church sanctuary. Yassa ‘Abd al-Masih, who died in 1959, reported that his grandfather used only Coptic within the church. The Ziniyyah tradition of the use of Coptic as a speaking medium does not mean that Coptic had survived in Egypt as a spoken language that late, but only that it was employed in spots for the glorification of a defunct institution (Worrell, 1942, pp. 301-304).

After the two well-known citations to Maqrizi, about which more momentarily, most of these citations are anecdotal and it is not entirely clear what they may mean. Introducing someone as the last person conversant in Coptic, or an old man remembering his parents could converse in Coptic, does not mean it was still a true living language: people can converse in Latin, or Sanskrit, but that does not make them living languages; some people can converse in Coptic today, but they have learned the language as adults, not as children. And the anecdotes from travelers like Vansleb, and the modern anecdotes with their tendency to cite old people's memories of long dead ancestors, seems fairly weak evidence. Coptic may have survived into the 16th century or even the 17th in parts of Upper Egypt, but the evidence seems pretty anecdotal. The 18th and 19th century stories may refer to learned clergy who could converse in Coptic, as some can today, and clearly references traditions of speaking only Coptic in church,

The Maqrizi references (the page numbers cited above are to the two-volume Bulaq edition of his Khitat) are the most commonly cited evidence that Coptic was in routine spoken use in Maqrizi's day. But the section is part of Maqrizi's discursus on the Copts, and his discussion of the Coptic towns and monasteries of Upper Egypt. Much of that section is derived from the works of earlier historians. Sometimes Maqrizi names his sources, sometimes not; sometimes the source can be recognized. Some critics have said the passages on Coptic refer to a period earlier than the time of Maqrizi.

Certainly, Coptic disappeared as a spoken language in the Delta and Lower Egypt long before it did in Upper Egypt. There is little evidence for everyday use of Coptic in Lower Egypt much later than the Fatimid period, but traces of it in Upper Egypt centuries later. Assuming Maqrizi really is providing a contemporary witness, we can assume it was still spoken in the early 1400s. The 16th and 17th century attestations are a lot more dubious, at least as evidence of any widespread use outside of religious contexts.

Coptic experienced a revival of sorts in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the teaching of Coptic in the church schools and a growing emphasis on training of the clergy in the language, whereas in previous centuries they had sometimes merely committed the liturgical formulas to rote memory. While there have been attempts to revive it as a spoken language, like most other such attempts at revival for national or religious reasons (Welsh among non-native speakers, Irish outside the Gaeltacht), has had only limited success. People already speak Arabic, the language needed for daily life. The great exception in the history of language revival, Hebrew in Israel, remains exceptional because there was no other common language to turn to.

I don't know if I've contributed anything to scholarship in these postings, but I at least hope these reflections will have been of interest to some readers.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part II

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy. Part I of this post appeared a week ago.

Other events having intruded, it has been a week since Part I of my discussion of the question of why Aramaic is still a spoken language (in limited islands) while Coptic is merely a liturgical language among the largest body of Middle Eastern Christians. Part I is here. I hope to get more into the meat of the "why" in this second part, and then in a third part early next week, to address a question that is itself controversial: when, exactly, did Coptic cease to be spoken on a daily basis? Even this has answers ranging from the 14th century on down to the 17th or even later.

Let's begin approximately where we left off. "Coptic" properly refers to that late version of the Egyptian language written in a variant of the Greek alphabet with some letters added from Demotic Egyptian. It emerged in the wake of the Roman conquest of Egypt and, over the next couple of centuries, became transformed in content by Egypt's transformation under Hellenistic culture, Roman administration, and the Christian religion.

Coptic was the spoken language of everyone in Egypt, other than members of the Helleno-Roman administrative elite, but it is worth noting that it was not the language of administration; that was Greek. (Ironically, it took the Muslim conquest for Coptic to become, for a while, the language of administration.) That would seem to have little to do with its survival as a spoken language, but Aramaic was the language of administration in several places, including places (like Iran) that were not even Semitic-speaking. Still, I'm not sure what this might have to do with its survival: people don't generally speak the language of bureaucracy, and this was the golden age of Coptic as a language of theological and religious discourse.

The role of  Greek was reinforced at the official level by the split with Rome and Constantinople over the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the Christological controversy actually reinforced the role of Coptic since the official imperial church was rejected by the Egyptian populace and the Coptic (non-Chalcedonian) patriarchs, sometimes from underground, represented the popular will.

The Arab conquest of Egypt in 632 AD did not at first have much impact on Coptic; in fact it began to replace  Greek in administration, though that was short-lived. In 706 AD the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration. The administration had been dependent on Coptic clerks and secretaries, and to keep their jobs, many Coptic clerks began to master Arabic. In the following Abbasid period, a series of taxpayer revolts by Coptic populations, especially in the central Delta region of Bashmur, led to deportation of the rebels to Iraq and the settlement of Arab tribesmen in the Delta. Up to this time most Arab/Muslims were located in Fustat or other cities, with some tribal groups settling in Upper Egypt. Arabic settlement in the Delta was an important factor in Islamization of the Delta. Or so I argued in a doctoral dissertation a long time ago.

Another major turning point came in Fatimid times with the rule of the bizarre Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996-1020), sometimes characterized as mad for his persecution of Christians but also his exactions on Muslims. Prior to his mysterious disappearance he banned the use of Coptic in public places and even forbade private conversations in the language. Though Hakim's restrictions were limited to a short period, they certainly deterred the daily use of Coptic. Declining education among the clergy, a problem only truly addressed in the 19th century, certainly contributed to the problem.

An external indication of the decline of Coptic is the increasing use of Arabic, even in works with a religious content. Though saint's lives and religious works continued to appear in Coptic, key works seeking a general audience increasingly had to appear in Arabic. The single most important work on church history (and a critical source for the history of Egypt as a whole), the History of the Patriarchs, a compilation of works by many hands, but with the compiling attributed to Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa (Severus of Ashmunain) in the 10th century, is entirely in Arabic. Even the biographies of early patriarchs which must have originally been written in Coptic, often survive only in Arabic. Another major work, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt by Abu al-Maqarim (wrongly attributed to "Abu Salih the Armenian" and so translated into English), appeared only in Arabic, in the 13th century. Bilingual dictionaries and wordlists became common, implying that increasing numbers of the faithful no longer spoke or even understood Coptic; already in the 12th century Pope Gabriel II had permitted the use of Arabic in the liturgy and for reading the gospels, because of the decline of Coptic. There are complaints (sometimes attributed to saints of an earlier age) about the decline of Coptic, but little doubt about its reality.

But this is the decline of Coptic as a literary language. The spoken tongue certainly died out more gradually, but when? There is considerable dispute. That it was still spoken in many places in the 14th century seems pretty well established though even that has had its doubters; claims are made for the 16th and 17th centuries and even some outliers for the 19th century. When it died may not be as important as that it died (though as we'll see there were 19th century attempts at revival), but the "when" question will be addressed in Part III  early next week.

To the historical sketch above I'd like to add some comparisons with Aramaic which I think help address the  "why did one survive and the other is fossilized as a litrugical language?" question:

The Geography: Most of the survivals of Aramaic are found — or were preserved in — mountainous areas; it survived in Tur Abdin in Turkey, in parts of the Kurdish mountains, in the Anti-Lebanon north of Damascus, etc. When it survived in non-mountainous regions it was either a recent introduction (Assyrian refugees from Turkey to Iraqi cities) or there was another geographically isolating factor, such as the Iraqi marshes for the Mandaeans.There are exceptions, but geography was certainly a factor. While there were remote Coptic isolated communities such as the Wadi Natrun or Saint Anthony's in the Eastern Desert, monastic communities obviously cannot reproduce themselves. The Coptic population was located in the Nile Valley and the Fayyum, areas where they were integrated with their Muslim neighbors and the main geographical fact (the River) was a uniting factor.

The lack of speakers beyond the core area, or the broader "installed base". Despite the antiquity of the language and the fact that all Egyptians once spoke it, Egyptian and Coptic were not spoken outside Egypt except by Egyptians abroad, or in a few cases perhaps in  the Nubian kingdoms. Aramaic, by contrast, though initially only the native tongue in the Levant, was the lingua franca of the Iranian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and later Seleucid and other successor states across southwest Asia (and liturgically still among India's Saint Thomas Christians), and had currency as far as India and even (in the case of the "Nestorian stele") China. This greater "installed base" provided more speakers across a broader geography, if not more speakers total.

The broader liturgical base. Coptic is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and has some use in the liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches of Egypt. Aramaic is at least partly the liturgical language of Syrian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Melkite Catholic, Maronite, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Malankara Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar Catholic,  Malankara Syrian Orthodox, Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and perhaps some I've never heard of; in the Judaic realm it is used in some normative Jewish liturgies, by some Kurdish Jews, as well as in the liturgies of Middle Eastern Karaite Jews and Samaritans (who spoke it until recent centuries); and beyond the Judeo-Christian faiths, it is both the liturgical and to some extent the spoken language of the Mandaeans. For most of these faiths it is preserved only in a limited way in the liturgy and is not a spoken language, and none of the Christian groups rivals the Copts in number, but it is a reminder of how widespread Aramaic was.

Part III will appear early next week.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part I

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy.
 

This is Part One of a multi-part post which, I hope, will be of interest not just to those interested in Coptic and Aramaic, but to anyone interested in the survival or non-survival of minority languages throughout the Middle East.  It seeks to answer, or explore the elements of an answer, to this question: Aramaic today still has over half a million speakers; Coptic, though one of the most ancient languages on earth, and the Copts being the largest Christian group in the Middle East, has been reduced to a liturgical language for centuries. Why?

During my vacation postings about this time last year, I had several posts about Aramaic and Syriac through the centuries, spoken Western Aramaic today, and spoken Eastern Aramaic today. Aramaic, once the lingua franca of the whole Middle East, with inscriptions found from Egypt to China and India, still lingers in a few islands of speakers — some 15,000 speakers of Western Aramaic, in Syria,  and perhaps half a million speakers of Eastern Aramaic in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and a Western Diaspora. Most of these speakers are Christian, but there are Muslim speakers in Syria, and others are Jewish, Samaritan, or Mandaean. It is also of course the liturgical language of several Eastern Christian denominations, Karaite Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeanism.  See last year's posts, linked above, for more.

When Coptic Pope Shenouda III died earlier this year, a commenter raised an interesting question: why does Aramaic still survive as a spoken language, however scattered, while Coptic is reduced to only a liturgical language? The Copts are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and their language, which is merely the last form of Egyptian, has an unbroken lineage of some 4500 or more years. Yet it has been several centuries since anyone learned Coptic at their mother's knee; it is today a religious and scholarly, not a native, spoken tongue. Why did Aramaic survive (if hanging by a thread) as a spoken tongue while Coptic did not?

It's a great question. I'm not sure there's a single answer, and it also requires us to delve into some controversial debates (like, exactly when did Coptic cease to be spoken natively? 14th century? 17th century? 19th century? All have their advocates). And since my doctoral dissertation was on the ‘Abbasid period in Egypt, the eighth and ninth centuries,  a key period of Arabization and Islamization, it brings up some memories of my own historical research. (And contrary to my younger colleagues' claims, I did not write my dissertation during the ‘Abbasid period.)

Though perhaps too many of my posts tend to focus on Egypt, I think this one actually has considerable interest beyond that. What has preserved other non-Arabic languages across the Arab world, not just Aramaic but bigger languages like Kurdish and the Amazigh/Berber tongues, Nubian, Armenian, Circassian, Mehri and the other surviving South Arabian languages, etc?

This map from the Gulf 2000 site (click here or on the map to see an enlargeable version) doesn't even include North Africa, but is a reminder that the Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Hebrew image most of us carry in our heads is a gross oversimplification.

If the Caucasus, Sudan, and North Africa were included, the map would be even more colorful.

But these islands of minority languages, ranging from big ones like Kurdish to tiny enclaves like the three towns north of Damascus that speak Western Aramaic, all have survived, for various reasons, in the sea of Arabic.

Yet Coptic, with 4000 years of history and a cohesive minority that outnumbers many of those whose languages endure, is only a liturgical tongue today? Why?

Bear in mind that I don't know the answer, but I intend to spend several posts considering the evidence.

A Short History of Egyptian

The earliest evidence of proto-writing in the Nile Valley is gradually being pushed back, but seems to date from around 3200 BC or even a couple of centuries earlier. By the time a language can be discerned through the proto-writing, that language is Egyptian. That language, after millennia of evolution, is still used in parts of the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and may have been in daily use as a spoken language as recently as three centuries ago. That is nearly 5000 years of a living, if changing, language. The earliest Chinese writing dates from the second millennium BC, and Hebrew was reduced to a liturgical language for some 1500 or more years before its revival; neither can approach Egyptian in terms of probable, documented endurance as a language. (Though, like Chinese, that language changed enormously through the millennia.) The hieroglyphic writing system had a simplified form known as hieratic, and eventually evolved a more cursive system called demotic, and the language evolved through multiple changes.

Coptic is merely Egyptian in its latest form. It was written in the Greek alphabet, with an additional six (or in one dialect, seven) characters taken from demotic. Coptic was Egyptian transformed through Hellenization and Christianization, and thus was influenced by external elements, while remaining Egyptian. Though it had a lengthy history of its own which I'll discuss next time, it also was very much the tongue of Egypt, and was spoken for more than a millennium in its own right. 

Check in after the weekend to see where I'm going with this. Since not everyone will be interested, other posts will be interspersed.

"Wahawi ya Wahawi Eyaha": Is it an Ancient Egyptian Chant?

My vacation begins today. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts ahead of time on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy.

It's Ramadan, and back before Ramadan was primarily associated with  television soap opera series, the tradition in Egypt was to light fanous, Ramadan lanterns. The fanous were associated with a popular chant, beginning "Wahawi ya Wahawi Eyaha,"  More recently the phrase was expanded into a popular song. The question is, where does the phrase come from? It doesn't have any obvious meaning in Arabic, so the assumption that it is pre-Islamic is a reasonable one; after all, many ancient folk customs survive, and one is coming up next week, Wafa' al-Nil, the feast marking the Nile flood, which goes back to Pharaonic times.

Lately two different Egyptian English language news sources have cited a Pharaonic etymology for 'Wahawi ya Wahawi in their features for Ramadan. Both offer the same basic explanation, and I'm wondering if this is a real etymology with some sort of documentation, or a folk etymology:

Salonaz Sami in Al-Ahram:

For as long as I can remember, even when I was a kid and into my adolescent years, I have wondered about the meaning of eyaha. It wasn't until recently that I found out that eyaha, actually taken from the ancient Egyptian, means "moon". The phrase was used in ancient times in honour of Eyaha, the mother of the Pharaoh Ahmose I, who expelled the invading Hyksos from Egypt when he was just 16 years old. Wahawy ya wahawy, eyaha, means something like "welcome Eyaha". Since Muslims worldwide use the moon to determine the beginning and end of the holy month, the use of this phrase makes perfect sense. 

Nabila Magdy in Egypt Independent:

King Ahmose I, the founder of the 18th dynasty, expelled the Hyksos only five years after he ruled Egypt in 1550 BC at the age of 16. The story goes that whenever the people saw Queen Eyaha, whose name meant “moon,” they would sing “Wahawy, Eyaha,” meaning “Welcome, Ehaya.”
Ever since, Egyptians have used the same song to celebrate different occasions. As the Islamic hijri calendar follows the lunar system, Egyptians living in the Fatimid era, from AD 969 to 1171, started to celebrate the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan by singing “Wahawy, Eyaha” — a tradition that has continued today.

Let's analyze this story. Since neither report sources it, and it sounds a bit like a folk etymology,

First, the phrase does seem to have something to do with the moon, and the "welcome, moon" explanation in the first account makes sense, "Moon" was iah in Ancient Egyptian and yoh in Coptic, so the Eyaha part, which has a vowel somewhere between a and o, probably does have to do with the moon. Coptic is just the late form of Ancient Egyptian, and thus an Egyptian phrase is presumably involved. But how old is it?

Second, the mother of the Pharaoh Ahmose I is generally held to have been Ahhotep, the name meaning "the Moon is satisfied" (as "Ahmose" means "born of the moon,"), so her name did incorporate the moon in it, even if she was not exactly called "Eyaha."

But "welcome, moon" seems a reasonable call for Ramadan, and both stories link its use to the Fatimid era and other stories specifically link it to the era of the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996-1021 AD). At that period Coptic was still very much a spoken language, so why not just assume it's a Coptic phrase? Why attribute it to a remote queen of Egypt? Is this a folk etymology or a real one?

First, I'm not sure, so if anyone has documentation to linking this to pharaonic times rather than just the Middle Ages

Note that the headline on the Egypt Independent article says "Ramadan Jingle is 6,000 Years Old." As an editor I'm well aware authors aren't always responsible for their headlines, but how do we get to 6000 years?  The conventional date for the unification of Upper Egypt and the start of the First Dynasty is 3100 BC, which is 5100 years ago, but Ahmose I's reign is placed around 1550 BC, which means the story told here is claiming an age of only 3,500 years or so.

One clue that this may be a folk etymology is that it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in context. Why would Ancient Egyptians have greeted their queen (a divine being, remember) so infomally? Why would the greeting somehow have been associated with holidays, Ramadan or other? On the other hand, "welcome moon" needs no great explanation, no ancient queens, to make sense. If anyone has got a clear document linking the phrase to Ahmose I, post it as a comment. Here, however, is what the chant sounds like, in modern song form: