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by raoulduke 3043 days ago
There's an enormous difference between aesthetic features of writing and actual language relation. The original hypothesis that this inadvertently plagiarizes from is a 1912 William Flinders Petrie monogram. Wow... when I first started looking into this stuff 8 or 9 years ago, archive didn't have this/exist in this form:

https://archive.org/details/formationofalpha00petr

Petrie's tables are better... but they're still at best interesting and inconclusive.

(Also, although people cited /it/ above, Thesuarus Linguae Aegyptiae transliterates it /jtj/ (yty - long vowels rather than glottals); and claiming that's similar to pit is pretty ridiculous... If there's a genetic intra-Afroasiatic relation with that root (which I'm not sure there is...) it'd make a lot more sense to connect it with Ugaritic 'ad... Which I don't think it makes sense to do... And in support of that... not even the out-there Starling database makes that connection (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... // http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... )).

2 comments

I'm sorry, you keep throwing the word ridiculous around as if it was a jocular matter and I'm completely fine with that, but I don't welcome being mocked without a proper argument. Yes, jt>pit is a loose thread made without much information. But not because I am too lazy to meticulously collect evidence, but because it is downright impossible for me to study this at a day job level. Rather, I assumed this would be an obvious connection to already have been investigated and would hope for corrections or confirmation. And baring any evidence in my comment I would have thought it was obvious to be taken with a heap of salt for what it's worth.

So it was a bit dry, and you were amused anyway. That leaves me confused.

I can't think of any other concordances between Egyptian /j/ and /p/ in other languages. To be honest I've never seen the word jtj before today. There's a longstanding and known relation broadly with /p/ or /b/ and father and /m/ and mother. And as far as I'm aware there's no consensus on the meaning of that relation. But jtj isn't the root related to those; and Egyptian doesn't seem to have a strong example of /b/ (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... ).
I was suggesting that pit was an extension of it.

I think the j in jt is a remnant of jw (true), jw-?t, (biological father), but only because jw is the only egyptian j- lexeme I know so far, because I like to connect it to IO and Jo- and the jedi knights. For p- I'm not so sure, but something like grand-father or god-father would fit the theme, or less familiar for us distant from the Neolithicum, the stone-father (grey/old, hard/strong, inanimate/false vs true, crafty/fundamental).

To be fair, I cited it, not /it/, and only after noting the confusion in a previous post regarding layman confusion in transcription of I and U for Egyptian. And the chances that it was actually /jtj/, as opposed to that being the consonant root with unmarked vowels, is low.