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by posterboy 3049 days ago
So you have pt (sky), pr (house) and bt (house), and you are suggesting that there can be no obvious link? pt~bt perhaps? I don't know what's up with the /h/. It doesn't really matter because drawn glyphs pass the test of time better than phonemes by virtue of being homoiconic. Certainly, written language is a linguistic matter, not just merely aesthetic.

If you look at the pt hieroglyph, the lower form might be a roof I think. Of course, my confusion of pt and pr in the previous post shows an aptitude to jump to conclusions. But when Peter<Petrus<??? has no certain etymology, leaps of faith are inevitable. And while I understand that research is always careful to be skeptical, so am I when you say the hypothesis couldn't be. I'm not necessarily defending the theory from the featured article, because a common ancestor can come through a variety of origins. Anyway, the Egyptians are famous anyway, so they are the first go to for a theory.

Also, your claim is evidently wrong. The Bet glyph looks very different to the pr glyph.

I was initially trying to formulate a thought about writing, because it can show patterns of language on a deeper level or at least from a different perspective. After all, verbal communication involves more than phonetics. There are definitely words that have been read incorrectly and proliferated -- e.g. reading gamma for ypsilon, omega for digamma; although I have no evidence at hand this shouldn't be hard to believe.

This was constructive for me, as I hadn't made the connection from pr to beta, before. Thank you.

1 comments

Correct. There can be no obvious link. Particularly in that Old Kingdom /r/ would reflect a Semitic /'/, if memory serves. So /pr/ would be the equivalent of /p'/ which would mean "mouth."

I likely compounded your confusion by referring to the grapheme as pr; whereas it is in fact Gardiner's O4, the monosyllabic /h/ (http://msheflin.blogspot.com/search/label/Early%20Alphabet - take the chart beyond /b/ with a grain of salt; I haven't updated it in years). This isn't my theory... this is basically the only consensus view on Proto-Sinaitic. Please stop wading into a crazy complex and insular, highly esoteric academic subject and then getting mad at me when you misunderstand my comments and attempt to construct a new orthodoxy around them...

The only connection between pr and b(y)t is semantic. Once you move from pure ideograms to logograms or abjads that wholly breaks down.

I don't want to start a circular argument talking past each other. Wiktionary has for pr: "(Old Egyptian) IPA /paːruw/[1]". That's just one reconstruction but Its source is 20 years old so it could be outdated for all I know. Given your comments, I just see the glottal stop as another datapoint. Whether that also means "mouth" or not doesn't lead to confusion.

[1]: Hoch, James (1997) Middle Egyptian Grammar, Mississauga: Benben Publications, ISBN 0920168124, page 15