Comments on: Confounded Languages

By: Ariel S

Ariel S — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:37:48 +0000

I know Egyptian is not Semitic, duh! ;)

I don’t know much Arabic and really cannot say if ‘ash’ also exists in Egyptian Arabic. My guess is that it doesn’t, because Moroccan Arabic is known to be quite distinct from other Arabic dialect. The thing is that, AFAIK, Moroccan’s distinctness stems from Berber influence, not Coptic. So it would make sense if ‘ash’ found its way into Egyptian, not Moroccan.

BTW, in Palestinian Arabic “what “is “shu”. as in “shu hada?” “what’s this?”. Is ‘shu’ related to ‘ash’? No idea.

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 07:50:37 +0000

It’s rather unlikely. You see, Coptic is an Afro-Asiatic language but, unlike Arabic, Coptic is a development of Late Egyptian and Demotic and is thus an Egyptian language, not a Semitic one. There are some points of commonality between Egyptian and Semitic, but they are primarily lexical and the chances that a question-word like “ash” would have been shared are pretty remote.

Still, I don’t know enough about either language to be able to discount it completely: do you know of any other types of Arabic that also use this word?

By: Ariel S

Ariel S — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:14:11 +0000

i meant, morpheme.

By: Ariel S

Ariel S — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:13:21 +0000

Funny. I stumbled upon this place entirely by coincidence (I was looking for Davar Aher the late satirical supplemental.
The interesting thing about ‘ash’ is that ‘ash’ also exists with the same meaning in Moroccan Arabic, as in “Ash Hbarak?” “How are you?”. Correct me if I’m wrong. I wonder if these two phonemes are related. Did “ash” find its way from Egyptian to Moroccan through the years?
BTW, if i remember right, Coptic is supposed to be a Afro-Asiatic language, if i remember right, just like Arabic, so I wonder if this phoneme is that ancient (probably not).

By: Amanda J. Sisk

Amanda J. Sisk — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:33:36 +0000

Thank you, Mr. Holloway. An artist often reads with her hands as well as eyes…a sort of Braille, perhaps? I find that each material I use is a different tongue, but bound together in the way that the Romance languages are, enabling me to move from drawing and painting to printmaking to sculpture in the way one might shift from French to Italian or Spanish. At the end of the day, all is Vulgar Latin.

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 23:34:09 +0000

Thankyou! It is strange to look at an unfamiliar language and consider that, for some, its arbitrary symbols hold meaning. The works of art on your blog are very beautiful for precisely that reason. I cannot “read” an artwork as you can, but they are captivating nonetheless.

By: Amanda J. Sisk

Amanda J. Sisk — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 23:07:42 +0000

Lovely are the fragments upon your pages; I cannot decipher their meaning(s), but they please the eye.

By: Robert Mileham

Robert Mileham — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:57:27 +0000

Left a picture for you on my blog. Don’t think my text was that difficult!

Hope you are keeping well.