Explaining the Strange b in the Egyptian Negative Transliterated bn: An Innovative Orthographic Norm Derived from bw- (> -ⲞⲨ-) and bw nb (> ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ)

The following has been written to gather feedback, in preparation for an article to be written and submitted to peer review.

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The initial portion of the Egyptian negative transliterated bn has long struck scholars as strange. For example, it was recently remarked that this orthography began being used “[f]or reasons that are still unclear” (Oréal 2022: 200).

A proposal to solve this mystery:

With the negative transliterated bn, the foot sign of Gardiner D58 is actually a new orthographic convention where that hieroglyph was interpreted as a beginning-of-unit marker before a hieroglyph marking the actual sound itself, having developed through reinterpretation of the abstract noun morphology visible in bw- ( > -OY- ) and the later bw nb ( > OYON NIM).

 

Three steps.

 

Step #1 – Identifying a Coptic continuation of recognized abstract noun morphology.

The sequence bw deriving from “place” has been properly identified as abstract noun morphology even in basic language resources (e.g. Faulkner 1962: 82), a long-standing identification that also enjoys substantial cross-linguistic plausibility (Kuteva et al. 2019: 334).

Examples include bw m3‘ “truth,” and such nouns can figure into larger prepositional phrases (as would be expected for any nouns, abstract or not).

However, scholars do not appear to have noticed that this abstract noun from earlier phases of Egyptian should also be identified with Coptic adverbial phrases with “in” like Ϩ︦ⲚⲞⲨⲘⲈ “truly” (< “in truth”). In these adverbial phrases, the sequence -ⲞⲨ- has often been interpreted as an indefinite article (e.g. Lambdin 1983: 88 and Müller 2021: 529; in comparison, note the lack of any concrete identification in Layton 2007: 130-131 and Layton 2011: 174). Yet, the indefinite article is a misleading lookalike and is actually a subtle misparsing of this small and apparently unassuming -ⲞⲨ- section of the phrase Ϩ︦ⲚⲞⲨⲘⲈ. In reality, this sequence -ⲞⲨ- is the same “place”-derived abstract noun morphology from the earlier stage of Egyptian, producing the adverbial phrase “in truth” (cf. acknowledged-in-basic-language-resources adverbial phrases in Italian like con entusiasmo “enthusiastically” [< ”with enthusiasm”] and con discrezione “discreetly” [< “with discretion”] [Stillman et al. 2019: 255]).

Across Egyptian’s history, then, an uncontroversial sound change involving lenition of the initial voiced bilabial stop should accordingly be posited alongside some sort of merger of that bilabial with the following vowel, a development probably having to do with the phonetic reduction that can be attendant upon grammaticalization.

Orthographically, writings include bw and the foot sign of Gardiner D58 alongside the single stroke of Gardiner Z1. Thus, unresolved issues include which writing is earlier and whether the more-original word had an original high back vowel or not. In either case, the writing bw at some point must have been interpreted as a writing like the ri of bnri for bnr “be sweet” after loss of the final /r/ -- that is, the rightmost hieroglyph signals the present sound, whereas the hieroglyph to its immediate left is maintained as orthographic detritus deriving from the more-original sound that is no longer present (Gardiner 1957: 29; Loprieno 1995: 22; Hoch 1997: 11). That is, the signs functioned as something like bnri and bw, to use a strikethrough to represent the obsolete sound in transliteration.

 

Step #2 – Perceiving a non-etymological writing that further shows the sound change.

Further evidence for this lenition can be seen in the non-etymological writing of bw nb “everyone,” which should be identified as corresponding to Coptic ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ “everyone” (< “every being”).

Here, the initial bit is not actually bw “place.” Instead, the Coptic ⲞⲨⲞⲚ shows that bw is being used to write a deverbal noun related to the root wn “be, exist” (i.e., “being”).

The earlier writing of the root wn with bw is then understandable in two ways:

First, the sequence bw was able to represent a bilabial glide /w/ at the time of its introduction – that is, it was functioning as something like bw, to use a strikethrough to represent the obsolete sound in transliteration.

Second, there was no need to represent the closing nasal of wn because it was historically adjacent to another identical sound, as can be seen in the -Ⲛ Ⲛ- of ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ (an orthographic tendency noted in Gardiner 1957: 52, for example)

The act of non-etymological writing is also pretty intelligible because speakers probably were not very conscious of the root wn as it figured into this phrase, much like how many present-day speakers of English would not automatically connect the differently-pronounced “-body” of “everybody” with the originating noun “body” unless they were forced to examine that word and mull over it.

 

Step #3 – Discerning an orthographic re-purposing for the sake of disambiguation.

After lenition, the initial b of bw was available for reinterpretation as a generic “beginning of unit” marker – that is, it was no longer perceived as the historic spelling, but rather as an arbitrary marker empty of phonetic content that could begin any sequence of words.

Once the standard Egyptian negation that should be represented as m shifted to n through place assimilation leading to permanent change in place of articulation (cf. the Coptic negative habitual ⲘⲈϤ… and ⲘⲈϢⲀⲔ “perhaps”[< “you don’t know”]; pace the common connection of  nn to bn and Ⲛ︦ as seen in Loprieno 1995: 89 and Oréal 2022: 200), any bare n would have been liable to misinterpretation at the beginning of a sentence. For example, in a common cross-linguistic development (Kuteva et al. 2019: 350-351), the application of the benefactive/purpose/causal preposition transliterated n was evidently elevated from noun phrases to entire clauses and so birthed a causal conjunction n that could begin a sentence (Gardiner 1957: 126-127; Faulker 1972: 124; cf. English’s clausal “for” in the sense of “because”). Thus, because things like the sentence-beginning negative and the sentence-beginning causal conjunction could both be plausibly written as a bare n, a strong need for disambiguation would have arisen, and so scribes thought to repurpose this b from  bw /w/ as a marker to unmistakably signal a negative. 

 

Here, past scholarship has properly recognized a potential influence from the orthographic link between negation and other body parts, namely the open arms sign of Gardiner D35 that begins the sequence transliterated as nn (Loprieno 1995: 140; however, this should probably be transliterated mn).

 

Desiderata.

Although not necessary for the purposes of this analysis, an interesting question is how the sequence transliterated nb could correspond to the Coptic ⲚⲒⲘ. For this line of inquiry, variant forms like ⲚⲒⲂⲈⲚ (Crum 1939: 225) seem like a crucial clue to any eventual explanation (perhaps something along the lines of syllabic reduction of the final nasal that then merged with the preceding bilabial?).

As an indeterminate point within the overall argumentation, the more-original phonetic form of the word “place” and the more-original form of its writing deserve further thought.

As a gap within the overall argumentation, very desirable would be a “smoking gun” piece of evidence where an abstract noun like bw m3‘ “truth” appears with an “in” preposition from ẖnw under a hieroglyphic script (Černý 1976: 285). For, this particular prepositional phrase would tie the earlier recognized abstract noun morphology more tightly together with the important Coptic structure seen in Ϩ︦ⲚⲞⲨⲘⲈ “truly.”

To look out towards larger issues, also unexplained is the use of bw in sequences like the negative transliterated bw-pw that corresponds to the Coptic negative perfect Ⲙ︦ⲠⲈ- (e.g. Loprieno 1995: 225) The Coptic form indicates some sort of negative existential cycle (Veselinova and Hamari 2022: 5-12), wherein a subdomain of standard negation arises from negation of the copula that originally negated a following juxtaposed clause (< lit. “it is not [that]…”). So, if the b has a similar “unit-marking” usage for negation like is occurring with and is probably deriving from bn, the question becomes why the sequence Ⲙ︦ of the Coptic would correspond to the w of the bw in the earlier hieroglyphic writing. Perhaps weak nasalization made the bilabial nasal resemble a glide; in either case, the sound’s realization as a nasal or a glide would have been perceptually less relevant because the following stop would have been voiced irregardless, if that earlier stage of Egyptian already displayed Coptic-like voicing patterns with obstruents (Mihalyfy 2012). This aspect of the language and writing deserves much deeper thought than these initial speculations, however.

In any case, perhaps most hanging over this analysis is the larger issue of the phonetic reality of earlier stages of Egyptian negation, including whether the open arms sign of Gardiner D35 is being properly transliterated with a dental nasal n (why isn’t it a bilabial m, on the basis of evidence like the Coptic negative habitual ⲘⲈϤ… and ⲘⲈϢⲀⲔ “perhaps”[< “you don’t know”]?). Also not to be underestimated is a proper evaluation of the importance of the negative existential cycle resulting in different variants apparent in Coptic like Ⲙ︦Ⲡ︦Ⲣ-/Ⲙ︦ⲠⲰⲢ-, Ⲙ︦ⲠⲈ-, and Ⲙ︦Ⲛ︦- (< m wn), a phenomenon tightly tied into the underdiscussed phenomenon of asyndetic clausal juxtaposition in Egyptian.                                                                                                   

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David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages. 

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as at the North Atlantic Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics and remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. A series of several short articles of his from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian have recently been appearing in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.

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