quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Kushana/Tocharian language was a lingua franca. The base of this language is Dravidian not Indo-European.
I did find that Meroitic was related to the Tokhrian/Kushana language, which is classed in the Indo-European family.
Care to explain how you get from admission that what you call Tokhrian/Kushana is and IndoEuropean language, to reclassifying it as Dravidian, and then reclassifying it again to Niger Congo?
And you wonder why your linguistic work is rejected or ignored?
The Dravidian speakers were formerly the dominant group in Central Asia. As a result, Tamil is often a substratum language in many Asian languages like Kushana.
I have not reclassified Kushana/Tocharian. I classified Meroitic as a Niger-Congo language.
Dravido-Harappans of Central Asia Andrew and Susan Sherratt (1988) has hypothesized that Dravidian speakers represent one of the non-IE farming groups that had already occupied many areas, before the expansion of the IE speakers. The archaeological evidence for the spread of Harappan elements across Central Asia demonstrates cultural contact during the period in question. This pattern supports the evident relationship between Dravidian languages and languages formerly spoken in Iran such as Elamite, and Kassite (McAlpin 1974; Winters 1984b), and the Altaic group (Menges 1977; Vacek 1983; Wang 1995) and Indo-European (Winters 1988a, 1989, 1991).
There is historical evidence which can help us to illustrate that until after 1000 B.C., and especially 500 B.C., much of Central Asia was settled by agro-pastoral Dravidian groups. These groups were settled over a wide area including Turkmenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mongolia and the Gansu and Yunnan provinces of China.
Contrary to the views of Renfrew (1987,1988) most scholars working on the Harappan script accept the hypothesis that this script is written in Dravidian (Winters 1984, 1984b, 1987). This hypothesis is supported by 1) the fact that Dravidian speakers live in Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Turkestan, 2) the presence of Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit indicates that Dravidian speakers probably occupied the Indus Valley before the Indo-Aryans arrived, and 3) the spread of the black-and-red ware (BRW) tradition in the Indo-Pakistan area, all support the Dravidian hypothesis.
Fairservis (1986), Mahavadan (1986b), Parpola (1986), and Winters (1984a,1984b,1987) have all suggested a Dravidian identity for the Harappan language due to their structural analysis of the Harappan script. The archaeological and linguistic evidence all supports this view.
K. H. Manges (1966) using linguistic data assumes an early settlement of Dravidian speakers far to the northwest on the Iranian plateau. Zvelebil has hypothesized a southeastern migration of Dravidian speakers out of northeastern Iran down into Tamilnadu.
The Indus region is an area of uncertain rains because it is located in the fringes of the monsoon (Fairservis 1975, 1986, 1987). Settlers in the Indus Valley had to suffer both frequent droughts and floods. severe droughts frequently occurred in the Indus Valley so the people dug wells.
There was a multi-staged Dravidian dispersal across Central Asia. Dravidian migrations were not spontaneous in nature, their colonization of Central Asia was formalized. the Dravidian colonists of Central Asia, were motivated by curiosity, and the search for new grazing land and metals.
Indus Valley Dravidian settlements have been found in around the luzurite areas of Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan (Brentjes 1983). Lapis lazuli is found in metamorphic limestone or dolomite (Rosen 1988). This material was used to make many prestige items in ancient times (Winters 1988c).
Central Asia 4000 years ago was relatively empty. As Dravidian populations increased in the Indus Valley, sedentary-pastoralists and miners colonized Central Asia through small-scale migrations and settlement of hitherto unfarmed or grazing areas over a period of several generations (Francefort 1987a, 1987b; Gupta 1979; Masson 1981; Winters 1988c) . These Dravidians as they dispersed across Central Asia named the separate water bodies and land forms where they settled (Winters 1986: 142, 1988b).
Many north Dravidian people are presently found in Central Asia. The cattle rearing Brahuis may represent descendants of the Dravidian pastoral element that roamed the steppes in ancient times. North Dravidian speaking Brahuis are found in Afghan Baluchistan , Persian Sistan and the Marwoasis in Soviet Turkmenistan (Elfenbein 1987: 229).
There are islands of Dravidian speakers in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. There are over 300,000 Brahui speakers in Qualat, Hairpur and Hyderabad districts of Pakistan. Other Dravidian speakers are found in Iran, Russia and Yugoslavia (ISDL 1983: 227). The distribution of Northern Dravidian speaking groups outlined above, corresponds to the former spread of Harappan cultures in the 3rd millennium B.C., in Central Asia.
Due to early the Dravidian settlement of Central Asia the Dravidian speakers influenced many languages. There is a Dravidian substratum in Indo-Aryan. There are Dravidian loans Rg Veda, eventhough Aryan recorders of this work were situated in the Punjab, which was occupied around this time by Dravidians using BRW.
Emeneau and Burrow (1962) found 500 Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit. In addition, Indo-Aryan illustrates a widespread structural borrowing from Dravidian in addition to 700 lexical loans (Kuiper 1967; Southward 1977; Winters 1989).
The Dravidian languages have also influenced the Altaic group e.g., Turkic (Menges 1977; Vacek 1987; Andronov 1963-64); Mongolian (Vacek 1978,1983,1981). Winters (1991) has discussed in detail the Dravidian substratum in many Altaic languages. Recently, Vacek (1983) has discussed the affinity between 120 Mongolian and Dravidian verbs that show full correspondence. History of Ethnic Diversity in Central Asia
The Dravidian substratum in Tocharian, Indo-Aryan and Altaic all suggest an early domination of Central Asia by the Dravidian speakers in a region of plural societies. The presence of "extreme" ethnic diversity in Central Asia support the hypothesis that there was extensive bilingulaism in ancient Central Asia.
Ethnic and linguistic diversity stimulated the need for a lingua franca in Central Asia to facilitate communication and trade between the various tribal groups living in the region. Due to the introduction of many items of civilization and trade by the Dravidian speaking Harappans, Dravidian probably served as an early lingua franca linking the urbanized Dravidian speaking people with the Dravidian and non-Dravidian speaking nomadic groups from Bactria in the West, to China and Mongolia in the east.
Francefort (1987a,1987b) and Winters (1988c, 1990, 1991) have outlined the archaeological data supporting a Dravidian colonization of farming and mining habitats in Central Asia.
This probably led to the adoption of Dravidian, as a language of exchange, technology and intergroup communication by non-Dravidian speakers. At first the desire of hunter-gatherer and pastoral nomadic people to participate in the new economic system introduced by the Dravido-Harappans led to extensive bilingualism among the peoples of Central Asia.
The probable introduction of Dravidian in such an area of linguistic fragmentation as a lingua franca probably proved to be advantageous for inter-tribal communication. The status of Dravidian as a unifying language was enhanced further through the introduction of innovative technological and economic culture traits by the Dravidian speakers.
These social and economic factors probably led to the dispersal of Dravidians from Iran to Central Asia. This made possible the presence of diverse languages in Central Asia that demonstrate many lexical and grammatical similarities; and makes congruent the spatial pattern separating speakers of Dravidian, Tocharian and Turkic in time and space.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: Truth will always overcome a lie, no matter what the lie is.
[QB]
quote: proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
First, I would like to make it clear that the probable language of the Kushana was Tamil. According to Dravidian literature, the Kushana were called Kosars=Yakshas=Yueh chih/ Kushana. This literature maintains that when they entered India they either already spoke Tamil, or adopted the language upon settlement in India.
The Kushana and the Yueh chih were one and the same. In addition to North Indian documents the Kushana-Yueh chih association are also discussed in Dravidian literature. V Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen hundred years ago, note that in the Sanskrit literature the Yueh chih were called Yakshas, Pali chroniclers called them Yakkos and Kosars< Kushana.
They allegedely arrived in India during the 2nd century BC. He makes it clear that the Yueh chih/ Kushana as noted on their coins worshipped Siva as seen on the coins of Kanishka. This is why we have a coin of a Kushana king from Taxila, dated to AD 76 that declares that the king was maharaja rajatiraja devaputra Kushana "Great King, King of kings, Son of God, the Kushana".
Kushana
King Kaniska of the Kushan
The term Tochara has nothing to do with the Yueh chih, this was a term used to describe the people who took over the Greek Bactrian state, before the Kushana reached the Oxus Valley around 150 BC . There is no reason the Kushana may not have been intimately familiar with the Kharosthi writing at this time because from 202BC onward Prakrit and Chinese documents were written in Kharosthi.
The Kushana and the Yueh chih were one and the same. In addition to North Indian documents the Kushana-Yueh chih association are also discussed in Dravidian literature.V Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen hundred years ago note that in the Sanskrit literature the Yueh chih were called Yakshas, Pali chroniclers called them Yakkos and Kosars< Kushana. They allegedely arrived in India during the 2nd century BC. He makes it clear that the Yueh chih/ Kushana as noted on their coins worshipped Siva as seen on the coins of Kanishka.This is why we have a coin of a Kushana king from Taxila, dated to AD 76 that declares that the king was maharaja rajatiraja devaputra Kushana "Great King, King of kings, Son of God, the Kushana".
Some researchers believe that the Ars'i spoke Tocharian A, while Tocharian B was the "Kucha language" may have been spoken by the Kushana people. I don't know where you read that the speakers of Tocharian A were called Ars'i. This names have nothing to do with ethnic groups, they refer to the cities where Tocharian text were found: Tocharian A documents were found around Qarashar and Turfan, thusly these text are also referred to as Turfanian or East Tocharian; Tocharian B documents were found near the town of Kucha, thusly they are sometimes called Kuchean or West Tocharian.
Kanishka Casket
Linguist use the term Tochari to refer to these people, because they were given this title in Turkic manuscripts . They called themselves Kushana.
The observable evidence make it clear that the terms used to label the Tocharian dialects are not ethnonyms, they are terms used to denote where the Tocharian records were found. The use of the term Ars'i does not relate to the Kushana people. The terms: Asii, Pasiani, Tochari and Sacarauli, refer to the nomads that took away Bactria from the Greeks.
These nomads came from the Iaxartes River that adjoins that of Sacae and the Sogdiani .The Kushana people took over Bactria much later. It is a mistake to believe that Ars'i and Kucha were ethnonyms is under-standable given your lack of knowledge about Tocharian. And I will agree that there were a number of different languages spoken by people who wrote material in Tocharian. It is for this reason that I have maintained throughout my published works on Tocharian, that this was a trade language. This language was used by the Central Asians as a lingua franca and trade language due to the numerous ethnic groups which formerly lived in central Asia". Kharosthi was long used to write in Central Asia. It was even used by the Greeks. The use of the Kharosthi writing system in Central Asia and India, would place this writing contemporaneous with the tradition, recorded by the Classical writers of Indians settling among the Kushites of Meroitic Empire..
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: Tocharian was probably a Lingua Franca
There were many people who probably used Tocharian for purposes of communication including the Kushana and the "Ars'i/Asii". They probably used Tocharian as a lingua franca. You make it clear in your last post that numerous languages were spoken in Central Asia when the Tocharian was written in Kharosthi.
Most researchers believe that a majority of the people who lived in this area were bilingual and spoke Bactrian ,Indian languages among other languages. I agree with this theory, and believe that the Kushana Kings may have spoken a Dravidian language. Due to the possibility that the Kushana spoke a Dravidian language which is the substratum language of Tocharian; and the presence of a number of different terms in Tocharian from many languages spoken in the area-led me to the conclusion that Tocharian was a trade language. The Kushana always referred to themselves as the Kushana/Gushana. The name Kushana for this group is recorded in the Manikiala Stone inscription (56BC?), the Panjtar Stone inscription of 122 AD and the Taxila Silver Scroll. The Greeks called them Kushana in the Karosthi inscriptions, and Kocano. In the Chinese sources they were called Koei-shuang or Kwei-shwang= Kushana, and Yueh chih .
As you can see the term Kushana had been used to refer to these people long before Kujula Kadphises used the term as a personal name. This was over a hundred years after the Kushana had become rulers of Bactria. It would appear from the evidence that the nation of the Kushana was called Kusha.
quote:Originally posted by rasol: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Kushana/Tocharian language was a lingua franca. The base of this language is Dravidian not Indo-European.
I did find that Meroitic was related to the Tokhrian/Kushana language, which is classed in the Indo-European family.
Care to explain how you get from admission that what you call Tokhrian/Kushana is and IndoEuropean language, to reclassifying it as Dravidian, and then reclassifying it again to Niger Congo?
And you wonder why your linguistic work is rejected or ignored?
quote:The Dravidian speakers were formerly the dominant group in Central Asia. As a result, Tamil is often a substratum language in many Asian languages like Kushana.
How does this alter the fact that Kushana is and Indo European language and you claim Kushana [not Tamil] is the basis of the Meroitic text?
quote:I have not reclassified Kushana/Tocharian.
In this case, your Kushana hypothesis ascribes and Indo-European origin to Meroetic, since Kushana is, as you admit, and Indo European language.
quote:I classified Meroitic as a Niger-Congo language.
Which is complete nonsense - if as you say - Merotic is unrelated to any African language, but rather...related to Indo European [Kushana].
You're not making any sense.
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quote:There is historical evidence which can help us to illustrate that until after 1000 B.C., and especially 500 B.C., much of Central Asia was settled by agro-pastoral Dravidian groups.
There is no evidence that these people migrated back and forth from India to Africa across a lost-sunken continent as you claim.
You're not making any sense.
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quote:There is historical evidence which can help us to illustrate that until after 1000 B.C., and especially 500 B.C., much of Central Asia was settled by agro-pastoral Dravidian groups.
There is no evidence that these people migrated back and forth from India to Africa across a lost-sunken continent as you claim.
You're not making any sense.
Why do make up lies. I never said the Kushana arrived in the Meroitic Sudan across some lost continent. They probably came to Egypt and made their way to Meroe from there.
You can't read. I already presented evidence that Indian communities existed in Egypt and Indian coins have been found in modern Ethiopia.
Let's review the evidence there were Indians in North Africa in addition to Kush/Meroe. For example, at Quseir al-Qadim there was a large Indian speaking community (see: R. Salomon, "Epigraphic remains of Indian traders in Egypt", Journal of the American oriental Society, (1991) pp.731-736; and R. Salomon, Addenda, Journal of the American Oriental Society, (1993) pg.593). These Indians were in Egypt writing messages in their own language, around the time we see a switch from Egyptian to Meroitic writing among the Meroites.
In addition, we can also be sure that the Kushan were known in northeast Africa because a horde of Kushan coins were found in the floor of a cave at the present monastery-shrine at Debra Demo in modern Ethiopia in 1940.
quote:Originally posted by rasol: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: The Kushana/Tocharian language was a lingua franca. The base of this language is Dravidian not Indo-European.
I did find that Meroitic was related to the Tokhrian/Kushana language, which is classed in the Indo-European family.
Care to explain how you get from admission that what you call Tokhrian/Kushana is and IndoEuropean language, to reclassifying it as Dravidian, and then reclassifying it again to Niger Congo?
And you wonder why your linguistic work is rejected or ignored?
quote:The Dravidian speakers were formerly the dominant group in Central Asia. As a result, Tamil is often a substratum language in many Asian languages like Kushana.
How does this alter the fact that Kushana is and Indo European language and you claim Kushana [not Tamil] is the basis of the Meroitic text?
quote:I have not reclassified Kushana/Tocharian.
In this case, your Kushana hypothesis ascribes and Indo-European origin to Meroetic, since Kushana is, as you admit, and Indo European language.
quote:I classified Meroitic as a Niger-Congo language.
Which is complete nonsense - if as you say - Merotic is unrelated to any African language, but rather...related to Indo European [Kushana].
You're not making any sense.
You don't read too well. Let me try to explain the situation to you as simply as possible:
1) I pointed out that Meroitic experts claimed they could not find a connection between Meroitic and African languages.
2) Therefore, I compared Meroitic to Kushana, since the classical writers claimed Indians had played an important role in Meroitic civilization.
3) After deciphering the Meroitic writing I was able to discover new Meroitic lexical items and grammatical features which allowed me to compare Meroitic to African languages.
posted
the Kushana from India, and Meroite scholars jointly invented the Meroitic script using Demotic and Kharosthi as their model for the new writing system.
This view is supported by the traditions recorded by the Classical writers, and presence of at least 17 signs identical to Kharosthi signs in the Meroitic script.
In addition, there was a long tradition of Kushite innovation in regards to Egyptian writing. This innovation encouraged the Kushites to experiment with various Egyptian writing systems during the life of the Kushite empires. As a result, the Meroites would have been very amenable to the introduction of a new writing system if that system simplified writing. I believe that this system of writing we call Meroitic did just that. It used a combination of "Demotic" and Tocharian signs to write Meroitic.
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I'm only quoting you. However it is difficult to keep track of your lies, I do agree.
quote:I never said the Kushana arrived in the Meroitic Sudan across some lost continent. They probably came to Egypt and made their way to Meroe from there.
posted
^ LMAO @ Winter's linguistic mess! Dravidian was NOT a substratum of the languages of Central Asia which was very diverse. Tamil is a language of the Dravidian family which is totally different from Indo-European Kushana. Actually it can be argued that the Dravidian family descended from a common Eurasian language that also includes the Elamite languages and others. All are Eurasian languages and have NOTHING to do with those of Africa. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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I'm only quoting you. However it is difficult to keep track of your lies, I do agree.
quote:I never said the Kushana arrived in the Meroitic Sudan across some lost continent. They probably came to Egypt and made their way to Meroe from there.
Let me try to explain the situation to you as simply as possible:
1) I pointed out that Meroitic experts claimed they could not find a connection between Meroitic and African languages.
Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations. Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
quote:Clyde Winters:
3) After deciphering the Meroitic writing I was able to discover new Meroitic lexical items and grammatical features which allowed me to compare Meroitic to African languages.
How do you decipher a script with script from another language, which uses a different set of letters both quantitatively and morphologically? How do you decipher a script using script which has been found to have no connections to Meroe; to demonstrate this, where is the script uncovered in Meroe of a Kushana language, alongside that in Meroitic language? If Kushana were in Meroe at some point, as you say, and if they had come with their scripts to the region, then surely scripts in their language should also be tracked in Meroe. For Kushana to have such impact on Meroe, that is the least that should be found.
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posted
^Let's take a very different and unrelated situation, and use as an example anyway:
French and English use essentially the same letters, but just because I'm familiar with the alphabets, doesn't mean that I can understand words in French, if I happened to understand English but not French. The only way I can translate the French words and sentences then, is if those words were accomodated by their English counterparts.
^But in the case of Meroitic and Kushana scripts, such strong letter correspondence doesn't even occur, i.e. sharing of the very same set of letters. In fact, just going by Clyde's own diagram, Meroitic and Kharosthi not only differ visibly in the number of letters respective to each script, but for the most part, also differ quite visibly in morphology. Unless, one finds a Rosetta type of stone in Meroe, showing a single literature being communicated in Meroitic language and Kharosthi side by side, and hence determining word correspondences, how can Kharosthi be used to decipher Meroitic?
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quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
You don't read too well.
Apparently, the case with you.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Let me try to explain the situation to you as simply as possible:
1) I pointed out that Meroitic experts claimed they could not find a connection between Meroitic and African languages.
quote:Mystery Solver writes: Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations.
Correct. The idea that Meroitic is unrelated to any African language is Winters opening proposition.
It was this faulty assumption that was the basis of his attempt to link Meroitic to Indo European languages in the 1st place, and if this assumption is incorrect, the whole enterprise falls a part, and that's why he restates it.
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quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
You don't read too well.
Apparently, the case with you.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Let me try to explain the situation to you as simply as possible:
1) I pointed out that Meroitic experts claimed they could not find a connection between Meroitic and African languages.
quote:Mystery Solver writes: Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations.
Correct. The idea that Meroitic is unrelated to any African language is Winters opening proposition.
It was this faulty assumption that was the basis of his attempt to link Meroitic to Indo European languages in the 1st place, and if this assumption is incorrect, the whole enterprise falls a part, and that's why he restates it.
You can not make a lie the truth. You tell the truth and the lie will pass.
The comparative method was used to find the cognate language of Meroitic. Using this method Meroitic scholars have compared the "known" Meroitic terms to vernacular African languages to establish morphological cognition between Meroitic and an African language. Up to now these linguistic comparisons failed to reveal the cognate language of Meroitic. Researchers working on the Meroitic language do not believe that it was a member of the Afro-Asian group. Griffith and Haycock tried to read Meroitic using Nubian.
K.H. Priese, tried to read the Meroitic text using Eastern Sudani; and F. Hintze, attempted to compare Meroitic with the Ural-Altaic group. Siegbert Hummel, compared the "known" Meroitic words to words in the Altaic family which he believed was a substrate language of Meroitic.
Rilly recently claimed that Meroitic is related to Nubian , eventhough Griffith and Haycock failed to read Meroitic using Nubian. Rilly's hypothesis is that Meroitic can be read by reconstructing the proto-language of the Sudani language.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
We can disconfirm this theory because it is not supported by the historical and linguistic evidence we have concerning the linguistic and political history of Kush. We must reject Rilly's theory because ,we have no evidence that 1) Proto-Nilo-Saharan, as constructed by Rilly was ever spoken by a living being; 2) we have evidence that the Noba/Nubians entered Nubia long after the Kushites had founded Napatan and Meroitic civilizations, so eventhough they live in Nubia today, they are not representative of Kushite people who they were often in conflict with; 3) Egyptian documents make it clear that the Blymmes also entered the area after the founding of Napatan and Meroitic civilization, so even if some people claim that the Beja=Blymmes this is conjecture. Consequently, even if Beja= Blymmes, they donot represent the Kushite people who founded the Napata and Meroe civilizations, because both the Noba and Blymmes entered Kush after its founding. This makes it clear that although Rilly's evidence looked promising, the data presented in support of the hypothesis fails to support his claim.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites.
Because there are no cognate Meroitic terms and lexical items in the Eastern Sudanic Languages, Rilly has begun to reconstruct Proto-Eastern Sudanic, and attempt to read Meroitic text using his Proto-Eastern Sudanic vocabulary. Even if I hadn’t deciphered the Meroitic writing this method would never lead to the decipherment of this or any other language.
First, it must be stated that no “dead “ language has been deciphered using a proto-language. These languages were deciphered using living languages, Coptic in the case of Egyptian, Oromo and (Ethiopian) Semitic was used to decipher the Mesopotamian Cuneiform scripts.
The basic problem with using a proto-language to read a dead language results from the fact that the proto-language has been reconstructed by linguist who have no knowledge or textual evidence of the alleged proto-language. Secondly, there are subgroups in any family of languages. This means that you must first establish the intermediate proto-language (IPL) of the subgroup languages in the target language family. Once the IPLs have been reconstructed, you can then reconstruct the superordinate proto-language (SPL).
You can only reconstruct the SPL on the basis of attested languages. In addition, before you can reconstruct the IPLs and SPL a genetic relationship must be established for the languages within the Superfamily of languages, e.g., Nilo Saharan.
The problem with Rilly’s method, is there is no way he can really establish the IPLs in Eastern Sudanic because we have not textual evidence or lexical items spoken by people who lived in the Sudan in Meroitic times. As a result, the languages spoken by people in this area today may not reflect the linguistic geography of the Sudan in the Meroitic period. This is most evident when we look at modern Egypt. Today the dominant language is Arabic, and yet Arabic has no relationship to Egyptian. If we accept Rilly’s method for deciphering Egyptian we would assume that once me reconstructed proto-Semitic , we could read Egyptian—but as you know Egyptian is not a Semitic language.
These scholars failed to find a match between Meroitic and the vernacular languages of Nubia and the Sudan. This made it necessary to turn to the historical literature concerning the Kushites to form a new hypothesis related to possible sources of the Meroitic language. The historical literature of the Kushites comes from Egyptian and classical sources. It was the Classical authors who noted the influence of the Indians on Meroitic civilization.
Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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The Kushana hypothesis was based on the following evidence, 1) no African language has been found to be a cognate language of Meroitic 2) the Classical literature says that the Kushites lived in Asia and Africa; 3) the Gymnosophists, or "naked sages" of Meroe came from India.
The comparative method was used to find the cognate language of Meroitic. Using this method Meroitic scholars have compared the "known" Meroitic terms to vernacular African languages to establish morphological cognition between Meroitic and an African language. Up to now these linguistic comparisons failed to reveal the cognate language of Meroitic. Researchers working on the Meroitic language do not believe that it was a member of the Afro-Asian group. Griffith and Haycock tried to read Meroitic using Nubian.
K.H. Priese, tried to read the Meroitic text using Eastern Sudani; and F. Hintze, attempted to compare Meroitic with the Ural-Altaic group. Siegbert Hummel, compared the "known" Meroitic words to words in the Altaic family which he believed was a substrate language of Meroitic.
Rilly recently claimed that Meroitic is related to Nubian , eventhough Griffith and Haycock failed to read Meroitic using Nubian. Rilly's hypothesis is that Meroitic can be read by reconstructing the proto-language of the Sudani language.
Rilly claims that Meroitic is Nilo-Saharan. He claims that this is supported by comparing the Proto-Nilo-Saharan to Meroitic, because the people living in Kush today are remnants of the Meroites. We can disconfirm this theory because it is not supported by the historical and linguistic evidence we have concerning the linguistic and political history of Kush. We must reject Rilly's theory because ,we have no evidence that 1) Proto-Nilo-Saharan, as constructed by Rilly was ever spoken by a living being; 2) we have evidence that the Noba/Nubians entered Nubia long after the Kushites had founded Napatan and Meroitic civilizations, so eventhough they live in Nubia today, they are not representative of Kushite people who they were often in conflict with; 3) Egyptian documents make it clear that the Blymmes also entered the area after the founding of Napatan and Meroitic civilization, so even if some people claim that the Beja=Blymmes this is conjecture. Consequently, even if Beja= Blymmes, they donot represent the Kushite people who founded the Napata and Meroe civilizations, because both the Noba and Blymmes entered Kush after its founding. This makes it clear that although Rilly's evidence looked promising, the data presented in support of the hypothesis fails to support his claim.
These scholars failed to find a match between Meroitic and the vernacular languages of Nubia and the Sudan. This made it necessary to turn to the historical literature concerning the Kushites to form a new hypothesis related to possible sources of the Meroitic language. The historical literature of the Kushites comes from Egyptian and classical sources. It was the Classical authors who noted the influence of the Indians on Meroitic civilization.
Before I began work on Meroitic, other researchers had already falsified the African theory for Meroitic's cognate language. The fact that not even Nubian, a language spoken by a people who lived in the Meroitic empire, failed to be the cognate language of Meroitic made it clear that we must look elsewhere for the cognate language spoken by the Meroites.
Flavius Philostratus, the writer of the Vita Apollonii, Vol. 1,cliamed that the Gymnosophists of Meroe originally came from India (see F.C. Conybeare, Philostratus:The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (p.45),1950). Given the fact that the Kushana had formerly ruled India around the time that the Meroitic writing was introduced to the Kushite civilization, lead to the hypothesis that the ancestors of the Gymnosophist may have been Kushana philosophers.
The historical evidence of the Kushana having ruled India made the Classical references to Indians in Meroe, an important source for the construction of alternative theories about the possible location of the cognate language of Meroitic. There is external evidence, which supports my theory. A theory explains observed phenomena and has predictive power. I have theorized that due to the claims of the Classical writers that some of the Meroites came from India (F.C Conybeare (Trans.), Philostratus: The life of Apollonius of Tyana Vol.2, (1950) pg.271). According to the Life of Apollonius, the Indian Meroites were formerly led by a King Ganges, who had "repulsed the Scythians who invaded this land [India from] across the Caucasus" (Conybeare, Vol.1, Pg.273). Pilostratus also made it clear that the Indians of Meroe came to this country after their king was killed.
The presence of this tradition of an Indian King of the Indian-Meroites conquering the Scythians predicts that the Indian literature should record this historical episode. This prediction is supported by a Jaina text called the Kalakeharya-Kathanaka, which reports that when the Scythians invaded Malwa, the King of Malwa, called Vikramaditya defeated the Scythians (H. Kulke & D. Rothermund, History of India (London, Routledge: 1990, pg.73). This king Vikramaditya may be the Ganges mentioned in the Life of Apollonius.Confirmation of the Ganges story, supports the Classical literary evidence that their were Indianized-Meroites that could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
Moreover, there were other Indians in North Africa in addition to Kush/Meroe. For example, at Quseir al-Qadim there was a large Indian speaking community (see: R. Salomon, "Epigraphic remains of Indian traders in Egypt", Journal of the American oriental Society, (1991) pp.731-736; and R. Salomon, Addenda, Journal of the American Oriental Society, (1993) pg.593). These Indians were in Egypt writing messages in their own language, around the time we see a switch from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Meroitic writing system. The evidence that the Classical references to an Indian-Meroite King who conquered the Scythians is supported by the Indian literature, provides external corroboration of the tradition that some of the Meroites were of Indian origin. The presence of Indians traders and settlers in Meroe (and Egypt), makes it almost impossible to deny the possibility that Indians, familiar with the Tokharian trade language did not introduce this writing to the Meroites who needed a neutral language to unify the diverse ethnic groups who made up the Meroite state. In relation to the history of linguistic change and bilingualism, it is a mistake to believe that linguistic transfer had to take place for the Meroites to have used Tokharian, when it did not take place when they wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics. In summary the classical literature makes it clear that there was a connection between the Gymnosophists (of Meroe) and the Indians. The fact that historical events mentioned in the classical sources are found in the Indian literature confirm the view that there were Indian-Meroites who could have introduced the Tokharian trade language to the Meroites.
The fact that the Nubians who were part of the "Meroitic state", used hieroglyphics and Coptic to write their language without abandoning their native language support the view that they could have also used Tokharian to write Meroitic. And that eventhough they wrote Meroitic inscriptions in Tokharian, they would not have had to abandon Nubian.
The evidence presented above provides internal and external validity for my theory based upon the sources I have cited previously. The sources I have used are impartial, to disconfirm my hypothesis someone needs to show that my propositions are not fully informed [i.e., there were no Indians North Africa and Kush when the Classical writers maintained they were] and present rival explanations based on the evidence. The fact that the claims made by the Classical writers is supported by the Indians themselves is further strong confirmation of the Kushana hypothesis.
The hypothesis based on the classical literature, was enough to support the original Kushana Hypothesis. The predicting power of the original theory, matches the observed natural phenomena which was confirmed elsewhere by cognate place names, ethononyms, lexical items and grammatical features, indicate that my theory has not be falsified. The ability to reliably predict a linguistic relationship between Kushana and Meroitic, was further confirmation of the Kushana Hypothesis, because the linguistic connections were deducible from prediction.
I controlled the Kushana Hypothesis by comparing the statements of the classical writers, with historical, linguistic anthropological and toponymic evidence found not only in Africa, but also India and Central Asia [where the people also used Tokharian as a trade language to unify the various people in Central Asia]. I constructed five testable hypotheses in support of the Kushana theory, and it seems only fair that these five variables must be disconfirmed, to falsify the Kushana Hypothesis. Failure to disconfirm this theorem, implies validity of my prediction.
My confirmation of the above five variables:1) the presence of Kushites in Africa and Asia;2) the presence of Kushana sages in Egypt who may have migrated to Meroe; 3)cognate lexical items; 4)cognate verbs and 5) cognate grammatical features indicates systematic controlled, critical and empirical investigation of the question of Kushana representing the Meroitic cognate language.
1.You have not presented any evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and contributed to their civilization.
5. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
6. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
7. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
You are full of yourself. You support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance.
quote: I repeat.
proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
Let me try to explain the situation to you as simply as possible:
1) I pointed out that Meroitic experts claimed they could not find a connection between Meroitic and African languages.
Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations. Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
quote:Clyde Winters:
3) After deciphering the Meroitic writing I was able to discover new Meroitic lexical items and grammatical features which allowed me to compare Meroitic to African languages.
How do you decipher a script with script from another language, which uses a different set of letters both quantitatively and morphologically? How do you decipher a script using script which has been found to have no connections to Meroe; to demonstrate this, where is the script uncovered in Meroe of a Kushana language, alongside that in Meroitic language? If Kushana were in Meroe at some point, as you say, and if they had come with their scripts to the region, then surely scripts in their language should also be tracked in Meroe. For Kushana to have such impact on Meroe, that is the least that should be found.
...which explains why you have consistently failed to address my point-by-point refutations of both your methods, and assessments of Rilly's work. Sure.
quote:Clyde Winters:
1.You have not presented any evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and contributed to their civilization.
5. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
6. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
7. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
...none of which I need to do, because there is no such thing as addressing either strawman, proclamations already destroyed to pieces by myself, or something that just makes no sense. That's what this weak plea, passed off as serious followup requests, really amounts to.
quote:Clyde Winters:
You are full of yourself.
Let's just say if there were medals for such a thing, you'd be the gold medalist.
quote:Rilly:
you support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance.
I support his methods, because they are linguistically sound. Yours isn't. I mean, you can't be jealous of something that doesn't make sense. Btw, isn't that what you've charged everyone who's questioned your fantastic propositions? What about Obenga; jealous too? You bet.
Case in point, how come you haven't had the courage to address this point-by-point annihilation of your uninformed and false claims, point by point?...
Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations. Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its (Meroitic's) family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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1.You have not cited evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and after they left their original home because of the death of their king and contributed to their civilization.
You have not disputed the fact that Indian records record the migration of Indian due to the death of their king.
6. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
7. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
8. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
Failure to dispute any of these facts make you claims groundless.
You are full of yourself. You support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance. You are just blowing hot air.
quote: I repeat.
proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
...which explains why you have consistently failed to address my point-by-point refutations of both your methods, and assessments of Rilly's work. Sure.
quote:Clyde Winters:
1.You have not presented any evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and contributed to their civilization.
5. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
6. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
7. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
...none of which I need to do, because there is no such thing as addressing either strawman, proclamations already destroyed to pieces by myself, or something that just makes no sense. That's what this weak plea, passed off as serious followup requests, really amounts to.
quote:Clyde Winters:
You are full of yourself.
Let's just say if there were medals for such a thing, you'd be the gold medalist.
quote:Rilly:
you support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance.
I support his methods, because they are linguistically sound. Yours isn't. I mean, you can't be jealous of something that doesn't make sense. Btw, isn't that what you've charged everyone who's questioned your fantastic propositions? What about Obenga; jealous too? You bet.
Case in point, how come you haven't had the courage to address this point-by-point annihilation of your uninformed and false claims, point by point?...
Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations. Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its (Meroitic's) family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
Meroitic was the language of the successive kingdoms of Kush. It was not written before the last stage of the civilization of Kush, the so-called « Kingdom of Meroe ». However, there is evidence for a much earlier date for the appearance of this language (Rilly, 8th Nilo-Saharan Conference, Hamburg, 2001), although it was not yet written with a script of its own. A list of Proto-Meroitic names of persons, obviously important figures of the first Kushite state, the Kingdom of Kerma, appears in an Egyptian papyrus from the sixteenth century BC.
According to the most recent archaeological work carried out by the University of Geneva, Kerma was founded around 2400 years BC and did not undergo any dramatic ethnic or cultural changes until its final stage. So the origin of Meroitic can now be placed very probably around this date or even a little earlier. Meroitic is yet for the greatest part untranslatable. Of course, the words can be read since the script was deciphered in 1911 by the British egyptologist F. Ll. Griffith. But the very meaning of these words was nearly unknown. Apart from some names of places, kings and gods, and a few Egyptian loanwords, no more than three dozens of indigenous words could be translated with certainty.
The main problem with unknown ancient languages is to find related languages, ancient or modern, which are known. If an unknown language cannot be linked with any known language, and if there are no extensive bilingual texts, translation is probably impossible. A sad example is Etruscan, which still resists translation in spite of three centuries of hard work with various methods.
It is impossible to prove a genetic relation between given languages if only a few basic words are available, as was the case until recently. Moreover, in the list of the allegedly translated Meroitic words, some were actually wrong. In 1964, Bruce Trigger tried to prove that Meroitic was a Nilo-Saharan - and more specifically an Eastern Sudanic - language. He used a list of Meroitic words compared with Nubian and Nara, a language from Eritrea. But the list was still very scanty, and half the words he used, taken from Zyhlarz's articles, were erroneously translated - or simply did not exist at all. Although he was right in his conclusion, he was wrong in the way he reached them. So the question of the linguistic position of Meroitic remained open after his paper.
The only basic Meroitic words for which a solid translation had been given by Griffith and his successors are the following :
man / woman / meat / bread / water / give / big / abundant / good / sister / brother / wife / mother / child / begotten / born / feet.
The methods to increase the number of translated words cannot be fully explained in details here. To make a long story short, I would say that it is a « multicontextual approach ». The archaeological and the iconographical context can be very helpful, since very often, the short texts are the description with words of a painted or engraved image. Clyde: There is no way you can read an inscriptionusing iconography because often you do notknow the name for the items depicted in the engraving.
....Typological similarity between Egyptian texts and their Meroitic counterparts can also be useful. Of course, the elements of the texts that are known, for example names of persons and gods, can help towards clarifying the grammatical nature and the semantic field of the unknown words. Most of the time, all these elements are insufficient. But in a few cases, a meaning can be suggested for new words and be confirmed in various inscriptions. Although very slow, this approach recently provided new translations.
Clyde: This comment makes it clear that Rilly made up words and associated them with inscriptions.
A set of thirtynine purely Meroitic basic words was finally produced, not including of course too specific words such as « prince » or « great priest », which are useless for comparative purpose.
Clyde: Here Rilly admits that he "produced thirtynine purely Meroitic basic words'. If the 39 words did not exist before hand, he made them up. Again evidence Rilly is using nonexistent words to read Meroitic.
SOME RECENTLY TRANSLATED MEROITIC WORDS
arohe- «protect» hr- «eat», pwrite «life», yer «milk» ar «boy», are- or dm- «take, receive», dime «cow», hlbi «bull», ns(e) «sacrifice>>, sdk «journey», tke- «love, revere», We «dog»
Clyde : Supercar claims that Rilly does not admit he has translated Meroitic. Here is the evidence that Rilly does believe he has translated Meroitic words based on Northern Eastern Sudani. All of these words he has made up .
The second stage of the work was to reconsider the relation of Meroitic with NiloSaharan and possibly to spot inside this phylum a specific family where Meroitic could belong. Previous works, including mine, had shown that a link with other phylums like Niger-Congo or Afro-Asiatic was unlikely.
Clyde: Here Rilly admits you can not connect Meroitic to any African languages based on the available agreed upon Meroitic corpus. As a result, Rilly made up Meroitic terms so he could "translate" Meroitic witg his made-up terms.
For this purpose, lexicostatistical methods were used (see below). The most convincing similarities are with Eastern Sudanic, and more specifically with the northern branch including Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima. The best result is obtained with Midob (a member of the Nubian group), thanks to Roland Werner's excellent description of this language.
Clyde: Supercar/Mystery Solver claims I made up the fact that Rilly isusing Nubian to read Meroitic. Here Rilly supports my earlier statements.
The scores of Taman, Nara and Nyima could be higher if there were extensive lexical data available, but infortunately, only short wordlists have so far been published.
But at this stage of the work, two main obstacles were encountered. First, the distinction between the Northern and the Southern branches of Eastern Sudanic had to be firmly established. Obviously, the scores of some Southern languages like Surmic or Nilotic in the lexicostatistical comparison with Meroitic are high.
Clyde: How can the correspondence be high between Meroitic and Nilo-Saharan when the Rilly admits earlier was able to find ocrrespondence between African languages and Meroitic?
This distinction between both branches was first suggested by Bender in 1991, but on morphological, not lexical, bases. This obstacle is rather easy to overcome: a series of basic words such as « drink », « mouth », « burn », « tooth », « hand », « louse » etc., shows close connections inside the northern branch, but nothing else than scattered similarities with the Southern one. One can even wonder if it would not be relevant to consider North Eastern Sudanic as a single family within Eastern Sudanic, at the same level as Surmic, Nilotic, Daju or Temein.
The second problem was more difficult to solve. Lexicostatistics are a good method to identify a linguistic family for a language whose genetic nature is unknown.
Clyde: Please cite at least one linguistic article or text that says you can identify a linguistic famuly using Lexicostatistics.
But this approach does not provide definite evidence. The one and only way to get it for sure is the classical comparative method as illustrated by Meillet for the Indo-European family, by Guthrie for Proto-Bantu, etc. So it was necessary, first to find regular phonetic correspondences between North Eastern Sudanic languages, second to reconstruct the original phonology of Proto-North Eastern Sudanic, third to reconstruct, as much as possible, some Proto-North Eastern Sudanic words, and finally to compare these proto-forms with Meroitic words. The task is not easy because extensive data are missing for a majority of the dialects and even for some languages like Afitti or Tama.
How could he compare Meroitic terms to Nilo-Saharan, when he already proved that the agreed upon Meroitic terms do not agree with African languages. If he is talking about the 39 Meroitic terms he created, this is not proof because these terms were made up, without using any Meroitic evidence as a source.
Finally, close connections were found between some Meroitic words and their ProtoNorth Eastern Sudanic counterparts (see table below). Some regular phonetic correspondences are obvious. For instance, where Proto-North Eastern Sudanic had /g/ in initial position, it became in Meroitic the velar fricative /h/ or /h/: the example displayed in the table below is « meal » or « food », but there are other instances. Most of the time, the correspondences are simple : initial /k/ in Proto-North Eastern Sudanic is preserved everywhere except in Nyima, where it often turns into dental /t /. There are sometimes very impressive sets like the words for « take, receive », « woman », « slaughter » and particularly the name of the supreme god (Meroitic Apede-mk : « the God Apede »), a detail which indicates that the speakers of Proto-North Eastern Sudanic formed not only a linguistic, but also a cultural community.
Clyde: Apedemk, is the only attested Meroitic word in the list above. This statement is not supported by the evidence.
Other correspondences are less obvious. For example, original /g/ in internal position, if in contact with a labiovelar vowel [o] or [u], becomes /b/ in Meroitic. This phenomenon is known in other linguistic families, for instance Celtic among the Indo-European phylum (cf. Greek gune « woman )) vs Gaulish bena). Moreover, initial dental consonant /d/ becomes often the liquid /V in Meroitic. This change is also common in other languages, opposing for example the English word tongue (where /t / < /d n and its Latin counterpart lingua. According to both these phonetic rules, the Meroitic article -l pronounced /la/, plural -leb, pronounced /laba/, and Nara demonstrative te, plural tegu, are related, both issuing from Proto-North Eastern Sudanic *de, plural *degu. So the correspondences between Meroitic and living North Eastern Sudanic languages can be found not only in lexical items, but also in morphological elements.
In spite of the scanty available data, the result is obvious : Meroitic is more than probably a member of the North Eastern Sudanic family.
This claim is not supported by the evidence. He admits that he made-up 39 terms, that were not associated with the agreed upon Meroitic terms. This makes his constructions pure conjecture since they can not be verified by actual Meroitic text.
The decipherment of Meroitic by Rilly is nothing more than smoke and mirrors and can not be supported by linguistic methods and the textual evidence.
.
Moreover, the map of these languages [see above] shows an interesting feature. Nowadays, these languages are scattered from Chad to Eritrea, but in the past, there was a link between their present situations : the Wadi Howar, an ancient river, now dried up, once an important tributary of the Nile. In the fourth millenary BC, all the region around this river was still a green country convenient for cattle-breeding. But around this time, this part of the Sahara became arid. Very probably, the pastoral populations living in the region were progressively obliged to gather together along the banks of the Wadi Howar. There they lived together for centuries and acquired a common language : Proto-North Eastern Sudanic. But in the beginning of third millenary BC, the river itself progressively dried up. So a first population migrated to the Nile, where they founded the Kingdom of Kerma, not far from the confluence of the Wadi Howar and the Nile. The geographical, historical and climatic data offer a common support to this theory.
The Taman group went East, towards the springs of the river, to the place where they still live today. Another refugee group, the ancestors of Nubian and Nyima speakers, went South to Kordofan, where they still live today. Later on, in the first centuries AD, Nubian groups invaded the dying Kingdom of Meroe and founded their own kingdoms along the Nile. As for Nara people, I think they first went to the Nile, like the future Meroites, and later went up the Nile and the Atbara toward Eritrea, where they live nowadays.
Clyde
quote:
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
posted
^ Yes, 4 pages of this thread and how many pages of other threads of ridiculous nonsensical claims.
Unfortunately T-rex, what you see from Clyde is purely an irrational reaction to the years of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. Clyde fails to see it, but what he does is no more than a reflection of the white racism and bias that he has faced only inverted to a black form. Thus Clyde is essentially one of those new age biased Afrocentrics and I dare say black supremacists. Of course he will deny the above accusation, but all his talk of black Africans creating culture everywhere outside of Africa including Europe and that whites did not appear until the Middle Ages suggests otherwise. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Yes, 4 pages of this thread and how many pages of other threads of ridiculous nonsensical claims.
Unfortunately T-rex, what you see from Clyde is purely an irrational reaction to the years of Eurocentrism and white supremacy. Clyde fails to see it, but what he does is no more than a reflection of the white racism and bias that he has faced only inverted to a black form. Thus Clyde is essentially one of those new age biased Afrocentrics and I dare say black supremacists. Of course he will deny the above accusation, but all his talk of black Africans creating culture everywhere outside of Africa including Europe and that whites did not appear until the Middle Ages suggests otherwise.
You are a racist troll. Don't you dare call me a Black supremist. I never defamed whites in anyway on this forum or anywhere else.
I demand that you produce right now any statement I have made herein to defame whites. I want an apology now for your lie.
The methods to increase the number of translated words cannot be fully explained in details here. To make a long story short, I would say that it is a « multicontextual approach ». The archaeological and the iconographical context can be very helpful, since very often, the short texts are the description with words of a painted or engraved image.
Clyde:
There is no way you can read an inscriptionusing iconography because often you do notknow the name for the items depicted in the engraving.
Misinformed #1. Of course there is, and he provides a pictorial example of this. You can use names of personalities in literature and pictures of personalities and deity, animals and objects accomodated by descriptive short texts/inscripitions of the iconography to extrapolate words from the cotexts, and then re-verify its meaning by way of its application in other texts time and again. This application however slow, has even been used to assist in deciphering Mdu Ntr/Egyptic, aside from using tools like the Rosetta stone-type of situation whereby single literature is communicated in two or more distinct scripts, with at least one of these languages being adequately understood, NOT just being familiar with the letters.
Using iconography is just part of Rilly's 'multicontextual approach'. Example provided:
Graffito from Musawwarat (REM 1165) Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^Just because you are personally incapable of doing this, doesn't make it undoable.
quote:Clyde Winters:
....Typological similarity between Egyptian texts and their Meroitic counterparts can also be useful. Of course, the elements of the texts that are known, for example names of persons and gods, can help towards clarifying the grammatical nature and the semantic field of the unknown words. Most of the time, all these elements are insufficient. But in a few cases, a meaning can be suggested for new words and be confirmed in various inscriptions. Although very slow, this approach recently provided new translations.
Clyde: This comment makes it clear that Rilly made up words and associated them with inscriptions.
Misinformed #2. Actually, what is clear, is your inability to understand what Rilly is doing here. For hint, see post above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
A set of thirtynine purely Meroitic basic words was finally produced, not including of course too specific words such as « prince » or « great priest », which are useless for comparative purpose.
Clyde: Here Rilly admits that he "produced thirtynine purely Meroitic basic words'. If the 39 words did not exist before hand, he made them up. Again evidence Rilly is using nonexistent words to read Meroitic.
Misinformed #3. How can he make the words up, if they are directly from actual primary Meroitic texts in iconography and by examining typological similarity between Egyptian texts and their Meroitic counterparts? Goes back to the two feedbacks above. Use your head.
quote:Clyde Winters:
SOME RECENTLY TRANSLATED MEROITIC WORDS
arohe- «protect» hr- «eat», pwrite «life», yer «milk» ar «boy», are- or dm- «take, receive», dime «cow», hlbi «bull», ns(e) «sacrifice>>, sdk «journey», tke- «love, revere», We «dog»
Clyde : Supercar claims that Rilly does not admit he has translated Meroitic. Here is the evidence that Rilly does believe he has translated Meroitic words based on Northern Eastern Sudani. All of these words he has made up .
Lie #1. Goes back to:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
^Translating a set of a few new words, isn't the same thing as deciphering the entire language. In fact, cite Rilly's said work, wherein he proclaims this was even his goal, as opposed to determining language family association. You understandably dodged this question the last time you were asked.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The second stage of the work was to reconsider the relation of Meroitic with NiloSaharan and possibly to spot inside this phylum a specific family where Meroitic could belong. Previous works, including mine, had shown that a link with other phylums like Niger-Congo or Afro-Asiatic was unlikely.
Clyde: Here Rilly admits you can not connect Meroitic to any African languages based on the available agreed upon Meroitic corpus. As a result, Rilly made up Meroitic terms so he could "translate" Meroitic witg his made-up terms.
Lie #2, misinformed #4. Goes back to:
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
^Just because Niger-Congo and Afrasan failed to show strong correspondence, doesn't mean that Nilo-Saharan should fail too. Is Nilo-Saharan not African?
quote:Clyde Winters:
For this purpose, lexicostatistical methods were used (see below). The most convincing similarities are with Eastern Sudanic, and more specifically with the northern branch including Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima. The best result is obtained with Midob (a member of the Nubian group), thanks to Roland Werner's excellent description of this language.
Clyde: Supercar/Mystery Solver claims I made up the fact that Rilly isusing Nubian to read Meroitic. Here Rilly supports my earlier statements.
Lie #3. Goes back to:
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
^Wherein your citation of his work, did he say that he read Meroitic terms from using Nubian? In the above, he is looking for the frequency of lexical correspondence across a variety of NES languages. Is finding lexical 'correspondence' the same thing as translating Meroitic words by using Nubian, or the opposite: i.e. using already translated basic Meroitic words [from primary Meroitic texts], and then finding correspondences? I really find it funny that even non-linguists can understand this, when you don't.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The scores of Taman, Nara and Nyima could be higher if there were extensive lexical data available, but infortunately, only short wordlists have so far been published.
But at this stage of the work, two main obstacles were encountered. First, the distinction between the Northern and the Southern branches of Eastern Sudanic had to be firmly established. Obviously, the scores of some Southern languages like Surmic or Nilotic in the lexicostatistical comparison with Meroitic are high.
Clyde: How can the correspondence be high between Meroitic and Nilo-Saharan when the Rilly admits earlier was able to find ocrrespondence between African languages and Meroitic?
You aren't bright, are you? Goes back to lie #2, misinformed #4 above. This comment makes it look like that you aren't even aware of African language families.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This distinction between both branches was first suggested by Bender in 1991, but on morphological, not lexical, bases. This obstacle is rather easy to overcome: a series of basic words such as « drink », « mouth », « burn », « tooth », « hand », « louse » etc., shows close connections inside the northern branch, but nothing else than scattered similarities with the Southern one. One can even wonder if it would not be relevant to consider North Eastern Sudanic as a single family within Eastern Sudanic, at the same level as Surmic, Nilotic, Daju or Temein.
The second problem was more difficult to solve. Lexicostatistics are a good method to identify a linguistic family for a language whose genetic nature is unknown.
Clyde: Please cite at least one linguistic article or text that says you can identify a linguistic famuly using Lexicostatistics.
This just reminds me of:
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
^Apparently, you aren't aware of what lexicostatistics is all about. It is quantitative model of determining frequency of lexical correspondence across languages under study. What does that mean? If you can answer this, then you'll realize how ridiculous your question is.
quote:Clyde Winters:
But this approach does not provide definite evidence. The one and only way to get it for sure is the classical comparative method as illustrated by Meillet for the Indo-European family, by Guthrie for Proto-Bantu, etc. So it was necessary, first to find regular phonetic correspondences between North Eastern Sudanic languages, second to reconstruct the original phonology of Proto-North Eastern Sudanic, third to reconstruct, as much as possible, some Proto-North Eastern Sudanic words, and finally to compare these proto-forms with Meroitic words. The task is not easy because extensive data are missing for a majority of the dialects and even for some languages like Afitti or Tama.
How could he compare Meroitic terms to Nilo-Saharan, when he already proved that the agreed upon Meroitic terms do not agree with African languages. If he is talking about the 39 Meroitic terms he created, this is not proof because these terms were made up, without using any Meroitic evidence as a source.
Goes back to lie #2 and misinformed #3.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Finally, close connections were found between some Meroitic words and their ProtoNorth Eastern Sudanic counterparts (see table below). Some regular phonetic correspondences are obvious. For instance, where Proto-North Eastern Sudanic had /g/ in initial position, it became in Meroitic the velar fricative /h/ or /h/: the example displayed in the table below is « meal » or « food », but there are other instances. Most of the time, the correspondences are simple : initial /k/ in Proto-North Eastern Sudanic is preserved everywhere except in Nyima, where it often turns into dental /t /. There are sometimes very impressive sets like the words for « take, receive », « woman », « slaughter » and particularly the name of the supreme god (Meroitic Apede-mk : « the God Apede »), a detail which indicates that the speakers of Proto-North Eastern Sudanic formed not only a linguistic, but also a cultural community.
Clyde: Apedemk, is the only attested Meroitic word in the list above. This statement is not supported by the evidence.
Goes back to misinformed #1, #2 & #3.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Other correspondences are less obvious. For example, original /g/ in internal position, if in contact with a labiovelar vowel [o] or [u], becomes /b/ in Meroitic. This phenomenon is known in other linguistic families, for instance Celtic among the Indo-European phylum (cf. Greek gune « woman )) vs Gaulish bena). Moreover, initial dental consonant /d/ becomes often the liquid /V in Meroitic. This change is also common in other languages, opposing for example the English word tongue (where /t / < /d n and its Latin counterpart lingua. According to both these phonetic rules, the Meroitic article -l pronounced /la/, plural -leb, pronounced /laba/, and Nara demonstrative te, plural tegu, are related, both issuing from Proto-North Eastern Sudanic *de, plural *degu. So the correspondences between Meroitic and living North Eastern Sudanic languages can be found not only in lexical items, but also in morphological elements.
In spite of the scanty available data, the result is obvious : Meroitic is more than probably a member of the North Eastern Sudanic family.
This claim is not supported by the evidence. He admits that he made-up 39 terms, that were not associated with the agreed upon Meroitic terms. This makes his constructions pure conjecture since they can not be verified by actual Meroitic text..
Lie #4; which corresponds to misinformed #1, #2 & #3.
quote:Clyde Winters:
The decipherment of Meroitic by Rilly is nothing more than smoke and mirrors and can not be supported by linguistic methods and the textual evidence.[/b]
Lie #5; which corresponds to lie #1, misinformed #1, #2 & #3, and lie #2, misinformed #4.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Moreover, the map of these languages [see above] shows an interesting feature. Nowadays, these languages are scattered from Chad to Eritrea, but in the past, there was a link between their present situations : the Wadi Howar, an ancient river, now dried up, once an important tributary of the Nile. In the fourth millenary BC, all the region around this river was still a green country convenient for cattle-breeding. But around this time, this part of the Sahara became arid. Very probably, the pastoral populations living in the region were progressively obliged to gather together along the banks of the Wadi Howar. There they lived together for centuries and acquired a common language : Proto-North Eastern Sudanic. But in the beginning of third millenary BC, the river itself progressively dried up. So a first population migrated to the Nile, where they founded the Kingdom of Kerma, not far from the confluence of the Wadi Howar and the Nile. The geographical, historical and climatic data offer a common support to this theory.
The Taman group went East, towards the springs of the river, to the place where they still live today. Another refugee group, the ancestors of Nubian and Nyima speakers, went South to Kordofan, where they still live today. Later on, in the first centuries AD, Nubian groups invaded the dying Kingdom of Meroe and founded their own kingdoms along the Nile. As for Nara people, I think they first went to the Nile, like the future Meroites, and later went up the Nile and the Atbara toward Eritrea, where they live nowadays.
quote:Clyde:
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times....
Nothing much to say about the last piece, eh? Telling, but goes back to:
^Although current work have linked Kerma settlements with earlier settlements in pre-Kerma phases, suggesting settlements stretching further back in time than what's been detailed here, clearly, Rilly notes certain population movements that Clyde accuses him to be ignorant of, and hence, not considering them in his analysis. Winters is just totally disengaged with the real specifics at hand. - Mystery Solver.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Rilly provides a good example of why you can't interpret iconography simply by using your own inferences.
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
The methods to increase the number of translated words cannot be fully explained in details here. To make a long story short, I would say that it is a « multicontextual approach ». The archaeological and the iconographical context can be very helpful, since very often, the short texts are the description with words of a painted or engraved image.
Clyde:
There is no way you can read an inscriptionusing iconography because often you do notknow the name for the items depicted in the engraving.
Misinformed #1. Of course there is, and he provides a pictorial example of this. You can use names of personalities in literature and pictures of personalities and deity, animals and objects accomodated by descriptive short texts/inscripitions of the iconography to extrapolate words from the cotexts, and then re-verify its meaning by way of its application in other texts time and again. This application however slow, has even been used to assist in deciphering Mdu Ntr/Egyptic, aside from using tools like the Rosetta stone-type of situation whereby single literature is communicated in two or more distinct scripts, with at least one of these languages being adequately understood, NOT just being familiar with the letters.
Using iconography is just part of Rilly's 'multicontextual approach'. Example provided:
Graffito from Musawwarat (REM 1165) Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^Just because you are personally incapable of doing this, doesn't make it undoable.
Although this is his interpretation of the inscription he is wrong and failed to decipher the signs properly.
Firstly, the grafitto has a dog chasing a rabbit. Although the rabbit being chased by the dog is obvious to anyone looking at the grafitto this pictorial fact is not mentioned by Rilly.
Now let's look at his alleged decipherment and reading of the Meroitic signs.
For example, he interprets the three lines: ||| as the numeral three, this was wrong in Meroitic ||| is the ‘y’(check out the Meroitic writing chart above). In addition after correctly deciphering the Meroitic w and l signs, he failed to record the ‘e’, that follows the wl (please refer to the Meroitic chart above). Thus this should have read w-l-e, not wl.
If Rilly can be this careless in his interpretation of the Meroitic signs, when the meaning of each Meroitic symbol is well known, says much about his method of decipherment.
In addition, Rilly refers to the term Talents, this is a Roman word--not Meroitic. Use of this term indicates that Rilly placed his own ideas about Meroitic society in his interpretation of the inscription. This interpretation indicates that Rilly believed the Meroites were heavily influenced by the Romans when in reality they were not.
Now when we use my decipherment to read the text and the accompanying drawing
we have the following : [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”. The vocabulary items are as follows:
W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
As I said before Supercar/Mystery Solver you support Rilly due to jealousy of my accomplishments. How can you support the decipherment of this researcher when he fails to fully decipher an inscription, as evident in his failure to 1) refer to the dog chasing the rabbit, and 2) failure to read all of the Meroitic symbols on the griffito?
^Although current work have linked Kerma settlements with earlier settlements in pre-Kerma phases, suggesting settlements stretching further back in time than what's been detailed here, clearly, Rilly notes certain population movements that Clyde accuses him to be ignorant of, and hence, not considering them in his analysis. Winters is just totally disengaged with the real specifics at hand. - Mystery Solver.
This is pure conjecture. He has no documentary evidence of these population movements, especially the Nubians.
We know that during the Roman period the major conflict in the North of the Meroitic Empire was between the Blymmes and Nubians. If the Nubians were too weak to overcome the Blymmes before the end of the Meroitic Empire, do you really expect us to assume the Nubians were able to take possession of Meroite lands from a superior Meroitic military which is a major assumtion in the above statement by Mystery Solver/Supercar.
This idea of your's Supercar is ludicris.
.
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Rilly provides a good example of why you can't interpret iconography simply by using your own inferences.
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
The methods to increase the number of translated words cannot be fully explained in details here. To make a long story short, I would say that it is a « multicontextual approach ». The archaeological and the iconographical context can be very helpful, since very often, the short texts are the description with words of a painted or engraved image.
Clyde:
There is no way you can read an inscriptionusing iconography because often you do notknow the name for the items depicted in the engraving.
Misinformed #1. Of course there is, and he provides a pictorial example of this. You can use names of personalities in literature and pictures of personalities and deity, animals and objects accomodated by descriptive short texts/inscripitions of the iconography to extrapolate words from the cotexts, and then re-verify its meaning by way of its application in other texts time and again. This application however slow, has even been used to assist in deciphering Mdu Ntr/Egyptic, aside from using tools like the Rosetta stone-type of situation whereby single literature is communicated in two or more distinct scripts, with at least one of these languages being adequately understood, NOT just being familiar with the letters.
Using iconography is just part of Rilly's 'multicontextual approach'. Example provided:
Graffito from Musawwarat (REM 1165) Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^Just because you are personally incapable of doing this, doesn't make it undoable.
Although this is his interpretation of the inscription he is wrong and failed to decipher the signs properly.
How?...but let me guess, it is supposed to be explained in the following..
quote:Clyde Winters:
Firstly, the grafitto has a dog chasing a rabbit. Although the rabbit being chased by the dog is obvious to anyone looking at the grafitto this pictorial fact is not mentioned by Rilly.
He doesn't, because the specific text cited, doesn't. Now of course, you'll have us believe that the specific piece of text cited, should read "dog chasing rabbit". It only shows me that the man is actually methodologically using the multicontextual method to determine the meanings of new words, and not just blindly making them up, simply because of what is in the picture, which is what you're clearly doing.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Now let's look at his alleged decipherment and reading of the Meroitic signs.
For example, he interprets the three lines: ||| as the numeral three, this was wrong in Meroitic ||| is the ‘y’(check out the Meroitic writing chart above).
And you know this, because he specifically says this where...i.e. by saying so and so Meroitic letter corresponds to this or that?
quote:Clyde Winters:
In addition after correctly deciphering the Meroitic w and l signs, he failed to record the ‘e’, that follows the wl (please refer to the Meroitic chart above). Thus this should have read w-l-e, not wl.
Do you need reading glasses? He writes "wle", not "wl". And again, how the heck do you know what he is reading, if he hasn't specifically spelt out the terms in their 'Meroitic letters'? All I see, is the iconography with scripture in Meroitic letters, and the portion of the text to be interpreted, written in English letters but in Meroitic language, and associated translations in English.
quote:Clyde Winters:
If Rilly can be this careless in his interpretation of the Meroitic signs, when the meaning of each Meroitic symbol is well known, says much about his method of decipherment.
Rilly is well aware of previously established letters and words, he makes that clear in the link. All I see, and have demonstrated, is your carelessness in reading his work.
quote:Clyde Winters:
In addition, Rilly refers to the term Talents, this is a Roman word--not Meroitic.
"Black" is specifically an English word, not Kemetic, yet we know what represents 'black' in Kemetic. Use your head.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Use of this term indicates that Rilly placed his own ideas about Meroitic society in his interpretation of the inscription.
Translations are done so, precisely because for each word in a primary foreign text in question, we are reminded of words that are supposed to or can best communicate the same thing more or less. This is no rocket science, just common sense. Rilly did no different here.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This interpretation indicates that Rilly believed the Meroites were heavily influenced by the Romans when in reality they were not.
Unless you can cite him specifically saying so, this is something you made up yourself.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Now when we use my decipherment to read the text and the accompanying drawing
we have the following : [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”. The vocabulary items are as follows:
W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
Let's take a very different and unrelated situation, and use as an example anyway:
French and English use essentially the same letters, but just because I'm familiar with the alphabets, doesn't mean that I can understand words in French, if I happened to understand English but not French. The only way I can translate the French words and sentences then, is if those words were accomodated by their English counterparts.
^But in the case of Meroitic and Kushana scripts, such strong letter correspondence doesn't even occur, i.e. sharing of the very same set of letters. In fact, just going by Clyde's own diagram, Meroitic and Kharosthi not only differ visibly in the number of letters respective to each script, but for the most part, also differ quite visibly in morphology. Unless, one finds a Rosetta type of stone in Meroe, showing a single literature being communicated in Meroitic language and Kharosthi side by side, and hence determining word correspondences, how can Kharosthi be used to decipher Meroitic?
quote:Clyde Winters:
As I said before Supercar/Mystery Solver you support Rilly due to jealousy of my accomplishments.
And as I said before, there is no such thing as being jealous of something that simply isn't intellectually and evidentially sound. However, as I've amply demonstrated, there is such thing as a frustrated & broken down individual, like yourself, who falls to lying about peoples' work in order to knock them down.
quote:Clyde Winters:
How can you support the decipherment of this researcher when he fails to fully decipher an inscription
Already given you the answer to that.
quote:Clyde Winters:
as evident in his failure to 1) refer to the dog chasing the rabbit, and 2) failure to read all of the Meroitic symbols on the griffito?
None of which is 'evident', as I've just demonstrated.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:The decipherment of Meroitic by Rilly is nothing more than smoke and mirrors
Actually Rilly makes perfect sense in relating Meroitic to other languages of the Sudan/Africa.
Your claims on the other hand, make little sense, and are unrelentingly dishonest and illogical.
You claim Meroitic is unrelated to African languages.
You claim it was introduced by Indo-European speaking Asians.
You then claim these Indo-European Asians are really Dravidian [sub-stratem].
You then claim Dravidian is really African.
You then claim this makes Meriotic 'niger-congo', after all.
Notwithstanding your original claim that it was unrelated to African languages....which was the basis of claiming it's Indo-European origin to begin with.
I've actually had fun with this thread because i'm amused by the audacity that it takes for Dr. Winters to espouse and endless series of mutually contradictory/self reversing arguments without so much as blinking, or winking at his audience. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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^Although current work have linked Kerma settlements with earlier settlements in pre-Kerma phases, suggesting settlements stretching further back in time than what's been detailed here, clearly, Rilly notes certain population movements that Clyde accuses him to be ignorant of, and hence, not considering them in his analysis. Winters is just totally disengaged with the real specifics at hand. - Mystery Solver.
This is pure conjecture. He has no documentary evidence of these population movements, especially the Nubians.
Then it must be 'conjecture' that you, yourself, kept harping on about, saying that Rilly hasn't taken into consideration, 'Nubian' migrations into the region, during the dying days of the Meroitic complex. You are full of contradictions.
quote:Clyde Winters:
We know that during the Roman period the major conflict in the North of the Meroitic Empire was between the Blymmes and Nubians. If the Nubians were too weak to overcome the Blymmes before the end of the Meroitic Empire, do you really expect us to assume the Nubians were able to take possession of Meroite lands from a superior Meroitic military which is a major assumtion in the above statement by Mystery Solver/Supercar.
Actually, you should be asking yourself this question, because it is you who kept saying that the 'Nubians' have replaced the Meroitic population, who dubiously fled to west Africa. So how did the 'Nubians' come to replace them?
Ps - Of course, the point flew over your head, which is that you lied, when you kept proclaiming that Rilly is equating the contemporary groups referred to as 'Nubians' with 'Meroites'.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This idea of your's Supercar is ludicris.
What idea; population movements(?) - citation?
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Originally posted by rasol: I've actually had fun with this thread because i'm amused by the audacity that it takes for Dr. Winters to espouse and endless series of mutually contradictory/self reversing arguments without so much as blinking, or winking at his audience.
'Contradictions' is the keyword here.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Winters writes: He has no documentary evidence of these population movements
This comes from someone who willfully makes up population *movements* from Nigeria to Japan and China to Sudan, and invents lost continents to facilitate far fetched fake migrations.... but he can't fathom Nile Valley Africans moving around...the Nile Valley.
quote:MysterySolver writes: 'Contradictions' is the keyword here.
Yes, and disingenuousness, I quite agree.
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posted
I thought it might be worth giving it a shot, to read what's on the aforementioned iconography myself, using the following table:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
In the order that I can read the terms….
On the left hand corner, below the dog and rabbit image, I see :
#1. o l(a) se/s(a) r(a) o r(a) t(a) ny(a)/ne
Above the letters just mentioned, right next to the dog’s tail and hind limbs, I see three parallel lines, which according to the table is:
#2. y(a)
Then to the lower right hand corner, I come across:
#3. t(a) l(a) t(a)
Right above ‘t l t’, as far as I can tell, are the signs for what appears to closely resemble the sign for p(a), then some *unfamiliar* sign, and then what most closely resembles the n(a) sign, so that I have,...
#4. p(a) *^[see below for details] n(a)
Right above the dog’s tail, the signs appear to read:
#5. o o q(a)
And at either the tip or the end of the dog’s tail on the right hand side, above the cluster on the lower right hand side, the signs appear to read:
#6. e l(a) w(a)
Note: "*" means the sign is unfamiliar to me.
Re-arranging the above, as far as I can tell, going back to
#1. "o l(a) se/s(a) r(a) o r(a) t(a) ny(a)/ne" is likely what Rilly wrote out as 'Netror-se-l-o'.
#2. "y"; don't know what Rilly has interpreted that, it is either what he was intepreting as "brought" with question marks next to it, or the number "3"
#3. "t(a) l(a) t(a)" is what I suspect Rilly wrote down as "tlt".
#4. "p(a) * n(a)" is what I presume Rilly to have written down as "phn".
#5. "o o q(a)" is probably what Rilly simply noted as "qo".
#6. "e l(a) w(a)" is most likely what was written down as "wle".
^The letters seem to read from right to left, in this instance.
Reading from top to bottom, and from right to left, the assembled letters read:
Topmost line, from right to left: Wle qo; 2nd line top, from right to left: phn y ["y", that Rilly either reads as "brought (???)" or "3"?]; lower lines, from right to left: tlt Netror-se-l-o
Now of course, Rilly makes it clear in the iconography exemplified, what his actual emphasis is here, and highlights them accordingly, as provided in the link:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^These highlighted words are the point of focus of the recently interpreted words.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Rilly provides a good example of why you can't interpret iconography simply by using your own inferences.
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
The methods to increase the number of translated words cannot be fully explained in details here. To make a long story short, I would say that it is a « multicontextual approach ». The archaeological and the iconographical context can be very helpful, since very often, the short texts are the description with words of a painted or engraved image.
Clyde:
There is no way you can read an inscriptionusing iconography because often you do notknow the name for the items depicted in the engraving.
Misinformed #1. Of course there is, and he provides a pictorial example of this. You can use names of personalities in literature and pictures of personalities and deity, animals and objects accomodated by descriptive short texts/inscripitions of the iconography to extrapolate words from the cotexts, and then re-verify its meaning by way of its application in other texts time and again. This application however slow, has even been used to assist in deciphering Mdu Ntr/Egyptic, aside from using tools like the Rosetta stone-type of situation whereby single literature is communicated in two or more distinct scripts, with at least one of these languages being adequately understood, NOT just being familiar with the letters.
Using iconography is just part of Rilly's 'multicontextual approach'. Example provided:
Graffito from Musawwarat (REM 1165) Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^Just because you are personally incapable of doing this, doesn't make it undoable.
Although this is his interpretation of the inscription he is wrong and failed to decipher the signs properly.
How?...but let me guess, it is supposed to be explained in the following..
quote:Clyde Winters:
Firstly, the grafitto has a dog chasing a rabbit. Although the rabbit being chased by the dog is obvious to anyone looking at the grafitto this pictorial fact is not mentioned by Rilly.
He doesn't, because the specific text cited, doesn't. Now of course, you'll have us believe that the specific piece of text cited, should read "dog chasing rabbit". It only shows me that the man is actually methodologically using the multicontextual method to determine the meanings of new words, and not just blindly making them up, simply because of what is in the picture, which is what you're clearly doing.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Now let's look at his alleged decipherment and reading of the Meroitic signs.
For example, he interprets the three lines: ||| as the numeral three, this was wrong in Meroitic ||| is the ‘y’(check out the Meroitic writing chart above).
And you know this, because he specifically says this where...i.e. by saying so and so Meroitic letter corresponds to this or that?
quote:Clyde Winters:
In addition after correctly deciphering the Meroitic w and l signs, he failed to record the ‘e’, that follows the wl (please refer to the Meroitic chart above). Thus this should have read w-l-e, not wl.
Do you need reading glasses? He writes "wle", not "wl". And again, how the heck do you know what he is reading, if he hasn't specifically spelt out the terms in their 'Meroitic letters'? All I see, is the iconography with scripture in Meroitic letters, and the portion of the text to be interpreted, written in English letters but in Meroitic language, and associated translations in English.
quote:Clyde Winters:
If Rilly can be this careless in his interpretation of the Meroitic signs, when the meaning of each Meroitic symbol is well known, says much about his method of decipherment.
Rilly is well aware of previously established letters and words, he makes that clear in the link. All I see, and have demonstrated, is your carelessness in reading his work.
quote:Clyde Winters:
In addition, Rilly refers to the term Talents, this is a Roman word--not Meroitic.
"Black" is specifically an English word, not Kemetic, yet we know what represents 'black' in Kemetic. Use your head.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Use of this term indicates that Rilly placed his own ideas about Meroitic society in his interpretation of the inscription.
Translations are done so, precisely because for each word in a primary foreign text in question, we are reminded of words that are supposed to or can best communicate the same thing more or less. This is no rocket science, just common sense. Rilly did no different here.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This interpretation indicates that Rilly believed the Meroites were heavily influenced by the Romans when in reality they were not.
Unless you can cite him specifically saying so, this is something you made up yourself.
I have lost any respect I ever had of you. Here you admit that Rilly has not faithfully described an object he is deciphering ( e.g., absence of 'y' and the rabbit), and you claim this is okay.
When interpreting primary data you have to explain everything that is related to the primary data. Here the picture was published and can show the difference between Rilly's interpretation and the actual object. Overtime this picture may not be printed in a secondary source so it can cause confusion and lead to the false interpretation of this artifact becoming accepted as valid.
You may believe this is okay but it is not. It shows how Rilly, and now you will do anything to make yourself right.
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver: I thought it might be worth giving it a shot, to read what's on the aforementioned iconography myself, using the following table:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
In the order that I can read the terms….
On the left hand corner, below the dog and rabbit image, I see :
#1. o l(a) se/s(a) r(a) o r(a) t(a) ny(a)/ne
Above the letters just mentioned, right next to the dog’s tail and hind limbs, I see three parallel lines, which according to the table is:
#2. y(a)
Then to the lower right hand corner, I come across:
#3. t(a) l(a) t(a)
Right above ‘t l t’, as far as I can tell, are the signs for what appears to closely resemble the sign for p(a), then some *unfamiliar* sign, and then what most closely resembles the n(a) sign, so that I have,...
#4. p(a) *^[see below for details] n(a)
Right above the dog’s tail, the signs appear to read:
#5. o o q(a)
And at either the tip or the end of the dog’s tail on the right hand side, above the cluster on the lower right hand side, the signs appear to read:
#6. e l(a) w(a)
Note: "*" means the sign is unfamiliar to me.
Re-arranging the above, as far as I can tell, going back to
#1. "o l(a) se/s(a) r(a) o r(a) t(a) ny(a)/ne" is likely what Rilly wrote out as 'Netror-se-l-o'.
#2. "y"; don't know what Rilly has interpreted that, it is either what he was intepreting as "brought" with question marks next to it, or the number "3"
#3. "t(a) l(a) t(a)" is what I suspect Rilly wrote down as "tlt".
#4. "p(a) * n(a)" is what I presume Rilly to have written down as "phn".
#5. "o o q(a)" is probably what Rilly simply noted as "qo".
#6. "e l(a) w(a)" is most likely what was written down as "wle".
^The letters seem to read from right to left, in this instance.
Reading from top to bottom, and from right to left, the assembled letters read:
Topmost line, from right to left: Wle qo; 2nd line top, from right to left: phn y ["y", that Rilly either reads as "brought (???)" or "3"?]; lower lines, from right to left: tlt Netror-se-l-o
Now of course, Rilly makes it clear in the iconography exemplified, what his actual emphasis is here, and highlights them accordingly, as provided in the link:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
^These highlighted words are the point of focus of the recently interpreted words.
Your reading of the signs clearly show that Rilly failed to properly interpret the grifitto. But to support Rilly you also failed to include the rabit in your interpretation. A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
Rilly claims the name on the grifitto is "Netarura", yet the inscription has Netror. Here we see again Rilly making claims without relying on the actual text. This shows how Rilly uses conjecture throughout this decipherment to read into the inscription whatever he wants, instead of copying the 'o', as it is represented in the text he changes the letter to 'u'. Making up your own letters to read an inscription is not professional at all.
All this is unprofessional you accept this behavior because you want make him right. Shame on you.
Also you still haven't explained why Rilly claims the currency was talents, when this term was probably not a part of Meroitic. Supporting Rilly's interpretation of the inscription when the iconogrphy shows a dog chasing a rabbit is further proof, if any was needed of your desire to be right by any means necessary.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Now when we use my decipherment to read the text and the accompanying drawing
we have the following : [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”. The vocabulary items are as follows:
W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
posted
Mystery Solver you have still not answered any of the questions below. I am waiting for your answer.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: You don't know anything about linguistics.
1.You have not cited evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and after they left their original home because of the death of their king and contributed to their civilization.
You have not disputed the fact that Indian records record the migration of Indian due to the death of their king.
6. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
7. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
8. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
Failure to dispute any of these facts make you claims groundless.
You are full of yourself. You support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance. You are just blowing hot air.
quote: I repeat.
proto-: When prefixed to the name of language, this term serves to designate the earliest known, at times the earliest artificially reconstructed, form of that language.
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
As usual you don't know what you're talking about. The Kushana used the Kharosthi/Karosti script. Inscriptions written in Kharosti date back to 251 BC.
The first Meroitic inscription dates back to the reign of Shanakdakheto (c.177-155 BC). The date of the first Meroitic inscriptions is 100 years after people the Kushana were writing their works in Kharosti.
...which explains why you have consistently failed to address my point-by-point refutations of both your methods, and assessments of Rilly's work. Sure.
quote:Clyde Winters:
1.You have not presented any evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and contributed to their civilization.
5. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
6. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
7. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
...none of which I need to do, because there is no such thing as addressing either strawman, proclamations already destroyed to pieces by myself, or something that just makes no sense. That's what this weak plea, passed off as serious followup requests, really amounts to.
quote:Clyde Winters:
You are full of yourself.
Let's just say if there were medals for such a thing, you'd be the gold medalist.
quote:Rilly:
you support Rilly because you want to deny my decipherment due to jealousy and ignorance.
I support his methods, because they are linguistically sound. Yours isn't. I mean, you can't be jealous of something that doesn't make sense. Btw, isn't that what you've charged everyone who's questioned your fantastic propositions? What about Obenga; jealous too? You bet.
Case in point, how come you haven't had the courage to address this point-by-point annihilation of your uninformed and false claims, point by point?...
Just another false statement to add to the index of your fallacious propagations. Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its (Meroitic's) family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
Here you admit that Rilly has not faithfully described an object he is deciphering ( e.g., absence of 'y' and the rabbit)
Citation of this phantom admission?
quote:Clyde Winters:
When interpreting primary data you have to explain everything that is related to the primary data. Here the picture was published and can show the difference between Rilly's interpretation and the actual object.
Gone through this with you. Refer to last post.
quote:Clyde Winters:
You may believe this is okay but it is not. It shows how Rilly, and now you will do anything to make yourself right.
Makes no sense.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters:
Your reading of the signs clearly show that Rilly failed to properly interpret the grifitto.
How so? It reconfirms his reading.
quote:Clyde Winters:
But to support Rilly you also failed to include the rabit in your interpretation.
I didn't translate the literature, so I have no clue what you're talking about. I only read the letters on the table and reassembled them. Rilly used a multicontextual approach to extract meanings of certain words from the cotext. Difference!
quote:Clyde Winters:
A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
Who said anything about 'buying'. You sure you don't need reading glasses? Your out-of-sync interpretations with just about what anyone actually says, is really scary.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Rilly claims the name on the grifitto is "Netarura", yet the inscription has Netror.
Common sense should remedy this. He first wrote it out how it appears in Meroitic letters, and then in translation, he just placed vowels in certain areas where the vowel wasn't directly jotted down. The table I posted demonstrates this phenomenon. Meroitic deosn't always place vowels in words, but nonetheless they're implied. This isn't new, it's a fairly well known feature about Meroitic. Some researchers have deemed the "o" to sound like a "u". Should familiarize yourself with these things.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Here we see again Rilly making claims without relying on the actual text.
Here we see you again, speaking out of misinformation.
quote:Clyde Winters:
This shows how Rilly uses conjecture throughout this decipherment to read into the inscription whatever he wants, instead of copying the 'o', as it is represented in the text he changes the letter to 'u'. Making up your own letters to read an inscription is not professional at all.
See post above.
quote:Clyde Winters:
All this is unprofessional you accept this behavior because you want make him right. Shame on you.
Shame on you for proclaiming to be a linguist, and yet still not understand what even non-linguists can understand.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Also you still haven't explained why Rilly claims the currency was talents, when this term was probably not a part of Meroitic.
It isn't my place to explain. I simply reassembled terms from the table provided, and came up with the same terms as Rilly did. I also showed what Rilly's actual emphasis was in the texts translated. If you don't understand the ramifications of that point, then too bad.
quote:Clyde Winters:
Supporting Rilly's interpretation of the inscription when the iconogrphy shows a dog chasing a rabbit is further proof, if any was needed of your desire to be right by any means necessary.
And you have this desire to sound not bright, whether fake and/or real; regardless, it doesn't help you. Where is the letters for 'dog' and 'rabbit'in your farfetched 'Tocharian interpretation? I see these terms placed brackets, and wild guesswork at trying to tell a story based on pictures, and not the actual texts. I've already made a point on this.
we have the following : [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”. - Clyde Winters
Why the brackets? Don't Meroitic have terms for dog or rabbit?
quote:Clyde Winters:
Now when we use my decipherment to read the text and the accompanying drawing
Not by a long shot, pending answers to:
Recap: French and English use essentially the same letters, but just because I'm familiar with the alphabets, doesn't mean that I can understand words in French, if I happened to understand English but not French. The only way I can translate the French words and sentences then, is if those words were accomodated by their English counterparts.
^But in the case of Meroitic and Kushana scripts, such strong letter correspondence doesn't even occur, i.e. sharing of the very same set of letters. In fact, just going by Clyde's own diagram, Meroitic and Kharosthi not only differ visibly in the number of letters respective to each script, but for the most part, also differ quite visibly in morphology. Unless, one finds a Rosetta type of stone in Meroe, showing a single literature being communicated in Meroitic language and Kharosthi side by side, and hence determining word correspondences, how can Kharosthi be used to decipher Meroitic?
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Here you admit that Rilly has not faithfully described an object he is deciphering ( e.g., absence of 'y' and the rabbit), and you claim this is okay.
You lost me Dr. Winters,
There is no rabbit in your transliteration either - W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
Ph, intention
N, good, only
Y, bring
-t, you (personal pronoun)
tl, to elevate
Netror, name of person
Slo, meritorious
You put rabbit and dog in brackets to literally represent what is being referred to -
: [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”.
What in your opinion is the actual word for Dog and Rabbit in meroitic?
Is it written in the text, yes or no?
quote:Winters: A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
-Exists as a noble boon- implies a benefit bestowed as a blessing [from God], or a gift [from man], [intention would imply the later]??
But your translation does not make this clear.
Likewise '3 talents' which Riley literally translates could relate to the skillset of the dog, including [implicitely] hunting.
But what we are discribing now is interpretation - not transliteration, correct?
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1.You have not presented any evidence that Prototerms can be used to decipher and read a dead language.
2.You have not cited any research claiming that we have textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan in the Meroitic Sudan.
3.You have not cited any research that the Nubian speakers were ever part of the Meroitic empire.
4. You have not disputed the fact that Classical writers said Indians were living in Meroe and contributed to their civilization.
5. You have not disputed the fact that there was a large Indian community already living in Egypt during the Meroitic Empire.
6. You have not illustrated that the Kharosthi script does not agree with Meroitic writing.
7. You can not dispute the fact that Kharosthic was in use long before Meroitic came on the scene.
...none of which I need to do, because there is no such thing as addressing either strawman, proclamations already destroyed to pieces by myself, or something that just makes no sense. That's what this weak plea, passed off as serious followup requests, really amounts to.
Mystery Solver you have still not answered any of the questions below. I am waiting for your answer.
Simple; because:
a) the initial answer is already in your citation. If you aren't bright enough to understand it, then your bad.
b)because you haven't addressed the following *point by point*, amongst other questions:
Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
Notwithstanding the robotic recitations, by pooling together previous postings, you were wrong:
*when you falsely charged Rilly with proclaiming to have 'fully' deciphered Meroitic script, at least according to the link presented.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-Nilo-Saharan.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by creating proto-NES [proto-North Eastern Sudanic], naturally contradicting the above.
*when you falsely charged him with attempting to read Meroitic by simply using Nubian. Again contradicting the two above.
*when you falsely charged him with dating some proto-language.
*when you falsely charged him with just focusing on Sudan, simply because this was the geography where the Meroitic complex used to lie.
*when you falsely charged him, in relation to the above, about focusing on just Nilo-Saharan, Nubian, or proto-NES, when in reality, he first compared Meroitic lexicons with other superfamilies like Niger-Congo and Afrasan, which failed to show strong correspondence, prompting him to turn to Nilo-Saharan, starting with eastern Sudanic languages.
*when you falsely charged him with using 'proto-Meroitic' names to read Meroitic, when in reality, these were just part of the 'multicontextual approach' to extracting more words from associated cotexts in primary texts.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to generate additional words to those which were established by previous researchers. In fact, presumably including those previously established words, he was able to come up with 39 Meroitic words 'whose meanings' were 'assured' for his lexical comparisons.
*when you falsely charged him with not being able to find potential cognates within the eastern Sudanic family. His tables prove this wrong.
*when you falsely charged him with using lexicostatistics or glottochronology to read Meroitic.
*when you baselessly charged his work to be a farce, simply because attempts by previous researchers failed, even though they didn't use Rilly's more refined 'multicontextual approach'.
*when you said lexicostatistics could be used to date languages descended from a proto-language.
*when you confused lexicostatistics with glottochronology. Glottochronology is the tool used to date languages using quantitative [mathematical] models, as well as making use of multidisciplines as additional tool for precision of dating language divergences.
*when you said that documentary evidence of other Nilo-Saharan languages during the Meroitic times was necessary, in order to establish its (Meroitic's) family association.
*when you spoke of the need for evidence to show that Nilo-Saharan precedes Meroitic, when Meriotic is supposed to be part of the Nilo-Saharan family, as demonstrated by Rilly.
*when you spoke of the need to "fully" reconstruct the lexical items and grammar of the ancestral language.
*when you spoke of using Tocharian, and then spoke of using Kharosthi, suggesting that you don't distinguish between the two.
*when you posted the diagram of Meroitic, Demotic, Kharosthi, Egyptian and Gebel, in order to support your dubious theorey of Meroitic derivation from Kharosthi; as it turns out, even from your own diagram, Meroitic not only has a distinct set of letters from that of Kharosthi, but also more closely resembles Demotic and Egyptian counterparts than Khorasthi.
^Basically, these are but just some of the seriously flawed claims that you've made throughout your hypothesis about Meroitic derivation from Tacharian(?), and/or what you now call Khorasthi(?). All your charges about Rilly can essentially be summed up as strawmen setups and phantom events, not professed in the link.
Courtesy is a two way street. Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Here you admit that Rilly has not faithfully described an object he is deciphering ( e.g., absence of 'y' and the rabbit), and you claim this is okay.
You lost me Dr. Winters,
There is no rabbit in your transliteration either - W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
Ph, intention
N, good, only
Y, bring
-t, you (personal pronoun)
tl, to elevate
Netror, name of person
Slo, meritorious
You put rabbit and dog in brackets to literally represent what is being referred to -
: [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”.
What in your opinion is the actual word for Dog and Rabbit in meroitic?
Is it written in the text, yes or no?
quote:Winters: A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
-Exists as a noble boon- implies a benefit bestowed as a blessing [from God], or a gift [from man], [intention would imply the later]??
But your translation does not make this clear.
Likewise '3 talents' which Riley literally translates could relate to the skillset of the dog, including [implicitely] hunting.
But what we are discribing now is interpretation - not transliteration, correct?
Based on his previous practices, Clyde will likely say that the pictures themselves are the words, as if Meroitic has no terms for these items.
As I have demonstrated however, Rilly's emphasis was to derive the words he emphasized [in red block letters in the link]. He did translate the rest of the piece, but not really much of a concern here. Hence, the assured translated words here, were "this dog". From what I can tell, he might be openning the interpretation of the signs for "phn" and "y" [according to the table] here in two ways: one where he deems that the term 'phn" could mean "brought" and hence question marks following it, meaning open to further investigation, and the other, for "y" whereby it could present a Meroitic synonym for the numeral three.
Hence, *exactly* as noted in the link:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o « this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
Notice the emphasized 'block' terms, which are the words whose meanings were supposed to be assured, in the cotext, with the rest of the 'interpretation' completed out nonetheless.
Ps - How are these emphasized words assured in their meaning according to Rilly?
But in a few cases, a meaning can be suggested for new words and be confirmed in various inscriptions. Although very slow, this approach recently provided new translations.Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote: Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
The central issue is whether Meroitic is or is not related to Nilo Saharan.
Clyde is not in a position to engage this point, because he is using Kharosthi script, which is distinct from Meroitic, to translate Meroitic, without a Rosetta stone-type of scenario going on here, where one script in one language translates the very same text written in Meroitic script, just as hieroglyphics and Demotic was done with Coptic.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
Who said anything about 'buying'. You sure you don't need reading glasses? Your out-of-sync interpretations with just about what anyone actually says, is really scary.
You don't even read what your hero has written. Rilly is the one who says a dog was bought not me. If a dog was bought, that means the dog was purchased.
Rilly
quote: Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o« this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote: Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
The central issue is whether Meroitic is or is not related to Nilo Saharan.
It is revealing that Winters relates it instead as and imagined ego contest between him and Riley, which is quite boring and off point.
Winters focus should logically be on showing us how there is no relationship between Meroitic and the other Native languages of the Sudan.
He has not done so.
You are late. I refuted the contentions of Rilly three pages ago. I repeat:
Rilly’s use of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani can not be used to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence this group of languages was ever spoken in the Meroitic Empire. Since we have no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan being spoken in the Meroitic period there is no way anyone can claim this family of languages was spoken in the Meroitic Empire in Meroitic times.
Rilly claims that lexicostatistics or glottochronology allows him to read Meroitic. Lexicostatistics is used to fit datable events among languages that theoretically are descendant from a common ancestor.
The basic vocabulary is that part of the lexicon that shows slow change. These terms relate to basic cultural practices and universal human experiences.
Rilly can not use this method to read Meroitic because there are only 26 attested Meroitic terms accepted by the establishment. None of these terms are cognate to Nubian or Taman terms except the name for a Meroitic god. With only 1 cognate Meroitic and Northern Eastern Sudani languages, there is no way you can date the time Meroitic speakers and Nilo-Saharan speakers spoke a common ancestral language. Rilly claims to be able to decipher Meroitic using a method that compares basic culural words to date the time languages separated, can not be used to read Meroitic, because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nilo-Saharan cognates. The absence of Meroitic and Nubian cognates prevents any fruitful comparisons between these languages. Rilly Paper
There are three ways to verify a protolanguage is congruent with reality 1) there is documentary evidence of the ancestor or near ancestor of the target language that allows comparison of adctual terms and grammars to the construct (i.e., reconstructed lexical items and grammars); 2) written evidence in the form of inscriptions exist from systematic excavation that compare favorably to the contruct; and 3) the power of prediction that this or that construct will conforms to objective reality.
Rilly's ideas that he can read Meroitic based on Kushite names from Kerma, which he calls proto-Meroitic names (even though he knows full well that a protolanguage is artificial and comes from reconstruction); and a list of Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani terms from the Nubian, Nara, Taman and Nyima languages meets none of these standards. This meets none of the standards because there is no documentary evidence for Northern Proto-Eastern Sudani dating to the Meroitic period. Moreover, the principle language he hopes to use to read Meroitic text: Nubian, was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. A fact Rilly admits in his own paper where he notes that Nubians invaded the Meroitic Empire during the declining days of the empire.
Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, wrote that ,"a protolanguage is no more than a theorectical construct designed to link by means of rules the systems of historically related languages in the most economical way. It thus summarizes the present state of our knowledge regarding the systematic relationships of grammars of the related languages....When dealing with past language states it is possible to assess the distance between construct and reality only in cases where we possess documentated evidence regarding an ancestor or a near ancestor, such as is provided by Latin, in the case of the Romance languages"(p.71).
We can reject Rilly's claim he can use this protolanguage to read Meroitic because there is no documented evidence of Northern Eastern Sudani speakers ever living in the historic Meroitic Empire, until after the Meroitic Empire was in decline. The absence of documentary evidence of any Nilo-Saharan language spoken in the Meroitic Empire during the Meroitic period precludes any possibility that Rilly's alleged Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani has any relationship to Meroitic or reality for that matter.
Before my decipherment of Meroitic the attested vocabulary of Meroitic was only 26 terms. Researchers proved decades ago that none of these terms have Nubian and Nilo-Saharan cognates. This makes Rilly's ideas about deciphering Meroitic using Proto-Northern Eastern Sudani a farce.
This is a farce because we do have document evidence of Meroitic, but none for the Nilo-Saharan languages. As a result, any proto-term hfrom Northern Eastern Sudani Rilly compares with Meroitic will be conjecture since there is no documented evidence of Nilo-Saharan languages being spoken in the Meroitic Empire.
H.H. Hock, in Principles of Historical Linguistics (1986), observed that there are two major arguments against the idea that comparative reconstructions recover the "prehistoric reality" of a language.
The first principle, is that languages change over time. This makes it almost impossible to "fully" reconstruct the lexcical items and grammar of the ancestral language. Secondly, there are few, if any dialect free languages. Constructs resulting from comparing lexical items and grammars from an available set of languages,produce a dialect free protolanguage, that is unnatural and "factually incorrect as shown by the insights of the wave theory" (p.568).
Granted, by comparing languages and associating them with a particular time period you can make comparative reconstructions that may eliminate dialectal diversity. But Rilly can not do this because none of the attested Meroitic terms have Nubian cognates. This along with the fact that we have no textual evidence of Nilo-Saharan during the Meroitic period demonstrating that Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken in the Meroitic Empire, especially Nubian,precludes using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic. Using proto-Northern Eastern Sudani terms to read Meroitic will fail to provide a linguistically realistic situation in Nubia 2000 years ago. This is especially true for Nubian, which was not spoken in the Meroitic Empire. The Nubian speakers lived far to the north of the Meroitic Empire, a fact Rilly acknowledges in his paper.
quote: Rilly has demonstrated relationship, which you haven't been able to refute. All you do, to recap, is...
The central issue is whether Meroitic is or is not related to Nilo Saharan.
Clyde is not in a position to engage this point, because he is using Kharosthi script, which is distinct from Meroitic, to translate Meroitic, without a Rosetta stone-type of scenario going on here, where one script in one language translates the very same text written in Meroitic script, just as hieroglyphics and Demotic was done with Coptic.
This not a good question. Researchers have already discovered that the languages are not related. As pointed out above Rilly made up some terms he claims are Meroitic. These make believe terms can not be used to prove this point.
posted
I placed the dog and rabbit in brackets because these are pictures. The written message is simply: " Exist indeed to grant a noble boon (with)the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror".
I do not know the Meroitic word for dog. .
quote:Originally posted by Mystery Solver:
quote:Originally posted by rasol:
quote:Here you admit that Rilly has not faithfully described an object he is deciphering ( e.g., absence of 'y' and the rabbit), and you claim this is okay.
You lost me Dr. Winters,
There is no rabbit in your transliteration either - W, to be, exist, to drive, to conduct
L, indeed, or termination element
E, grant a boon, vouchsafe, favor
Qo, to live, to renew, to restore; noble, royal, honorable; to make , to form
Ph, intention
N, good, only
Y, bring
-t, you (personal pronoun)
tl, to elevate
Netror, name of person
Slo, meritorious
You put rabbit and dog in brackets to literally represent what is being referred to -
: [Dog] exist indeed to grant a noble boon [of rabbits with] the intention to bring elevation to you, meritorious Netror”.
What in your opinion is the actual word for Dog and Rabbit in meroitic?
Is it written in the text, yes or no?
quote:Winters: A rabbit being chased by a dog implies hunting not purchasing a dog.
-Exists as a noble boon- implies a benefit bestowed as a blessing [from God], or a gift [from man], [intention would imply the later]??
But your translation does not make this clear.
Likewise '3 talents' which Riley literally translates could relate to the skillset of the dog, including [implicitely] hunting.
But what we are discribing now is interpretation - not transliteration, correct?
Based on his previous practices, Clyde will likely say that the pictures themselves are the words, as if Meroitic has no terms for these items.
As I have demonstrated however, Rilly's emphasis was to derive the words he emphasized [in red block letters in the link]. He did translate the rest of the piece, but not really much of a concern here. Hence, the assured translated words here, were "this dog". From what I can tell, he might be openning the interpretation of the signs for "phn" and "y" [according to the table] here in two ways: one where he deems that the term 'phn" could mean "brought" and hence question marks following it, meaning open to further investigation, and the other, for "y" whereby it could present a Meroitic synonym for the numeral three.
Hence, *exactly* as noted in the link:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o « this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
Notice the emphasized 'block' terms, which are the words whose meanings were supposed to be assured, in the cotext, with the rest of the 'interpretation' completed out nonetheless.
Ps - How are these emphasized words assured in their meaning according to Rilly?
But in a few cases, a meaning can be suggested for new words and be confirmed in various inscriptions. Although very slow, this approach recently provided new translations.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: You don't even read what your hero has written. Rilly is the one who says a dog was bought not me. If a dog was bought, that means the dog was purchased.
I think what Mystery Solver is asking is if bought necessarily implies purchased as opposed to bought as in currying favor with a gift, as opposed purchasing.
It might be similar to your reference to 'boon', which may equally imply giving a gift.
Anyway, I think you should answer Mystery Solvers questions rather than trying to distract him with a trivial dispute over the meaning of bought vs. boon. Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Based on his previous practices, Clyde will likely say that the pictures themselves are the words, as if Meroitic has no terms for these items.
Yes, but we all know a picture of a dog or rabbit implies dog or rabbit -- in any langauge.
It's the Meroitic language and it's relationship to Nilo Saharan that is at issue.
quote:As I have demonstrated however, Rilly's emphasis was to derive the words he emphasized [in red block letters in the link]. He did translate the rest of the piece, but not really much of a concern here.
Hence, the assured translated words here, were "this dog". From what I can tell, he might be openning the interpretation of the signs for "phn" and "y" [according to the table] here in two ways: one where he deems that the term 'phn" could mean "brought" and hence question marks following it, meaning open to further investigation, and the other, for "y" whereby it could present a Meroitic synonym for the numeral three.
Hence, *exactly* as noted in the link:
Wle qo phn 3 tlt Netror-se-l-o « this dog was bought (???) three talents, it is Netarura's ».
Notice the emphasized 'block' terms, which are the words whose meanings were supposed to be assured, in the cotext, with the rest of the 'interpretation' completed out nonetheless.
Ps - How are these emphasized words assured in their meaning according to Rilly?
But in a few cases, a meaning can be suggested for new words and be confirmed in various inscriptions. Although very slow, this approach recently provided new translations.
Rily could be correct or he could be wrong, but Winters attempted refutations of him to date are simply strawfire distractions, which neither show that the translations are incorrect, nor that Meroitic is unrelated to other African languages - as *Winters*, and not Riley, claims.
Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: This not a good question. Researchers have already discovered that the languages [merotic and nilo saharan] are not related.
False statement obviously since researchers claim that Meroitic is a Nilo Saharan language.
It is you who claims that Merotic is unrelated to any other African language.
It is you who claims that the langauge is effectively Indo-European [notwithstanding your ludicrous dissembling in and effort to -HIDE- what you are actually implying.
It is you who failed to refute the affinities denoted between Merotic and other Nilo Saharan languages.
Therefore the problem is your failure to answer the question - not that the question is not *good*, , which is simply your excuse for not being able to answer it.
Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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