Standard Theory of Egyptian Syntax

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Standard theory or, more precisely, standard theory of Egyptian syntax is a term that is widespread in Egyptology for a group of ideas about the syntax , especially of the classical Egyptian language (“ Middle Egyptian ”) and also for the other language levels of Egyptian . The standard theory question has largely dominated the Egyptological grammar discussion since the 1970s. The term standard theory for these ideas was first used by Leo Depuydt . The so-called theory structure often leads to discomfort among less linguistically oriented Egyptologists or can even be a fearful topic for students.

prehistory

The Egyptian language has few obvious means of identifying subordinate clauses such as subordinate conjunctions . For this reason it was previously believed that Egyptian texts consisted largely of a series of simple elementary sentences, for whose logical relationships to one another the language had not developed any means of expression. This corresponded to the general idea of ​​archaic and / or non-European languages ​​at the time. At the same time one had to accept that certain phenomena of the verb morphology remained unexplained: For example, in addition to a "present", "perfect", "future" etc., somewhat rarer tenses were observed, which are known in the younger language levels as "present 2", " Perfect 2 ”,“ Future 2 ”etc. (so-called“ Second tenses ”) and whose function was not understood or misunderstood as“ emphatic ”(including Adolf Erman ) or - much more seriously -“ imperfectical ”(primarily Alan Gardiner ) .

development

A reassessment of the Egyptian syntax came from Hans Jacob Polotsky . At first, he noticed in texts of more recent Egyptian language levels that the second tenses are used obligatorily if the sentence contains an adverbial phrase which - according to modern terminology - is focused , for example consists of a question element, i.e. in sentences like j.jrj -k-gmj-st mj-jh = you-find-it (2nd tense) like = "how did you find it?" From this observation he subsequently developed the thesis that the second tenses are actually to be analyzed as relativistic forms, in the given example "that you have found it, (is) how?" This would mean that there would be a correspondence to our subordinate clauses, even without a conjunction in the Egyptian text.

Polotsky continued to develop this observation into what we now call standard theory ( pertaining to his Egyptian Tenses, for example ). On the one hand, he extended the assumption of second tenses to the older classical Egyptian language, where morphological markings for these are much less common in writing. On the other hand, he also extended his analysis to the numerous cases in which no obvious adverbials can be found after a second tense . He concluded here that instead the entire following sentence must be implicitly adverbialized and focused by the preceding second tense , thus creating a grammatical link between sentences. One of his examples is the following document from the Book of the Dead: šdd.tw r pn (...) wdn.nf (...) , which has to mean "one should recite this saying (...) after one (that-and-that) has sacrificed ", where according to older teaching it would have been easy to translate literally" one should recite this saying (...), one has (...) sacrificed ". Since the first verb is a second tense, according to Polotsky's analysis, there is a sentence combination of the kind "that one should recite this saying (...), (is after) one (...) has sacrificed".

The high point reached the standard theory with the habilitation sschrift of Frederick boy . He radicalized Polotsky's approach in such a way that sentence connections made by second tenses are not only possible in Egyptian, but even represent the normal case, that is, each verbal form must either be nominalized (“second tense”) or adverbialized (otherwise). According to Junge, simple verbal clauses are not at all possible in Egyptian: an apparent verb like sḏm.nf “(traditionally :) he heard” is not a sentence-forming element by itself, but is to be analyzed either as “that he heard” or as “while he heard”. In the classical Middle Egyptian language in particular, morphological or graphical clues for the distinction between nominalized and adverbialized verbal forms are rare, so that the syntactic analysis must largely be obtained from the context .

Younger approach enabled an elegant explanation of the very common, but not yet satisfactorily understood particles jw . After Young's jw a semantically empty dummy - noun phrase (such as "that is the case"), which is then used when a set with a single verbal statement to be expressed content. “He heard” means in Egyptian jw sḏm.nf , quite literally “that it is the case (is by) hearing”.

Later on, several researchers took over the basic theory of Junge's character, but reformulated it in part. W. Schenkel presents the Egyptian syntax in such a way that sentences have a verbal core (= the adverbialized verb of standard theory), but must have a front extension (for example jw or a nominalized verb of standard theory). Frank Kammerzell describes Egyptian as marking the main clauses, which means that elementary clauses are subordinate clauses in themselves and only become main clauses when they are additionally marked. In contrast to this, the European languages ​​basically mark subordinate clauses, because elementary clauses are always main clauses and only become subordinate clauses through an extension (e.g. conjunction).

criticism

While the standard theory was accepted in the 1980s by the vast majority of Egyptologists who commented on the topic at all, critical voices began to emerge from 1990 onwards. These attempted to find counter-evidence or pointed out, for example, that languages ​​without verbal clauses are nowhere else in the world or that Egyptian cannot be reconciled with linguistic ideas such as generative grammar. In some more recent works, simple verbal clauses are also accepted in addition to sentence patterns that correspond to standard theory.

Some researchers even go so far as to question Polotsky's initial observation that the second tenses can be used to focus adverbs. The discussion is still in full swing, and a closed representation of a syntax model “according to standard theory” has not yet come about.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Leo Depuydt, "The standard theory of the 'emphatic' forms in Classical (Middle) Egyptian: A historical survey", in Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 14, 1983, 13-54
  2. ↑ Hans-Jacob Polotsky, “Une regle concernant l'emploi des formes verbales dans la phrase interrogative en neo-egyptien”, in Annales du Service des Antiquites de l'Egypte 40, 1940, pp. 241-245
  3. ↑ Hans-Jakob Polotsky, Egyptian Tenses . The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Vol. II, No. 5., 1965 [= Collected Papers , pp. 71-96]
  4. ↑ Friedrich Junge, “Syntax of the Middle Egyptian Literary Language. Basics of a structure theory ”, Mainz 1978
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Schenkel, "Tübingen Introduction to Classical Egyptian Language and Writing", Tübingen 2005
  6. ↑ Frank Kammerzell, professor at the HU Berlin, orally
  7. ↑ for example Mark Collier, "The circumstantial sdm (.f) /sdm.n (.f) as verbal verb forms in Middle Egyptian", in Journal of Egyptian Archeology 76, 1990, pp. 73-85
  8. ↑ Antonio Loprieno, “Ancient Egyptian. A Linguistic Introduction ", Cambridge 1995
  9. ↑ Thomas Ritter, "The Verbal System of Royal and Private Inscriptions. XVIII. Dynasty up to and including Amenophis III ”, Wiesbaden 1995 .; Sami Uljas, “On interclausal relations in Middle Egyptian”, in Susanne Bickel & Antonio Loprieno (eds.), Basel Egyptology Price 1, Basel 2003, pp. 387-403