Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [92]
* The word Mandarin is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word māntrin, ‘counsellor’, with some influence from the Portuguese verb mandar, ‘command’. Pŭtōnghuá means ‘common language’, a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as guāNnhuá, ‘official language’ (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for Mandarin), or guòyŭ, ‘national language’, which referred to much the same thing. Hànyŭ, ‘Han language’, is another term used.
* The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian n-irw-aR, ‘the-rivers-great’, referring to the Nile’s many streams in the Delta area. This is related to jatruw, ‘(the) river’, always its name in classical Egyptian (Luft 1992).
† The original name was Kiang alone, an Austro-Asiatic word, related to words for ‘river’ in Vietnamese song (once pronounced ’krong’) and Mon kruŋ, showing the kind of language spoken here before Chinese came in from the north (Norman 1988: 18).
§ Compare san, ‘brother’, with sānat, ‘sister’. Most abstract nouns share this femininity, e.g. maR ’at, ‘righteousness’ (always conceived as a goddess). See pp. 35ff. for a longer description of Semitic features.
† This common word for the king of Egypt was established by its use in the Hebrew Bible. It represents the Egyptian pr- ’r (House-Great), and so is like using ‘the Palace’ to refer to the British monarch.
* The name Memphis actually refers to King Pepi’s pyramid there, built some seven hundred years later: ‘stable in beauty’. Egypt is inexact as a name for the country. Reflecting the Greek word Aiguptos, it is in fact a title of Memphis: a slurring of əyt kRUW pta, ‘temple of the Ka-energy of Ptah’. kruw was the sustenance to the life force kaR, given by food and drink, and sacrificial offerings.
* Based in Sarw (Sais) in the Delta area, they are rumoured to have been of Libyan ancestry.
* Yet, when the hero of the fictional Tale of Sinuhe reached Retjenu, in northern Palestine (the tale is set at the end of the twentieth century BC, with Retjenu ranged with Egypt’s enemies), he was told: ‘You will be happy here. You will hear the language of Egypt.’ As Sinuhe recounts, there were already Egyptians with the ruler of Retjenu, who had spoken up for him (verse 30). The ruler’s name was Ammulanasi, recognisably Amorite.
* Herodotus, ii. 154, recounts that Psamtek put some Egyptian boys into the service of the Ionians and Carians, to be taught Greek, and thereby founded the Egyptian caste of interpreters. There is no reference to any Greeks studying Egyptian.
* Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra’s day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.
* The last inscription was made on the sacred island of Philae, just above the Nile’s first cataract and symbolically the farthest outpost of