Varii

The powers that be have decided that I should not sleep tonight. Aside from that, I also had to finish this post.

First, I would like you to observe the right side of this page. Specifically, notice that the Links section has been updated. There are two new links in it: Lumea lui Naspa Rau and Survival Guide to Homelessness.

The first of these pages contains ironical articles of some guy. While I do not agree with everything he says, I must say that I agree with many of the things there. Asides from these, he is very funny. The second page is here mainly for inspirational purposes. While I have never been homeless myself, I was able to understand from this guys posts, the way in which this experience might change you. Also, it makes you wonder about a lot of the wrong things in this society in which we are living.

I especially liked one of the comments in which one person there says that the current lifestyle is more of an "Active Laziness". People everywhere work, sleep, eat, and do nothing more beside these basic activities. The high-point of their day is probably when they get laid. They often identify themselves with their material possesions or with their jobs. However, aside of this jobs and aside these material possesions, they are often very shallow. Einstein once said that "Culture is what remains after you forgot everything". It is somehow the same here.

Here I get to the second point of this post. The ideal man. It is a common assumption these days that you should specialize in order to be successful. This can be contrasted to the Renaissance period where you should have been a generalist.

Nobody can deny that from an economical point of view, this seems to be the case. The better you know about something, the more you are likely to be paid. However, specialization is reducing your being. While it does make you more knowledgeable, it offers less and less ground for developing new ideas. I reckon that John Carmack once said, while working for Doom 3 that he has been reading books on psychology and genetics, and various other matters. He added that they cross-bred and this gave him some ideas with regard to the engine of his game.

It is said to say, but if you look at the society, some of its tendencies are contrary to the profit of the individual. For example, society needs specialized individuals who know one particular thing very well. The individual on the other hand is generally interested by many things. Mind, to be kept sane and fit, needs change. It is almost the same as with a muscle. If you only use it in one way, it will grow up to a point and then stop. If you use it in multiple ways, it will grow even more, and become more powerful (and thus more useful even to your day to day activity).

Thus, I consider it imperative for the modern person to learn and instruct himself even more than the Renaissance man. I do think that this should be done even at the risk of being shallow in some of your areas of knowledge. For example, you will probably see no use to the previous article about ancient Egyptian. For me however it was quite useful. Letting aside the cultural value, the exercise of memorizing stuff about hieroglyphs took my mind from some of my problems. Also, it was a mental exercise very different in nature from those that I generally do. And of course, I received quite a lot of visitors because of this new article :).

I will probably write another article about hieroglyphs if I feel like some of these days. However, I don't expect it to be ready sooner than Sunday.

Ancient Egyptian

At the dawn of this blog, it was written that linguistics will also be discussed here. No mention was made again on this subject after that. We are going to mend this thing here.

After some thought on what to write about, I chose one of the most unwelcoming languages around, ancient egyptian. I really do not know a reason why anyone would want to learn this language, other than it's strange attraction.

In the next 5 minutes you are going to learn how to read and write anything in Egyptian. Just kidding! What I shall write here is only a small and inexpensive introduction in the subject. Actually, I myself being no specialist of any kind in egyptology I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this, and everything written here should probably be checked.

First of all, ancient egyptian is a very difficult language. Its difficulty is twofold. First of all, the grammar is very different from the grammar of latin or germanic languages. Second, writing is quite difficult also.

Furthermore, there is not a single Egyptian language, but five different species: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, Coptic. These are not really different languages but rather different phases of the same language. The same can be seen in the case of the English language, where we have Old English (which is practically another language altogether), Elizabethan English, Modern English, etc. The grammar matters that appear here mainly apply to Middle Egyptian. This is considered one of the most important phases of Ancient Egyptian, a lot of works being written in this language.

As a side note, Coptic is still spoken today in Egypt but mainly as a ritual language for the Coptic Church. The people who are native coptic speakers generally use it with the family. If you are interested in being understood in modern day Egypt, you should learn Arabic, which is its official language.

These matters being clarified, we can now search deeper in this strange language. Here are the questions that I am going to answer:
1) How did Egyptian sounded like?
2) What is Demotic and Hieratic?
3) How is Egyptian written? Right to left? Left to right? Top to bottom?
4) What do the hieroglyphs represent? Are they letters? Or are they mainly ideograms, like in Chinese?

1) How did Egyptian sounded like?
I don't know as a matter of fact, nobody really knows. Researchers do know how some of the words sounded at some period or other in time, but this words are pretty rare and they cover only part of the spectrum. While the writing remained the same for almost 3000 years, the Egyptians were unable to keep the language from evolving (dramatically).

Here you may ask: If they do not know how it sounded, how come we are able to read it? The answer is pretty strange for someone who is not generally acquainted with semitic languages. The ancient egyptians (and a lot of other languages like hebrew, arabic, persian, etc.) did not write the vowels of the words. This is indeed cumbersome, but not as impossible to read as it seems. Watch this example:

Hr s a smpl xmpl t shw m pnt. (Here is a simple example to show my point).

The letter 'a' above is not really cheating, since Egyptian (and also Hebrew and Arabic) have some vowels. These vowels are however quite different in pronounciation than their equivalent in English or Romanian. Probably because of this, they are considered more like consonants than like vowels.

Back to the point. In some traditions, the consonants are considered the bones (body) of the word and the vowels its soul. That is a good way of thinking about it. Also, because the population that could actually read had an extensive training this was not quite difficult.

2) Hieratic and Demotic are two variants of writing Ancient Egyptian. If you look at the beautiful Egyptian hieroglyphs, you will probably notice that they are very detailed. Imagine a scribe forcing himself to record the order of the Pharaohs in such an incredibly detailed script. Probably they realized it was a problem with the writing, and because of that, the priests invented a second style of writing called Hieratic (which comes from the greek word for Sacred). After some time, people realized the advantages of a more fluid manner of writing and they invented their own writing, called Demotic (from Demos - people). Demotic was not quite an independent discovery (it was derived actually from Hieratic). In time this writing was used more and more instead of Hieratic.

So, while for 3000 years the hieroglyphs were used in a lot of official documents, Hieratic was also used for the same period of time. I have difficulties understanding how could a scribe write hastily and fluently without a script like those above.

3) How is Egyptian written? Right to left? Left to right? Top to bottom?

All of the above directions are possible. When egyptologists learn the language, they generally write it from left to right. However, in papyri, stuff is written both from right to left, from left to right, and from top to bottom. The PROPER way to read is to identify figures like birds and persons (which are very common). If they are looking towards the right, then you should read from right to left. If they are looking towards the left, you should read from left to right. Vertical writings are always read from top to bottom (never from bottom upwards). However, the first row that should be read is the left row, if the hieroglyphs look towards left, or vice-versa. Also, when reading, TOP has always priority. Top signs are read first, then bottom signs.

Hieroglyphs are written quite differently from the way we generally no modern languages are written. There is a rule relating to the harmony of things, known as "the fear of void". Hieroglyphs are amassed so that they are as compact as possible.

I will do my best to describe this in the following ASCII art. Suppose the rectangles filled with As, Bs and Cs are all hieroglyphs. A is tall and slim and B and C are short but wide. This is how you would write the word ABC in a wrong manner:

AAAA
AAAA
AAAA
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC  other signs here -->>>
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCC

As you see, above the Bs and the Cs there is an inesthetic white space. The PROPER way to write ABC is this:

AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB    other signs here -->>>
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC

As you see, now there are no white spaces and everything is fitted nicely together. To read it now, you should however remember the rule that the TOP has always precedence over the bottom.

Note however, that if the sign would be written like this (i.e. vertically), you wouldn't necessarily read it ABC:

AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA BBBBBBBBBB
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
AAAA  CCCCCCCC
other signs go below
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

How do you read it in this instance? Well, it depends. If A, B or C are figures facing left, you would read the word ABC. If they face right, you would read the letters BCA. I hope this makes some sense.

4) What do the hieroglyphs represent? Are they letters? Or are they mainly ideograms, like in Chinese?

I hear people (who don't know anything about the matter) debating on this problem endlessly. First of all, even in Chinese, some of the characters are generally not used by themselves.

In Egyptian, there are thee categories of signs: phonograms and ideograms. Ideograms are the most alike with Chinese signs. They represent an idea (or an object). They do not usually convey the sound of the word.

Phonograms are actual sounds. Even though most of them look very beautiful (for example the letter m is written like an owl), they are only sounds, and do not necessarily convey meaning all by themselves.

There are more than one type of phonograms though. There are letters that are just that. A simple letter. The egyptian alphabet has 24 single letters. Asides from that, there are letters which are combinations of 2 letters (these are called biliteral signs) and of 3 letters (triliteral signs). Most of the 3 letter signs and some of the biliterals and uniliterals have meaning of their own. However, they are NOT necessarily used only when reffering to this base meaning.

There is also a special type of logogram called a determinative. To understand the role of a determinative, look at the following sentence:

Here also lies Roland.

If we take out the vowels, we have:

Hr ls ls Rlnd.

If we are not aware about what is written, we could have something like:

Here lies also Roland.

Here, the meaning is not lost. However, there are situations when this danger may occur. This is especially true if we do not remember what were we writing about.

To avoid this situation, we will add a determinative:

Hr(a location) ls ls(an action) Rlnd(a person).

In this way, we will not transcribe Hr like Her instead of Here. Also, we won't be able to say "lies also" instead of "also lies". In Egyptian, instead of paranthesis, they used a logogram.

OK! That wraps it up. You could probably find easily the Egyptian uniliterals. However, to truly learn the language you should probably buy the book Middle Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner. This book is considered the de facto standard for Middle Egyptian.

Best wishes to your endeavours.

Vows

Things upon this earth are never eternal. Unbroken vows will always be broken and crisis is always cyclical. I do not pretend to know why things happen like this. Some philosophers say that it is for our own evolution that we must endure pain and ephemerity.

The day after tommorow will be 6 months since my last post on this blog. At that time I said that no posts will be written here anymore. The overwhelming sensation of unaccomplishment was unbearable. Another crisis today has forced my hand to write other things upon this blog.

However unpleasant that sensation might have seemed at the time, comparing it with the recent events that took place in my life is like comparing a light breeze with a full-blown tornado. I will not write pathetic comments about what happened or why it happened the way it happened. I cannot do it, but I DO have to write something because I verily think that otherwise my mind will shatter in 1000 little pieces.

In the Bible, probably you already know, there are a lot of laws, of do and a lot of don't. A particular set of versets of the Bible, during the Leviticus I think, explains when and for what reasons to swear. The word swear is not really used hear in the sense of profanity but rather as a synonym for the act of vowing. Later, in the New Testament, Jesus is quoted saying that a person should not vow on anything. His word should be yes and remain yes. Or it should be no and remain no.

I thought myself at this problem for a long time. As a rule of the thumb, I tried to keep close to this but I failed many times. If Jesus was able to do this, he was truly an enormous man. The complexity of this world, the whys and hows, the whens and wheres will always perplex the human side of us. Illusions haunt the soul and yes so often becomes no and no becomes yes.

It is probably because of this, because of the neverending pain of being unable to reach the ideal that people become sad with no apparent reason. And it is also because of the desire to attack this ideal, to rebuild from tiny crumbles his spirit, that he is regaining his happiness with no apparent reason.

A melodramatic mood seems to reign supreme through these pathetic lines. The whole sentences seem like a fit of a drama queen or the lines of the actors of a soap opera. Style should probably be adjusted or else rebuilt. However, the feelings that I have are expressed so solidly in the above paragraphs that I am not going to correct that. My sentiments will probably seem to you shallow, and from the higher perspective they could very well be. They are genuine though, and nevertheless painful. In an almost physical sense.

Doru