The Rosetta Stone

[Bill77]

I mean the fascination with anything ancient.

The ancients are irrelevant, the fascination is regressive and counter producive.

Macedonia's biggest and costliest tactical error has been pursuing the antiquisation policy.

Just to make things clear, it was Greece that started with this fascination with us and antiquisation. We just answer their queries and by not responding will be counter productive.

[Soldier of Macedon]

I mean the fascination with anything ancient.

I don't see anything wrong with a healthy interest in the early history of Macedonia, it is all relevant. There are also statues of more recent historical figures too. And although I understand your point about the focus on human rights, are you suggesting that we ignore altogether our history from antiquity? If not, what sort of limitations do you think there should be?

Not to mention the cringe-worthy Macedonian falanx greeting the Hunza king at the airport, which I see as an attempt to impose a dead culture on a supposed modern state.

Nobody is trying to impose a dead culture, but we have every right to pursue our historical roots and know more about where we came from and what we have done. I agree about the whole Hunza situation, although I was not so much against the visit but more concerned about the way it was handled.

I recall the early years of the maknews forum, how we laughed at Grk plans to carve Alexander's head into a mountain.

We're a long way from comparing to the lunacy of some Greeks.

[Pelister]

I mean the fascination with anything ancient.

The ancients are irrelevant, the fascination is regressive and counter producive.

Macedonia's biggest and costliest tactical error has been pursuing the antiquisation policy.

Had our argument centered exclusively on our human rights, I am 99% sure that by now we would have won the name game. Instead, we've joined the Grks in their column mania - and in many cases, we might have even out done them.

Then there is the impact on our already deplorable architecture. The 8 star shields in Bitola, the tragic bust of Alexander at the airport....and now crowned by the the abominable fountain. Kitsch, incongruous and embarrassing.

Not to mention the cringe-worthy Macedonian falanx greeting the Hunza king at the airport, which I see as an attempt to impose a dead culture on a supposed modern state.

I recall the early years of the maknews forum, how we laughed at Grk plans to carve Alexander's head into a mountain.

Yes, but Aleksandar Veliki (not this artificial 'Megos Alexandros' bullshit) has always been a part of Macedonian folklore. He isn't "celebrated" so much as he is simply stated as being one of us, and we his descendants. There are oral traditions that have been passed down over many centuries, poems, songs, stories about Aleksandar - we have that! The New Greeks never did. The 'Hellenophiles' in Europe have basically ignored the evidence, hijacked the 'King' and passed him onto a foriegn culture.

The term antiquisation is another colonial term. It is a piece of foriegn propaganda that ignores the evidence. How can this be a form of antiquisation, when the empirical evidence points to the fact that Aleksandar has always been a key part of the Macedonian oral tradition?

Are we to ignore what our own oral traditions say, because a foriegner has pointed the finger and thrown the word 'antiquisation' at us. The only peopl in the region guilty of doing this are the New Greeks, with their sham heritage and sham past.

[lavce pelagonski]

I never liked it when people call him Veliki its not really our word it should be Aleksandar Golemiot or simply Makedonski.

[Bill77]

I never liked it when people call him Veliki its not really our word it should be Aleksandar Golemiot or simply Makedonski.

I'm not sure if this is the case. It is not so strange of a word in our language as we think. We have discussed this word after the renaming of the airport.

Here are some of the examples given previously

Veligden- Great day (Easter)

Velika - common female name

Cant remember the other examples but they were two. Ofcourse this does not prove the word originated from the Macedonian language, but then again i don't know much about it and it could be.

[mango]

The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the 'Abbasids

Papaconstantinou, Arietta, ed. <i>The Multilingual Experience in
Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the 'Abbasids</i>. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2010. Pp. x, 240. $114.95. ISBN: 9780754665366.

Reviewed by Janet Timbie
Catholic University of America
[email protected]


This collection of essays adds to the growing field of study of
language change and language interaction in Egypt. The impetus for
the publication came from lectures given by Willy Clarysse and Sofia
Torallas Tovar in 2005, and from seminar presentations by Sarah J.
Clackson. Essays were added in order to present evidence for
multilingualism over the entire period in question. The quality of
research and analysis presented in these essays is generally very
high, though some aspects of the publication format make the volume a
bit hard to use. All essays but one are written in English, though
this is not the first language of certain contributors, and thus some
editorial polishing would have been helpful. But these details do not
seriously detract from the overall quality of this collection.

Important work in this field has been published in the last decade,
and the pace of research is increasing. J. N. Adams, <i>Bilingualism
and the Latin Language</i> (2003), set a standard for research in this
area and is frequently cited in the essays in this collection, as are
the reference works, <i>The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology</i> (2009)
and <i>Egypt in the Byzantine World</i> (2007), both edited by Roger
Bagnall. Both reference works have chapters dealing with language
usage in Egypt. Another recently published collection of essays,
<i>From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the
Roman Near East</i>, edited by H. Cotton et al. (2009), is similar in
scope to the collection reviewed here, and has some of the same
contributors.

The volume is divided into three parts. An introductory essay by the
editor, Arietta Papaconstantinou, and a somewhat different
introduction to the topic, by Sofia Torallas Tovar, lead off. Part
One, Evidence for a Multilingual Society: Documents and Archives,
follows with three essays (Clarysse, Clackson, and Sijpesteijn). Part
Two, Case Studies in Language Use in a Multilingual Society (Dieleman,
Choat, Boud'hors, Richter, Cromwell) closes the collection. When the
reader carefully studies individual essays, there is much valuable
information and analysis, as well as interesting pointers to the
direction of future research. As Papaconstantinou says in the
introduction, "The approach taken here is broadly socio-historical,
and focuses in great part on making the rich source material and its
potential better known. If anything, this collection demonstrates the
necessity for further work in this field with a full theoretical
framework to support it" (4). Due to the great advantages offered by
the preservation of evidence on papyri, multilingualism in Egypt from
300 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. can be studied over a "wider range of social
strata and language registers" (3). She then reviews topics that need
study, including separation between Greek and Egyptian cultures,
interference, bilingual scribes, education, group language use,
bilingual archives, gender, and public use of language, and points out
how each essay advances research. Torallas follows with a historical
survey of the evidence, and the questions that it raises, in
"Linguistic Identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt." She offers a useful
review of the Greek presence in Egypt before Alexander, based on both
literary and documentary evidence. Then, after an overview of changes
in Egyptian written language, Torallas turns to bilingualism and notes
that the "level of language mixing and of bilingualism among the
speakers was as heterogeneous as the population" (28), yet researchers
can only approach this problem by means of written evidence from the
Graeco-Roman period.

From this point on, the essays describe and analyze specific bodies of
evidence for multilingualism in Egypt. In Part One (Documents and
Archives), Willy Clarysse, "Bilingual Papyrological Archives," begins
with useful links to on-line databases for papyri and ostraca and
defines an archive as "a group of several texts that were brought
together <i>in Antiquity</i> by an institution or person" (48). After
discussing aspects of the relationship between archives and
archaeology, Clarysse turns to bilingual Greek-Demotic archives and
presents the evidence with an effective combination of graphs and
text. The late Sarah J. Clackson, whose essay "Coptic or Greek?
Bilingualism in the Papyri" was posthumously edited by
Papaconstantinou from two conference papers, provides an excellent
introduction to the relationship between written Coptic and Greek in
the fourth to seventh centuries. Beginning students of Coptic,
papyrology, and related fields would get a good orientation from this
essay, since the author aims to dismantle the "dichotomy between
'Greek-speaking culture' and 'Coptic-speaking culture'" (73).
Clackson believed that this dichotomy did not exist, but was an
artifact of the separation of Greek studies and Egyptian studies in
museums, libraries, and universities. More advanced students and
scholars will learn from the examples presented of interference
between Greek and Coptic at the level of lexicons and syntax, and from
the discussion of bilingual Coptic-Greek archives, "focusing on who
was writing what and why" (88). The last essay in Part 1 is
"Multilingual Archives and Documents in Post-Conquest Egypt" by Petra
Sijpesteijn, who carries the subject into and beyond the seventh
century through analysis of the use of Greek, Coptic, and Arabic in
public and private archives. Her conclusion highlights the
significant increase in the use of written Arabic in archives from the
seventh to the eighth centuries, but also underlines the difficulty in
understanding how Egypt eventually "became an entirely Arabic-speaking
country" (123). Sijpesteijn's more speculative ideas about this,
related to changes in low-level administration and religious
conversion, point the direction to further research.

Part Two (Case Studies in Language Use in a Multilingual Society) is
longer, with five essays in rough chronological order by date of
texts. Jacco Dieleman, in "What's in a Sign? Translating Filiation
in the Demotic Magical Papyri," examines the relationship between
written Egyptian (Demotic), spoken Egyptian, and Greek through the
evidence of bilingual magical manuscripts in which a Greek
abbreviation sign is used in the Demotic font. Dieleman then asks,
"Are there any indications that the foreign loan sign articulates a
particular sentiment on the part of the editors within its new
linguistic and scriptural environment?" (129). After a very careful
and clearly written analysis, Dieleman ends by saying that "it remains
unclear to me what these sections have in common that could explain
the loan sign's occurrence" (151). Yet the reader will not be
disappointed with this modest conclusion because the analysis has been
so careful and has set a standard for future research. Malcolm Choat,
"Early Coptic Epistolography," shifts the discussion into the Coptic
period of written Egyptian, looks at formulae in early Coptic letters,
and "assesses the relative influence of Graeco-Roman patterns, the
letters of Paul, and earlier Egyptian precursors" (153). He concludes
that all three elements influenced Coptic practice, and therefore that
the knowledge of "the last guardians of Demotic" (178), namely the
Egyptian priestly class, contributed to Coptic in a way that must be
studied further.

Another type of multilingualism is explored by Anne Boud'hors in
"Toujours honneur au grec? Ŕ propos d'un papyrus gréco-copte de la
region thébaine." Some liturgical manuscripts from the seventh
century have Greek and Coptic versions of the same text on facing
pages. Her analysis demonstrates that the Greek version had a place
of honor, but probably was not read in services, thus forecasting the
relationship between Coptic and Arabic versions in eleventh-century
liturgical manuscripts. Tonio Sebastian Richter, in "Language Change
in the Qurra Dossier," adds to the study of written Arabic in Egypt
with an exploration of a trilingual collection of texts related to
taxation and dated to the early eighth century. His essay begins with
a statement of principle regarding language choice in written versus
spoken communication, continues with background on Umayyad
administration in Egypt, and then delves into the details of the Qurra
dossier, leading to some suggestions about the usage of both spoken
and written Coptic in the public domain. Finally, Jennifer Cromwell
offers a case study of the work of an eighth-century scribe who wrote
both Coptic and Greek texts, "Aristophanes Son of Johannes: An Eighth-
Century Bilingual Scribe? A Study of Graphic Bilingualism."
Aristophanes clearly used different Coptic and Greek hands for texts
in each language and the illustrations and analysis in Cromwell's
essay are very clear and helpful. It seems that there were multiple
schools for scribal training and Aristophanes was the product of one
that taught two different styles. But the relationship between this
graphic bilingualism and true bilingualism, as in the famous case of
Dioscorus of Aphrodito, remains to be explored.

The reader will have some problems in using this volume. On occasion,
poor choices in English lead to confusion. See, for example, "did not
go wasted on administrators" (8) and "a man invested in Christ" (40 n.
98); other instances could be cited. The table of contents omits the
headings Part One and Part Two. There are no bibliographies, either
at the end of each essay or in the volume as a whole, although there
is an index. The publisher should have corrected these problems, yet
they do not negate the value of the collection. The essays by
Torallas, Clarysse, Clackson, Sijpesteijn, and Richter combine
background material that would be very helpful to both beginners and
advanced students with expert analysis of a specific problem. The
entire case study section (Part Two) offers material from the cutting
edge of multilingual studies, where technical command of the material
is combined with understanding of the theoretical framework.

[Po-drum]

Furthermore, the sounds of the letters J, Ќ, Ѓ, Њ, Љ, Џ and Ф did not even exist in Old Macedonian (Old Church Slavonic) a thousand years ago, let alone a thousand years before that. Their appearance and evolution in all Slavic languages is well documented. If they're research was indeed in accordance with the scientific knowledge of Macedonian language we should expect that these sounds would not appear in their decipherment of the Demotic text, yet they do. They could argue that perhaps what was known so far about the phonological evolution of Macedonian is wrong, but then they would need to explain the evidence of the documentation. If it was only that. In reality they face a mammoth task of explaining why they ignored the documentation of the Macedonian language of the last 1000 years.

What do you think about this possibility:

"There cannot be any doubt now that Thracian had specific sounds (e.g. č, ǧ, š, ť, at least a neutral vowel ə, maybe two in some dialects, etc.), impossible to be accurately recorded in the Greek and Latin documents."

http://www.unibuc.ro/uploads_en/29535/30/ThrSacNames.pdf

[Delodephius]

Hm, old school stuff. The author of the paper assumes the existence of a Pre-Indo-European language in cases he cannot explain the origin of some words. This shows he believes in the migration of Proto-Indo-European peoples into Europe, probably according to the Kurgan hypothesis. He also holds the position that Palaeo-Balkan languages are not directly connected to later Slavic languages, in other words he does not deny the Slavic migration hypothesis and displacement of the original Balkan settlers, the Thracians, Illyrians and Macedonians, who's ancestors displaced the PreIE peoples in the first place. He also supports the Nostratic theory and all that it then stands for. So, even though I agree that some consonants that could not be recorded in Greek or Latin like š, ž, č, c, did exist in the Palaeo-Balkan inventory, I don't agree with a lot of what he is saying.

[DedoAleko]

Русите се согласија дека македонските научници го дешифрираа „каменот од Розета“

Руските лингвисти се согласни дека македонските научници го открија кодот за дешифрирање на старите написи. Тие признаа дека сознанијата на нашите научници им помогнале да дешифрираат голем број стари списи.



Доскоро не можеше да се прочита средниот текст на познатиот „камен од Розета“, кој како клуч за читање на хиероглифите се наоѓа во британскиот музеј.

Старомакедонскиот напис во средниот дел на каменот одговара на написот во црквата Света Богородица Перивлепта во Охрид, но и на бројни ракописи, што се чуваат во руските архиви.

izvor: http://kanal5.com.mk/default.aspx?mI...&eventId=80744

[Dimko-piperkata]

the academics from russia are for @TM and @SoM worthless...only the opinion of the western culture (en speaking area) are truthfully and credibly

Russian academics: Yes the macedonians decrypted the Stone of Rosetta - YouTube

[Delodephius]

Доскоро не можеше да се прочита средниот текст на познатиот „камен од Розета“, кој како клуч за читање на хиероглифите се наоѓа во британскиот музеј.

That's not true. The text was and is fully readable. The entire project of the two Macedonian scholars is based on the false information that Demotic text was not readable or that it was not translated. They got their facts wrong from the start.

Secondly, which Russian scholars? People just assume that ALL Russian scholars are one group of people who when declare something is a gospel given truth. The inferiority complex of the Balkan peoples towards their Russian overlords. There are many Russian linguists and other scholars, different schools, different traditions. Some are crackpots just like the Macedonian "scholars" who "deciphered" the middle text of the Rosetta Stone. So which Russian scholars? Chudinov and his deluded ilk?

[Delodephius]

the academics from russia are for @TM and @SoM worthless...only the opinion of the western culture (en speaking area) are truthfully and credibly

You speak as if there is no such thing as examination, research, scientific method, historical theory, etc. etc. As if people just choose which side to believe indiscriminately and then follow the opinion of that side blindly. The way you jump for joy when Russians agree with what you believe because it reassures you that you have chosen the right side since you don't know shit about the subject in the first place. It just fits your agenda. We don't do that. Russians don't agree with you. Just a small bunch that is not taken seriously by most of Russian scholars. They too have problems with popularity and fame seeking dogs that will say and claim anything just to get the people on their side. And ordinary everyday people believe their every word since they are easily persuaded with high index vocabulary or fancy speech, and attractive "evidence".

[Delodephius]

Further, I am a bit appalled how people are ignorant of the history of the Egyptian language, the various stages of this language, its wast literature. At least as Orthodox Christians, Macedonians should be familiar with the existence of the Coptic language, the final stage of Egyptian, which is, much like Church Slavonic among Macedonians, used by the Copts, or Orthodox Christian Egyptians, which number at least some 10 million in Egypt alone, as a liturgical language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copts

There is a clear mark of evolution from older Demotic, which was still used by the priests of the Ancient Egyptian religion, to Coptic which was used and is still used by Christian priests and written in a version of the Greek alphabet (similar to Cyrillic). Those letters that were missing in the Greek alphabet were taken from the Demotic alphabet.

[Pelister]

You speak as if there is no such thing as examination, research, scientific method, historical theory, etc. etc. As if people just choose which side to believe indiscriminately and then follow the opinion of that side blindly. The way you jump for joy when Russians agree with what you believe because it reassures you that you have chosen the right side since you don't know shit about the subject in the first place. It just fits your agenda. We don't do that. Russians don't agree with you. Just a small bunch that is not taken seriously by most of Russian scholars. They too have problems with popularity and fame seeking dogs that will say and claim anything just to get the people on their side. And ordinary everyday people believe their every word since they are easily persuaded with high index vocabulary or fancy speech, and attractive "evidence".

You speak as though you sit outside of the everything that doesn't suite your politics. It also seems you speak for the "Russian scholars" and presumably the non-Russian scholars, and know something of the public attitudes and professional feelings of both groups. Are you professionally involved with any of them? I doubt it. You should re-read your posts, carefully. Your making alot of wild claims here, but I noticed that it has been your 'thing' to do that.

[Delodephius]

There exists in Russia the so-called "Academy of Trinitarism" that publishes a great volume of works that are almost entirely rejected by the mainstream Russian academia. If the linguists who agree on the issues that the middle text of the Rosetta Stone is written in Macedonian belong to the Academy, or a similar group which are abundant in Russia and likewise rejected by the mainstream academia, then it means not ALL Russian scholars are involved. The article gives the impression that ALL Russians scholars, or at least the important ones, are in agreement with the middle text being Macedonian, when the reality could be that only a minority of them, like the ones belonging to the Academy or such a group are, and maybe not even most of them. The article is short, there is no reference, and most curiously neither in the article nor in the video is there a mention of which Russian scholars. Russian Academy of Science is too vague as there are many camps in it itself.