<<I'm researching early words related to stone working, boats, water.
eg. water, wet, aqua, mar(ine) all are anciently linked between widespread languages. I think AE word was wtr.

Are aqua (akwa, ahk-wat?) or mar/mer/mor used to mean water or boat or sea in OK AE?

Regarding stone tool technology, which the OK AE were experts, were these words used?
ora ~ for rough stone core or "ore" or "raw" or "aurah"
tek ~ for chips or flakes knapped off the core. "nick", "tick", "ket"
gen ~ remaining stone tool or block or "gem" after knapping
aht/ahk ~ hammerstone or copper hammer or "tomahawk", "rock", "batu"



I’ll play along, but frankly I think this sort of “etymology hunting” by means of superficial resemblances is largely a waste of time and is all too prone to yielding false cognates, particularly as the AE did not write vowels and the words stripped down to their consonantal frames are capable (absent determinatives) of yielding a wide variety of potential pronunciations at meanings. It is the sort of thing for which Bernal (rightly, to my way of thinking) has been strongly criticized and reminds me of a saying, attributed iirc to Voltaire, that linguistics is a science in which the consonants count for very little and the vowels for nothing at all. That said, I find the following (transliterated Manual de Codage:

The AE word for water is generally mw; the Nile (“the river”) is jtr.w; another general word for water may be jr.t (WB shows a ?). The word wtr is not water, but blood and that group is apparently attested for the Greek period only.

The AE for boat varies by type of boat. General words for a boat are dp.t abd aHa. There are words for freighters: aqA.y and wsx, as wells as for b attle ships, aHA.t, and divine barks, wsx.t.

The Ocean is variously designated as nw, Sn, Sn-wr and wAD-wr.

As i have explained, the AE did not write vowels and used unspoken determinatives to indicate the class of things to which a word belongs. For that reason it really is impossible to look up things like “ora,” “gen,” etc.* I have therefore tried using the consonantal stems, none of which yielded the meaning you are looking for in any variation: tk, for example yields “to illumine or burn,” while gn yields “a powerful person” or “to stand,” depending on the determinative. ; I have also looked up the AE words for: hammer, qHqH, for ore: bjA, iron ore, bqz, and for copper ore, Hm.t, gm yields “to find,” “strength,” and (with “t,” a feminine marker) an unknown vegetable. None of this seems very useful and If are seriously looking for analogs to AE words in other languages, this is not the method to use. It’s sending you on chases in which the geese are only likely to get wilder. What you really need – at the very least is – is a comparison of various etymological dictionaries including any for AE. I only know of one, Gábor Takács, Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, which at this point has only reached volume 3, which covers through the letter m.

Lee


*To understand what this means for etymology (indeed for simple lexical interpretation), assume for a moment that English does not write vowels, and you are called upon to translate the word “bt” or to decide whether the word is related to a word in another language. But in a system without vowels, “bt” could mean: bat, bet, bit, but, boat, beat, bate, etc.











Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2008 12:07PM by Lee.