Linguistics rant
So I was kinda procrastinating today. A slightly edited version of this went out over AnthroSlugs. I'm a geek.
A Rant about Linguistics in Stargate, or: Why Spoken Ancient Egyptian Sucks Ass
Enjoying the movie Stargate requires a major suspension of disbelief.
Stargate starts with the discovery of an interdimensional portal, covered over and unused for a long period of time. Earth was cut off from this network when the gate was covered, and has remained independent since them. According to movie canon, the cover stone on the Stargate was carbon-dated to 10,000 years old. Pause here to snicker about carbon-dating stone, and the age of stones in general. This date, as far as I know, precedes the development of Egyptian civilization by about five thousand years. They're also assuming the writing on the stone is as old as the stone itself.
But I'm happy to let people who know more about archaeology nitpick about dates. I just need to know an approximate date at which Egypt and Abydos (the fictional planet, not the city) lost contact, so I can start talking about why the character of Daniel Jackson should not have been able to communicate with the people on Abydos, because it really is impossible.
Movie canon insists that the coverstones are 10,000 years old. I'm going to be nice to them and assume they can somehow mean that the writing was placed on the stone at that time, meaning the cut-off happened at about 7000 BCE. I refuse to go with this number, because it will make my analysis more impossible than it already is. The Daniel Jackson character contradicts the 10,000 figure, mentioning 5000 as more likely. So I'm going to base the rest of this on the assumption that the split happened 5000 years ago, at the very beginning of the Archaic Period, the earliest for which we have written records of Egyptian anything.
So let's assume that, on the world in the set of all possible worlds where Stargate takes place, that some kind of proto-Egyptian was the official language of an interplanetary empire which included Earth and Abydos. To make it easier but less realistic, let's assume that everyone in both Egypt and Abydos spoke the same dialect of proto-Egyptian. So, in movie canon, Earth rebels and seals off the Stargate. The dialect they speak is no longer connected to Abydan proto-Egyptian, and changes independently; let's assume Abydos stays connected and their language changes as the official empire language changes.
Since it's science fiction, I think I'm also allowed to ignore the fact that Ancient Egyptian has genetic relationships to other human languages. The now-extinct Ancient Egyptian belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. Other branches of the Afro-Asiatic family include the Semitic (yes, that's Hebrew and Arabic), Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan. The only other language in the Egyptian branch is Coptic, which basically died in the 16th century, but is used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church. So it's got relatives; Egyptian isn't an isolate.
However, in the Stargate universe, it's all because of aliens. Daniel Jackson says, "I mean, I've been able to show... a fully developed writing system appeared in the first two dynasties. You know, which, almost as if it was based on an even earlier..." Insert ominous music here. Let's just pretend that proto-Egyptian, and the writing system, was brought to earth by aliens who were then worshipped as gods, and that this alien language is, miraculously, learnable by humans and is a lot like other Afro-Asiatic languages. Pretend that this is the case.
So this revolt happens, and Egypt enjoys a lot of culture all by itself without extraterrestrial influence. Ancient Egyptian, a descendent of the proto-Egyptian given to the Egyptians by the aliens, eventually dies.
Enter anthropologist/linguist Daniel Jackson, a man who knows Ancient Egyptian and has some crazy theories about the extraterrestrial origin of Egyptian stuff. The first question is, what Ancient Egyptian does he know? The second question is, how well does he know it?
The language in Egypt 5000 years ago was Old Egyptian. A lot of the hieroglyphic stuff is in Middle Egyptian, a thousand years after that. Luckily for us, the pharaohs deliberately tried to keep the literary language as close to written Old Egyptian as possible. I'm going to proceed on the basis that the written language in Egypt didn't change all that much, and that Daniel Jackson knows how to read Old Egyptian. So Daniel Jackson can read Egyptian as it was at the time the Stargate was buried and Earth was cut off from Abydos.
How well does he know it? (I am going to refrain from jumping up and down yelling, "Linguists aren't polyglots!") Sure, okay, he can translate written documents. But he definitely doesn't know enough about Ancient Egyptian to speak it, all by itself. Any of it.
The only records we have of Old Egyptian are in the hieroglyphic writing system. Guess what? There are no hieroglyphs for vowels. We don't know what the vowels are. We know what the vowels are in Coptic and Demotic, because they wrote using a different alphabet, with vowels. Old Egyptian was two thousand years earlier, and I really doubt the vowels are the same. Egyptologists now apparently use "e" for all the places they think there should be vowels, and "a" for the pharyngeal fricatives, which are consonants that most of them (the Egyptologists) can't say.
So Daniel Jackson could have known the syntax of Old Egyptian, and their inventory of consonants, but he can't speak it without knowing what and where the vowels are. And he can't know how close written Old Egyptian is to spoken Old Egyptian, if at all.
But then they discover the Stargate, and Daniel figures out what it's for. They go through, and end up on a big desert planet (Abydos), populated by a bunch of people whose language they don't understand. Daniel says, "I can't make it out... sounds familiar... a bit like Berber. Maybe Chadic or Omotic." Berber and Chadic are sub-branches of the Cushitic branch (which I mentioned earlier -- Cushitic and Egyptian are branches of Afro-Asiatic). Omotic is a very controversial branch of Afro-Asiatic; the 40 languages it contains are more traditionally classified as West Cushitic, and not a separate Afro-Asiatic branch. They are not actual languages, they are groupings of languages in the same family as Ancient Egyptian.
A descendent of this proto-Egyptian is not going to sound very much like specific Cushitic subbranches. This is like saying that English reminds you of Slavic languages, because they're all Indo-European.
Then they find hieroglyphics, and Sha're, the Cute Girl of the story, the one who can read, uses the hieroglyphics to teach Daniel to understand the Abydan language. So it's related to Ancient Egyptian. He points at words and tries to say them, she says the Abydan pronunciation. Not only can he understand it, he can speak it fluently.
This is the impossible bit. Well, not the only impossible bit, but it's a pretty big impossible bit.
We're assuming that the Old Egyptian Daniel knows is more-or-less identical to the proto-Egyptian spoken by the aliens at the time Egypt diverged from Abydos. Daniel knows the syntax and consonants, but not the vowels. I'm assuming that what Sha're is teaching him is her Abydan pronunciation of the proto-Egyptian hieroglyphics, with vowels inserted. I'm also assuming that the consonants of proto-Egyptian still sounded like the way they were written, at that point.
It's impossible enough for him to learn to speak Abydan-style proto-Egyptian. Suppose I had a big bunch of, say, French phonetic transcription, and I removed all the vowels from it. Suppose you learned French from this, even though you couldn't pronounce it. Then I tell you how to pronounce several French words, with correct vowels. Does this mean that you can now put all of the vowels correctly into all the words of French that you know? No. Even if you know the full syllable template, and the inventory of vowels, any phonemic vowel (or allophone thereof) in a language can pretty much occur in any position. You wouldn't know what vowels to put where.
If Daniel knew the modern Abydan dialect, it would still be difficult to reconstruct the vowels of the proto-language. With only one descendant, you really can't do comparative reconstruction, because there's nothing to compare it to.
He definitely cannot learn to speak the modern Abydan dialect from this. Remember, the Abydans can't read. They have no motive to keep their spoken language anything like the 5000-year-old written language. And sounds will change in wild and varied ways. Yes, sound change is often predictable, but some changes aren't. And even if you know the change and how it phonologically happens, what changes in what environment, that doesn't mean you can incorporate it into your speech. Even though I know what happened in the Great Vowel Shift, I can't tell you offhand what the pre-GVS equivalents of my vowels are, and use them in conversation. And that was only 500 years ago -- shifts in vowels and consonants are likely to be extreme over 5000. Really really extreme. As in "I cannot believe my language is descended from this" kind of extreme.
Glottochronology actually states that, given a core vocabulary of 100 words (like "tree," "water," "say," "name," "sun," "moon") 86% of them will be retained every 1000 years (and 14% will be lost). Anyone feel like doing the math for 5000 years? (Yes, I know that glottochronology gets snickered at a lot, because it makes some really wacky assumptions. But I figured I should mention it.)
I may be able to rule out borrowing as a method of language change, since we aren't told about the Abydans' contact with speakers of other languages. Analogy, however, is happening all the time. Irregular patterns change to look like regular ones, regular patterns change to an irregular pattern because they look like a similar irregular pattern, people see patterns where there shouldn't be any and reanalyze a word to fit, and so forth. Paradigms will shift vastly. Plus, people will coin new words to talk about new concepts, and the meanings of existing verbs will shift.
Can you understand Proto-Indo-European? Me neither. Now guess how long ago you think it was spoken. Right. About 5000 years ago, we think.
Basically, there's no way you can speak a modern descendant of a language just by knowing a five-thousand-year-old ancestor whose consonants you can read. You can learn it from scratch, like you can learn any other language, but the method Daniel Jackson used is not really going to teach you the modern language, and you definitely can't learn it well enough to do interpretation in the short amount of time that was shown on screen.
Quick note from real life: the guy who reconstructed Ancient Egyptian for Stargate did it by looking at Coptic, the few Egyptian words written in the Akkadian syllabary (with vowels), and by looking at other Afro-Asiatic languages. He says, "For Stargate, I tried for ca. 1400 BC, with an archaic Middle Egyptian grammar (c. 1800 BC) and a few features from Coptic thrown in to simulate a language that had evolved in isolation from Egyptian, and make it a bit trickier for the Egyptologist character (and my colleagues) to figure it out." I don't think he made it weird enough.
Sources, in a completely unacademic style:
the movie Stargate
"An Introduction to the Languages of the World" by Anatole V. Lyovin
"Historical Linguistics: an Introduction" by Lyle Campbell
http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm
http://www.rostau.demon.co.uk/AEgyptian-L/archives/week117.txt
LING 52, 101, 102, and especially 140
A Rant about Linguistics in Stargate, or: Why Spoken Ancient Egyptian Sucks Ass
Enjoying the movie Stargate requires a major suspension of disbelief.
Stargate starts with the discovery of an interdimensional portal, covered over and unused for a long period of time. Earth was cut off from this network when the gate was covered, and has remained independent since them. According to movie canon, the cover stone on the Stargate was carbon-dated to 10,000 years old. Pause here to snicker about carbon-dating stone, and the age of stones in general. This date, as far as I know, precedes the development of Egyptian civilization by about five thousand years. They're also assuming the writing on the stone is as old as the stone itself.
But I'm happy to let people who know more about archaeology nitpick about dates. I just need to know an approximate date at which Egypt and Abydos (the fictional planet, not the city) lost contact, so I can start talking about why the character of Daniel Jackson should not have been able to communicate with the people on Abydos, because it really is impossible.
Movie canon insists that the coverstones are 10,000 years old. I'm going to be nice to them and assume they can somehow mean that the writing was placed on the stone at that time, meaning the cut-off happened at about 7000 BCE. I refuse to go with this number, because it will make my analysis more impossible than it already is. The Daniel Jackson character contradicts the 10,000 figure, mentioning 5000 as more likely. So I'm going to base the rest of this on the assumption that the split happened 5000 years ago, at the very beginning of the Archaic Period, the earliest for which we have written records of Egyptian anything.
So let's assume that, on the world in the set of all possible worlds where Stargate takes place, that some kind of proto-Egyptian was the official language of an interplanetary empire which included Earth and Abydos. To make it easier but less realistic, let's assume that everyone in both Egypt and Abydos spoke the same dialect of proto-Egyptian. So, in movie canon, Earth rebels and seals off the Stargate. The dialect they speak is no longer connected to Abydan proto-Egyptian, and changes independently; let's assume Abydos stays connected and their language changes as the official empire language changes.
Since it's science fiction, I think I'm also allowed to ignore the fact that Ancient Egyptian has genetic relationships to other human languages. The now-extinct Ancient Egyptian belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. Other branches of the Afro-Asiatic family include the Semitic (yes, that's Hebrew and Arabic), Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan. The only other language in the Egyptian branch is Coptic, which basically died in the 16th century, but is used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church. So it's got relatives; Egyptian isn't an isolate.
However, in the Stargate universe, it's all because of aliens. Daniel Jackson says, "I mean, I've been able to show... a fully developed writing system appeared in the first two dynasties. You know, which, almost as if it was based on an even earlier..." Insert ominous music here. Let's just pretend that proto-Egyptian, and the writing system, was brought to earth by aliens who were then worshipped as gods, and that this alien language is, miraculously, learnable by humans and is a lot like other Afro-Asiatic languages. Pretend that this is the case.
So this revolt happens, and Egypt enjoys a lot of culture all by itself without extraterrestrial influence. Ancient Egyptian, a descendent of the proto-Egyptian given to the Egyptians by the aliens, eventually dies.
Enter anthropologist/linguist Daniel Jackson, a man who knows Ancient Egyptian and has some crazy theories about the extraterrestrial origin of Egyptian stuff. The first question is, what Ancient Egyptian does he know? The second question is, how well does he know it?
The language in Egypt 5000 years ago was Old Egyptian. A lot of the hieroglyphic stuff is in Middle Egyptian, a thousand years after that. Luckily for us, the pharaohs deliberately tried to keep the literary language as close to written Old Egyptian as possible. I'm going to proceed on the basis that the written language in Egypt didn't change all that much, and that Daniel Jackson knows how to read Old Egyptian. So Daniel Jackson can read Egyptian as it was at the time the Stargate was buried and Earth was cut off from Abydos.
How well does he know it? (I am going to refrain from jumping up and down yelling, "Linguists aren't polyglots!") Sure, okay, he can translate written documents. But he definitely doesn't know enough about Ancient Egyptian to speak it, all by itself. Any of it.
The only records we have of Old Egyptian are in the hieroglyphic writing system. Guess what? There are no hieroglyphs for vowels. We don't know what the vowels are. We know what the vowels are in Coptic and Demotic, because they wrote using a different alphabet, with vowels. Old Egyptian was two thousand years earlier, and I really doubt the vowels are the same. Egyptologists now apparently use "e" for all the places they think there should be vowels, and "a" for the pharyngeal fricatives, which are consonants that most of them (the Egyptologists) can't say.
So Daniel Jackson could have known the syntax of Old Egyptian, and their inventory of consonants, but he can't speak it without knowing what and where the vowels are. And he can't know how close written Old Egyptian is to spoken Old Egyptian, if at all.
But then they discover the Stargate, and Daniel figures out what it's for. They go through, and end up on a big desert planet (Abydos), populated by a bunch of people whose language they don't understand. Daniel says, "I can't make it out... sounds familiar... a bit like Berber. Maybe Chadic or Omotic." Berber and Chadic are sub-branches of the Cushitic branch (which I mentioned earlier -- Cushitic and Egyptian are branches of Afro-Asiatic). Omotic is a very controversial branch of Afro-Asiatic; the 40 languages it contains are more traditionally classified as West Cushitic, and not a separate Afro-Asiatic branch. They are not actual languages, they are groupings of languages in the same family as Ancient Egyptian.
A descendent of this proto-Egyptian is not going to sound very much like specific Cushitic subbranches. This is like saying that English reminds you of Slavic languages, because they're all Indo-European.
Then they find hieroglyphics, and Sha're, the Cute Girl of the story, the one who can read, uses the hieroglyphics to teach Daniel to understand the Abydan language. So it's related to Ancient Egyptian. He points at words and tries to say them, she says the Abydan pronunciation. Not only can he understand it, he can speak it fluently.
This is the impossible bit. Well, not the only impossible bit, but it's a pretty big impossible bit.
We're assuming that the Old Egyptian Daniel knows is more-or-less identical to the proto-Egyptian spoken by the aliens at the time Egypt diverged from Abydos. Daniel knows the syntax and consonants, but not the vowels. I'm assuming that what Sha're is teaching him is her Abydan pronunciation of the proto-Egyptian hieroglyphics, with vowels inserted. I'm also assuming that the consonants of proto-Egyptian still sounded like the way they were written, at that point.
It's impossible enough for him to learn to speak Abydan-style proto-Egyptian. Suppose I had a big bunch of, say, French phonetic transcription, and I removed all the vowels from it. Suppose you learned French from this, even though you couldn't pronounce it. Then I tell you how to pronounce several French words, with correct vowels. Does this mean that you can now put all of the vowels correctly into all the words of French that you know? No. Even if you know the full syllable template, and the inventory of vowels, any phonemic vowel (or allophone thereof) in a language can pretty much occur in any position. You wouldn't know what vowels to put where.
If Daniel knew the modern Abydan dialect, it would still be difficult to reconstruct the vowels of the proto-language. With only one descendant, you really can't do comparative reconstruction, because there's nothing to compare it to.
He definitely cannot learn to speak the modern Abydan dialect from this. Remember, the Abydans can't read. They have no motive to keep their spoken language anything like the 5000-year-old written language. And sounds will change in wild and varied ways. Yes, sound change is often predictable, but some changes aren't. And even if you know the change and how it phonologically happens, what changes in what environment, that doesn't mean you can incorporate it into your speech. Even though I know what happened in the Great Vowel Shift, I can't tell you offhand what the pre-GVS equivalents of my vowels are, and use them in conversation. And that was only 500 years ago -- shifts in vowels and consonants are likely to be extreme over 5000. Really really extreme. As in "I cannot believe my language is descended from this" kind of extreme.
Glottochronology actually states that, given a core vocabulary of 100 words (like "tree," "water," "say," "name," "sun," "moon") 86% of them will be retained every 1000 years (and 14% will be lost). Anyone feel like doing the math for 5000 years? (Yes, I know that glottochronology gets snickered at a lot, because it makes some really wacky assumptions. But I figured I should mention it.)
I may be able to rule out borrowing as a method of language change, since we aren't told about the Abydans' contact with speakers of other languages. Analogy, however, is happening all the time. Irregular patterns change to look like regular ones, regular patterns change to an irregular pattern because they look like a similar irregular pattern, people see patterns where there shouldn't be any and reanalyze a word to fit, and so forth. Paradigms will shift vastly. Plus, people will coin new words to talk about new concepts, and the meanings of existing verbs will shift.
Can you understand Proto-Indo-European? Me neither. Now guess how long ago you think it was spoken. Right. About 5000 years ago, we think.
Basically, there's no way you can speak a modern descendant of a language just by knowing a five-thousand-year-old ancestor whose consonants you can read. You can learn it from scratch, like you can learn any other language, but the method Daniel Jackson used is not really going to teach you the modern language, and you definitely can't learn it well enough to do interpretation in the short amount of time that was shown on screen.
Quick note from real life: the guy who reconstructed Ancient Egyptian for Stargate did it by looking at Coptic, the few Egyptian words written in the Akkadian syllabary (with vowels), and by looking at other Afro-Asiatic languages. He says, "For Stargate, I tried for ca. 1400 BC, with an archaic Middle Egyptian grammar (c. 1800 BC) and a few features from Coptic thrown in to simulate a language that had evolved in isolation from Egyptian, and make it a bit trickier for the Egyptologist character (and my colleagues) to figure it out." I don't think he made it weird enough.
Sources, in a completely unacademic style:
the movie Stargate
"An Introduction to the Languages of the World" by Anatole V. Lyovin
"Historical Linguistics: an Introduction" by Lyle Campbell
http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm
http://www.rostau.demon.co.uk/AEgyptian-L/archives/week117.txt
LING 52, 101, 102, and especially 140