Saturday, January 5, 2019

Ptahhotep Maxims, Conclusion 4 of 7

This was like a month's worth of homework in one night. The whole thing is starting to come alive. Imagine a world with no standard spelling. Like English in the era of Lewis and Clark. Have you read their journals? The sound-it-out method of spelling leads to inconsistent results. And the good thing about that is I get to write words however I wish.

Obviously they changed over time. While their speech differed between areas within the same time. An official was bragging about his extensive travels beyond Egypt borders saying the strangeness he encountered was like a resident of the cataract region finding himself in the delta. People tended to stay put their entire lives and that leads to developing differences in how people speak. "Th" sounds change to "t" sounds, "z" sound turn to "s" sounds, "f" turns to "v", voiced bilabial fricatives become voiceless bilabial plosives and so on. It's all laziness on a regional scale.

Come on. It's why French has so many silent letters. It's why British substitute so many crucial consonants with glottal stops. If you listen you'll notice. As you know our language has twenty six letters but it has twenty vowel sounds and twenty-four consonant sound. Careless speaking reduces that to twelve consonant sounds. You're expected to catch the meaning by hinting at words and by context. Laziness on a national scale.

If I was an Egyptian craftsman chiseling hieroglyphs in stone I'd be going, "Do you have to use so many "n" sounds? Those water zigzags are a total bitch to carve. Just drawing them is a pain in the butt /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\.

This fourth part discusses a disobedient son. There are twelve lines with repeated phrases. The notes at the end are inserted in their places among the lines.

* As for the fool who does not hear,
* he will not be able to do anything.
* He sees knowledge as ignorance,
* what is useful as what is painful.
* to the point that he is reprimanded every day.
* He lives on that which on dies from,
* condemnation is his income.
* HIs character from it is in the knowledge of officials,
* because of dying alive every day.
* His deeds are passed over
* from the multitude of wrongs on him every day.

1 comment:

ricpic said...

I'll match your fricative and raise you two frica....on second thought I'm all in. every plosive in my pot!