Ming Dynasty and New Rome and Infinite Magic Machine

Chapter 1697 The Language of Egypt
In the large library, the office that once belonged to Agassiz is now empty. Shang Luo sits at one end, while Zhu Xianxi's image sits at the other. And in front of the projector is Victoria.

"Then, we need to talk about what Coptic is." Although Victoria wasn't very reliable in other aspects, her knowledge was first-rate. The heart of the sun god in her chest not only gave her immense strength but also wisdom. It's just that she had previously been passively "conservative in her wisdom," without having a chance to use it.

“Coptic is actually Egyptian,” Victoria defines at the beginning. “Coptic is almost identical to late Egyptian, and because it entered the church as a liturgical language, it has been preserved as a specimen. Therefore, current Coptic is basically equivalent to Ptolemaic Egyptian.”

"What is the grammar of Egyptian?" Zhu Xianxi asked. "What is it generally like?"

"Archaeological evidence shows that in the early stages of its development, ancient Egyptian was an inflectional language, expressing meaning through word inflection. However, with the continuous improvement of the ideographic script and the integration between Upper and Lower Egypt, ancient Egyptian gradually evolved into an analytic language. For example, a word no longer inflects according to tense in a sentence, but begins to reflect the chronological order based on function words. Its word order also became fixed as subject, predicate, and object during this period."

Zhu Xianxi blinked: "This sounds familiar. I feel like I've heard this somewhere before."

Yes, this process is exactly the same as the evolution of the Chinese language. Old Chinese also had many inflectional features, and then gradually transformed into the analytic language we know today.

"What do Egyptian sentences look like?"

“For example, like this.” Victoria wrote a string on the blackboard: “w ra wbn m pt—Let me clarify first, what I wrote is not the original text, but a transliteration in vernacular form. Each letter actually represents a pronunciation.”

"So what does this sentence mean?"

"iw is a function word indicating completion, which is equivalent to 【了】".

"ra is the name of the sun"
"wbn is something that rises."
"m is a preposition used to introduce time, place, or relationship; it means 'at' or 'in'."

“pt is the sky.”

Victoria put down her pen: "I've laid all of these out, and I think you two will understand what it means."

Shangluo and Zhu Xianxi understood perfectly. Because although the word order was different, the sentence was essentially "The sun rose in the sky."

Compared to Chinese, the only difference is the position of the particle 【了】. In Egyptian, the particle 【iw】 indicating completion is placed at the beginning of the sentence, while in Chinese, the particle 【了】 indicates completion is placed at the end of the sentence.

"Why do they look so alike?" Zhu Xianxi asked.

"Because Egyptian uses ideographic writing, each word is fixed by the ideographic script. So in order to express the relationship between words, function words such as 'yu' and 'yu' are inevitably introduced, and then the sentence structure becomes the same as Chinese. Oh, by the way, a major feature of Egyptian is that it has a large number of classifiers, such as 4 n sw, four kings, where sw means king and n is a classifier for people."

[Completely identical, right? So, the idea of ​​directly replacing the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs with Chinese hieroglyphs was a brilliant one.]

Because there is no obstacle to replacing the two, it only changes the way the words are written.

In terms of writing style, the ancient Egyptian bull [] is depicted in profile, while the Chinese bull [牛] is depicted in full view. Since both are simplified drawings of bulls, there is no difference between profile and full view. In many other languages, Chinese and Egyptian actually express the same thing; it's just that Chinese tends to depict the full view or the bull lying in a sacrificial pit, while Egyptian tends to depict it in profile according to a relief sculpture.

Since it's all drawing anyway, and the things drawn are based on objects that exist in nature, it has nothing to do with pronunciation. So if it's just a simple replacement of symbols, it really won't cause any obstacles, just like writing seal script as clerical script or clerical script as regular script—it's just a difference in font.

“But there’s a problem,” Victoria replied. “I was referring to the most classical Egyptian. In the later stages of Egyptian writing, there were more and more phonetic symbols representing sounds.”

“That’s normal,” Zhu Xianxi nodded. “The further back in Chinese language development, the more phono-semantic characters there are.”

"That's certainly normal, but there's also something abnormal—during the Ptolemaic era, Egypt directly introduced a whole bunch of Greek loanwords. Now, almost all the words related to religious concepts in Coptic are Greek. For example, the word for god is written as deus, which is Zeus, the Greek word for god."

That's definitely not normal. If the first part is a natural evolution of Egyptian, then the second half is filled with strange content that is completely different from the original.

“Well, that’s not impossible,” Zhu Xianxi pondered. “Actually, there are words like Bodhi, Bodhisattva, instant, and Arhat in Chinese.”

Many words here, such as "刹那" (chànà), have become part of everyday Chinese language usage due to their frequent use in literature.

"So, what do you think, senior brother?" Shang Luo asked.

"These are actually minor issues. Even if the grammar is different, as long as you are willing to make the necessary changes, even completely unrelated Korean can be written in a way that is similar to Chinese."

such as:

The Guangmingxing-3 No. 2 satellite was successfully launched! The satellite has entered its predetermined orbit and entered the South Korean (Mexico) ( ).

The first part of the sentence is a list of Chinese characters. The second part contains a large number of words that have no direct equivalent in Chinese; they are case particles in Korean. However, the order of words in Chinese doesn't affect readability. As long as all the nouns and verbs are written in Chinese characters, only the final "sekmida" needs to be recognized. "Sekmida" is a polite suffix with no real meaning.

Even completely unrelated Japanese words can be written like this, for example:

The navy's elite troops made a sudden attack on the Pearl Bay naval port in the country's Golden City. In an instant, the entire Pacific Fleet was wiped out, and the whole world was stunned.

If you break down all the Chinese characters, it becomes: 娜钧精鋭，美国金城鉄壁夸称，真珠湾军港急袭。一瞬，美Pacific 滅浭全灭，世界惊喘—Apart from the incorrect inclusion of Chinese function words, it is perfectly readable for Chinese speakers.

If Egyptian were written like this, then even archaic words could be directly written in Chinese characters.

(End of this chapter)