Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic.

• Author: Rainey, A. F.
• Position: Review

Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic. By YOSHIYUKI MUCHIKI. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series, vol. 173. Atlanta, Ga: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 1999. Pp. xxv + 357. $48.

This monograph is the result of a dissertation designed to examine the evidence from epigraphic sources for the Egyptian vocables that have entered the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic languages. There is also a section on Egyptian vocables in the Amarna tablets. This book will be a useful tool for Egyptologists and Semitists since it brings together all the relevant references and treats them in a logical and highly functional manner. Each chapter, pertaining to a particular language, deals with loan words and then with proper nouns, personal, divine, and geographical. This monograph should complement the book by Hoch (1) that brings together Semitic words attested in Egyptian texts. However, with regard to the latter work, there are limitations to its value due to a number of serious mistakes in evaluation of the Semitic evidence, (2)

Yoshiyuki begins each chapter with a review of the methodology that he has utilized in the sorting and analysis. In the lists themselves he marks the entries according to their relative value as reliable examples and he only uses those which are "certain" (marked by**) for the linguistic discussion that follows. This is an eminently sound procedure. The linguistic evaluation has to do with phonological correspondences only. There is no attempt to explore the semantic fields in which Egyptian vocables have been utilized in the Semitic languages. Nevertheless, the phonetic and graphic sphere is valuable. Note that we have added the term "graphic" because many of the cases cited are the result of graphic adaptation. The Semitic languages do not always have an alphabetic marker for the Egyptian consonants. Therefore, research in this area must take into account the orthographic practices in vogue in each of the languages studied, both synchronically and diachronically.

Here and there, this reviewer sought in vain for a full bibliographical reference matching some allusion in the linguistic sections. For example, one article sought was A. Lemaire (misspelled Lemairre) on page 101. (3) Another was an article (referred to on p. 100) by J. Naveh. (4) In a revised edition, the author should go carefully over all his bibliographical references and be sure they are in his bibliography at the end of the book.

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