Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo
• Position: Book review

Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian, vol. 3: m-. By GABOR TAKACS. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. Pp. xxxii + 1010. $321.

There is no doubt that ancient Egyptian, by far the longest attested of all the world's languages, is related to other languages in Northeast Africa and West Asia. Together, this group of languages is called Afroasiatic. The evidence consists for the most part of Egyptian words that are etymologically related to words in neighboring languages. No one has ever disputed this fact. The need is for a record that documents as precisely as possible the extent of this relationship. The present work is an attempt to produce such a record by collecting what most everyone else has said on the subject since the late nineteenth century and by adding many new proposals. The bibliography occupies no less than 124 pages (pp. 887-1010).

This book pulverizes any lingering doubt that size matters. What I see in front of me is a volume of about a thousand pages devoted to the etymology of Egyptian words beginning with just one of about twenty-four phonemes (counts may vary slightly), namely m. At this rate, a complete etymological dictionary of ancient Egyptian would exceed 20,000 pages. It makes one want to announce a prize for the first author who can produce a work of 200,000 pages on a certain subject. Or why not two million? The industry devoted to the compilation of dictionaries can become the stuff of legend. Du Cange saw need to go back to work on his famed dictionary of Medieval and Most Recent Latin (media et infima Latinitas) on the afternoon of his wedding day. Littre's well-known confession, "Comment j'ai fait mon dictionnaire," is a lesson about the extremes to which our limited times on earth can be exploited monomaniacally in the service of a single intellectual endeavor.

In thumbing through this dictionary, I think it almost certain that the author would be the last person to disagree with the idea of addressing a request to Brill Publishers to place a brightly colored sticker on the book warning readers or buyers that "Only very little of what is reported in this work comes anywhere close to certainty." One can only admire the author's honesty in liberally dispensing attributes such as "absurd" to so many etymologies of Egyptian words proposed in the past by others. Many other etymologies may be judged somewhat less severely but the yield is equally disappointing. For example, about one and a half pages are devoted to etymologies of msdj "hate" (pp. 604-5) and all are deemed "unsatisfactory." Similar judgments are passed on countless other etymologies reported in this book. What benefit exactly can one draw from reading all this?

The great labors undertaken by the author impress the following question on one's mind: how could so many have been tempted into making so many extravagant statements? This phenomenal record of failure and malfunction needs to be seen to be believed. And it is thanks to the author's hard work and acquaintance with many languages that the extent of the damage can at all be surveyed. As to many of the author's own proposals, there have been critical reviews of the earlier volumes of his Etymological Dictionary, by J. Osing (Bibliotheca Orientalis 58 [2001]: 565-81), J. F. Quack (Orien-talistische Literaturzeitung 97 [2000]: 161-85), and others. I refrain from seeking to quantify to what degree the author may himself have indulged in unbridled speculation, like most of his predecessors. Instead, I devote the rest of this review to two topics, the relation between Chadic and Egyptian and some remarks involving probability, this most important branch of human knowledge straddling quantitative and non-quantitative (digital) mathematics.

As regards Chadic, I should like to get something off my chest here. The present book is replete with...