2.
David Mihalyfy,
Explaining the Odd Foot Sign of Gardiner D58 in the Egyptian Negator Transliterated bn: A Case for Innovative Orthographic Reuse Based on the Phonetic Reduction of the Nominalizer bw (> -ⲞⲨ-) and the Non-Etymological Writing bw nb for wn nb (> ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ),
27 p.
Abstract
In the mid-2nd millennium BCE, Egyptian scribes began writing a common negator as bn, with an odd foot sign of Gardiner D58 at its start. Building on past scholarship that recognizes the sign's semantic function and a larger, pre-existing orthographic link between negation and other body parts, this analysis identifies why disambiguation was needed in this specific case and why this specific sign was chosen as a disambiguator. On the one hand, the negator was at risk of confusion for other sentence-beginning entities potentially representable as a bare n. On the other hand, the not infrequent nominalizer bw that was also used to spell the word bw nb "everyone" began with a phonetically reduced b that had been retained in orthography, making it susceptible to reinterpretation as a semantic "beginning-of-unit" marker also applicable to negation. As two important steps in this argument, the nominalizer bw is shown to survive in the currently-misparsed section -ⲞⲨ- of Coptic adverbial phrases (e.g. Ϩ︦ⲚⲞⲨⲘⲈ "truly"), and bw nb "everyone" is identified as a non-etymological writing for wn nb "every being" (> Coptic ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ).
