A study of scribal practice in the late Ramesside Letters : characteristics of scribal mechanisms deployed in hieratic to determine negative aorists, 'not yet' forms, second tenses, terminatives and stative formations
University of Liverpool, 2017
Online
Hochschulschrift
Zugriff:
This thesis assesses the graphemic characteristics of negative aorists, 'not yet' forms, second tenses, terminatives, and stative verb-forms, in the Late Ramesside Letters corpus (LRL). Central to the study is the way in which these grammatical constructions were written in the original hieratic documents, the extent to which they were orthographically differentiated, and the practices scribes used when writing down these construction types. The thesis collects all identifiable instances of the aforementioned verb-forms in the LRL corpus. Their graphemic realisation is then analysed, noting relevant characteristics and the presence of any additional writing appended after the root of the verb. The range of endings attested with the relevant construction types is then considered. Chapter 1 outlines the aims and reasons for this study, and looks at the context of the LRL, including their provenance, publication history and the overall suitability of the LRL corpus for this research. The use of a single epistolary genre and a synchronically and prosopographically closely defined textual corpus as primary evidence, ensures a greater degree of precision and provides a more nuanced and time/corpus specific view of the studied issues, than is available in the more summary grammatical presentations, which tend to cover a broad range of documents in terms of genre and time. Chapter 2 presents the graphemic comparison of negative aorists and 'not yet' forms and Chapter 3 contains the graphemic study of affirmative second tenses and terminatives. The question investigated in these two chapters is whether scribes differentiated these two verb-forms in writing, and whether it is possible to distinguish them on graphemic grounds. In the majority of cases negative aorists and 'not yet' forms do not overlap orthographically or semantically. However, the existence of a small number of cases in which the written and semantic characteristics of these verbforms overlap, imply the existence of some level of underdetermining in the written script. The palaeographical study of affirmative second tenses and terminatives revealed that there is only a minimal amount of potential confusion between these two construction types, because in the majority of cases they were both semantically and orthographically distinct. Chapter 4 focuses on stative-endings identified in the LRL corpus and their graphemic realisation in each attested category of person and number. The results of this study demonstrate a degree of indeterminacy that is the result of both the linguistic simplification of stative-endings, and of the way this linguistic process was realised in writing. The study broadly confirmed the commonly accepted norms of the stative paradigm displayed at the end of the 20th Dynasty, but also demonstrates the importance of recording the range of graphemic realisation of stative-endings as they appear in primary evidence. Chapter 5 presents the overall conclusions, including a discussion of the scribal practice of writing these verb-forms and the presence of scribal idiosyncrasy. All three case studies served a common goal, to assess the graphical realisation of ending(s) scribes used with the verb-forms in question. This research confirmed that context and semantics may help in the successful identification of most of the examples but that only when grammatical context, semantic domain and writing are sufficiently clear, is it possible to make successful construction identification.
Titel: |
A study of scribal practice in the late Ramesside Letters : characteristics of scribal mechanisms deployed in hieratic to determine negative aorists, 'not yet' forms, second tenses, terminatives and stative formations
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Nagy, Z. |
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Veröffentlichung: | University of Liverpool, 2017 |
Medientyp: | Hochschulschrift |
DOI: | 10.17638/03009250 |
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