STRGT -- or, the "Stargate" Dilemma

Photos

WHT DS THS MN?

see larger image

uploaded by denseatoms

Film Critic Roger Ebert wrote that "the movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate." [1] The 1994 sci-fi film took many other hits for its treatment of parallel worlds, with an Ancient-Egypt-like planet at the far end of the universe. It turns out that the sun god Ra was really a malicious alien who kept a wormhole between the worlds. The earthly Egyptians eventually revolted and buried the stargate on their side. Ra and his otherworldly slaves were isolated on the other end.

But the movie's strongest point is how the American Egyptologist-linguist manages to communicate with the human, neo-Egyptian aliens once he passes through the star portal with some troops. He learned how to decipher the written language of the pharaohs.

SUBPLOT:

Egyptian hieroglyphics remained a mystery until 1799 A.D., when a French artillery officer found a slab of black basalt at a mouth of the Nile River. This so-called Rosetta Stone bore inscriptions in three ancient languages: 14 lines of hieroglyphics, 32 lines of a later Egyptian script called demotic, and 54 lines of Greek. The three texts bore the same message of praise for a king of Egypt who reigned from 205-182 B.C. [2]

According to Science and Its Times, Jean-Francois Champollion, a linguist, Egyptologist and historian, was the first to break the hieroglyphic code, in 1822: "His earlier studies of the Coptic alphabet and its relationship to the demotic script enabled him to see that some of the Egyptian hieroglyphs were strictly ideograms; that is, picture signs, while others also represented sounds." [3] Champollion had a sound knowledge of Coptic, also known as Neo-Egyptian, which was the latest form of the old Egyptian language. The liturgical language of the Coptic Church, Coptic became extinct around the 16th century A.D. [4]

But although the sounds of Coptic are relatively well-known, nobody knows how the Egyptian language sounded in its more-ancient stages. E. A. Wallis Budge wrote that the Egyptians started using hieroglyphics "more than seven thousand years ago, and they were employed uninterruptedly until about B.C. 100." [5] Coptic used a Greek-based alphabet with a number of letters derived from the cursive, simplified form of hieroglyphics known as Demotic.

BACK TO THE MOVIE:

Stargate's Egyptologist Daniel Jackson followed the common practice of inserting a weak "e" sound in the clusters of hieroglyphic consonants to make them in some way pronounceable. Egyptian, like newspaper Arabic, often didn't mark the vowels in its words.  He, like Champollion, had Coptic for a guide, but that is something like using French to reconstruct the sounds of Classical Latin.

Ancient Egyptian "nht" (sycamore), for example, is "nouhe" in Coptic; "bnr" (date palm) is "benne"; "pt" (heaven) is "phe"; and "ytf" (father) is "eiot". Some other Coptic examples are closer to the Egyptian, however: Egyptian "fe" (to carry) =   Coptic "fai"; "hmt" (copper) = "homt"; "nhm" (deliver) = "nohem". [6]

When Jackson first hears the language of the aliens, he mistakes it for Berber, Chadic or Amharic -- all distant relatives of Egyptian. It is the richness of the vowels that throws him, until he tries reading some hieroglyphics aloud to his love interest, Sha’uri. She recognizes the words, but plays Professor Henry Higgins by repeating their actual pronuniciation of each word to him.

Gruff Army Col. Jack O’Neil surprises them and snorts: "Thought you didn't understand their language."

"It's an ancient Egyptian dialect," Jackson answers. "Like the rest of their culture, it's evolved completely independently, but once you know the vowels --"

"Just answer the question," snaps O'Neil.

Jackson replies, "I just had to learn how to pronounce it."[7]

And with so comely a tutor, the lessons really worked.

EPILOGUE:

We may better appreciate Daniel Jackson's dilemma with these literal name transcriptions from the actual hieroglyphics:

KAIS KAISRS KRMNIKIS (Gaius Caesar Germanicus)
KLUTS TIBARSA (Claudius Tiberius)
BARNIKT (Berenice)
TRAPNT (Tryphaensa) [8]

OSIRIS is a Greek rendition of the Egyptian forms of the god's name: AUSAR, ASAR, WESIR. [9]

Sources Cited:

[1] http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19941028/REVIEWS/410280308/1023. Accessed on November 24, 2007.

[2] Budge, E. A. Wallis [Sir]. Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics with Sign List. New Tork: Dorset Press: 1993; p. 13.

[3] "Jean-Francois Champollion." Science and Its Times, Vol. 5: 1800 - 1899. Gale Group, 2000. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. Accessed on November 24, 2007.

[4] "Coptic" web page, http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=cop. Ethnologue website, accessed November 24, 2007.

[5] Budge, p. 1.

[6] Mercer, The Handbook of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1993; pp. 10-11.

[7] Stargate [motion picture], 1994. MGM DVD edition.

[8] Budge, pp. 23-24.

[9] http://www.teenwitch.com/divine/kmt/asar.html. Accessed on November 24, 2007.