I just got a copy of Black Athena,
which seemed like an interesting book... until I read an essay about
Bernal's etymologies: Word Games: The Linguistic Evidence in
Black Athena by Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum. After reading
their essay I no longer trust what Bernal says, about etymology or anything
else. The essay is found in the anthology Black
Athena Revisited, Editors Mary R. Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers,
University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
For someone who doesn't know much (like me)
Bernal's etymologies might seem convincing. We all know that words sometimes
have a long history where they originally meant something else (when Bernal
wants to derive "chariot" from "fishing net" you might think: "Why not?
I've seen weirder things"). It was good to read Jasanoff's and Nussbaum's essay
because their explanations has made me understand more about the systematic
knowledge that lies behind true linguistic work. They show that true
etymology is not about finding words that look more or less alike on the printed
page, it's about discovering regular patterns of phonetical correspondence. Such
patterns may not be obvious at first glance: Armenian erku
"two" is related to Latin duo and Sanskrit
dva(u) through well known sound laws (PIE *dw-
always comes out as erk- in Armenian).
Jasanoff and Nussbaum are easily able to refute Bernal's etymologies by
showing older forms of the Greek words that Bernal says are borrowed from Egypt:
these older forms have no similarity with Bernal's Egyptian words. For example,
Bernal wants to derive Thebes from Canaanite
tebah, "ark, chest" and Egyptian
tbi/dbt, "box" - but Mycenaean inscriptions
like te-qa-de "to Thebes", te-qa-ja "Theban"
show that there was originally no b in Thebes but "a
Proto-Greek "labiovelar" *gw".
When a language borrows words from another language the pronounciation
is changed to make the new word fit in - Jasanoff and Nussbaum explain that
these changes are usually very regular. In the words that we know the Greeks
borrowed from Egyptian or Semitic the voiced stops (b, d, g) are "quite
systematically represented by voiced stops in Greek; the same holds true,
mutatis mutandis, for the voiceless stops (p, t, k, etc.), liquids (r,
l) and nasals". But in Bernal's etymologies Egyptian b
sometimes gives Greek p, sometimes
ph, sometimes b. And the Egyptian word
ntr ("pure", "holy", "divine") has "according to Bernal five
distinct phonetic treatments in Greek!"
True loan words also mean exactly the same as the word in the original
language. Greek khrusos, "gold", corresponds to Hebrew
harus and Ugarit hrs - these words mean
"gold", not "yellow", "precious", "god gives" or anything else. Bernal wants to
derive Greek harma, "chariot" from the Semitic root
hrm, "net" - if the words he is comparing don't have to mean
the same thing, then he can derive anything from whatever he wants! Just roughly
match the consonantal skeleton of any Egyptian word to a Greek word which he
wants to show is borrowed.
There are several examples that show that Bernal doesn't know what he is
talking about. He says that the name of the "Lake Kopais" comes
from the Egyptian kbh, "purify", which
according to him also had the subsidiary meaning "lake with wild fowl". To
make us believe him he adds that this lake "has many Egyptian connections
in Greek tradition" (without any sources for this and without explaining what
these connections are) - but he is mistaken: Kopais is not a
lake name at all, it's an adjective, derived from the nearby city named
Kopai. The full name of this lake is Kopais limne:
"the Copaean lake". Jasanoff and Nussbaum conclude that Bernal's claim
to have revealed hundreds of new Greek-Egyptian and Greek-Semitic etymologies is
"simply false". Since Black Athena is heavily based on
"linguistic evidence" this means that the book falls apart.
All this doesn't mean that there aren't any Egyptian and Semitic loan words
in Greek, it just means that Bernal makes his own etymologies, any way he
wants.
Anyone interested in this should try to
find Black Athena Revisited - this book is not just
the other side of a quarrel where both sides are equally biassed: on the
contrary, it is calm and informative. Bernal, on the other hand, never mentions
anyone without stamping them with a quick judgment: according to him, people are
either racists or "good guys". Revisited is not only about
linguistics: it contains essays about Egyptian mathematics and astronomy,
about ethnology, historiography etc.