Database revelations: nuwi ‘waters’

Wallis Budge (EAWB) has the following line at the top of  the last page of his book Egyptian Language:

[Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis. 1963 1983 [printing]. Egyptian language: easy lessons in Egyptian hieroglyphics with sign list. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul]

pavement him-of / in connection with / flood

Your amateur researcher, JMS,  set about checking this sentence with the aid of the Nedj Nedj Database. This enquiry is described step-by-step below.

satu - f: “his paths”

The databased offered for satu:

JMS provisionally opted for ‘pavement’ as a translation from the choice of ‘floor-boards’, ‘pavement’ and ‘path’.

em: “in”

em is another of those multi-optioned prepositions characteristic of Ancient Egyptian (AE), and JMS has long since opted for ‘in connection with’ as a useful cover-all for it.

ennu: “that same”

For the next word EAWB gives "that same", and the doubtful spelling ennu.

This might be alternatively respelt in the database:

• nu: assuming complementary spellings of

— water: en

— adze:  nw (Gardiner) (re-spelt nu: JMS)

— pot: nw / in

• nenu

• enenu: in accordance with the JMS respelling principle of not permitting consonantal clusters (i.e. 2 or more consonants together), the syllables and consonants en-nu are here separated by an all-purpose vowel, e.

Of these three possibilities, enenu had long since been discarded as a realistic spelling option for words; while nenu offered ‘primaeval waters‘ — but such instances had glyph spellings as seen in the pink column on the right side below that provided no promising match to EAWB’s glyph sequence <water adze pot>:

Consequentially ‘primaeval waters’ and nenu seemed unlikely lines to follow. That left nu.

nu

For nu, examples with a closer glyph composition to EAWB’s <water adze pot> were the following:

For easier legibility, this summary is repeated below, omitting the source data on the left above:

From this it can be seen that most interpretations including the <water adze pot> glyph sequence  favour the interpretation ‘this‘ — which more or less accords with Wallis-Budge’s ‘that same’ interpretation at the start of this essay. So far so good.

wi: “lake”

When a search for  the word wi was undertaken, there were lots of responses but none that had anything to do with either ‘lake’ or ‘water’. Was there an error in translation here?

This led to another search, this time based on glyphs. Did EAWB’s sequence <water adze pot> occur anywhere, whether alone or as part of a larger sequence?

Indeed it did, but with over 70 responses, that was too many to be useful. How many were there when just a noun was sought?

The answer turned out to be 32 nouns featuring the sequence. But were any of these to do with water so as to arrive at EAWB's "lake"?

A quick visual check of these 32  <water adze pot> words produced 9 with meanings ‘water’ and ‘wave’. Here they are:

Egyptian	English	EngJSM	source	page: line	glyph names	glyphs
(nwt: nut)	"wave"	wave	Allen	[460.2:25]	<water adze pot coil bun waters>
(nwt: nut)	"wave"	wave	Faulkner Concise	[127:17.22]	<water adze pot coil bun waters>
(nwy: nuwi)	"waters"	flood	Allen	[460.2:24]	<water adze pot coil reeds waters>
(nw: nu)	"water"	flood	Faulkner Concise	[127:16.21]	<water adze pot coil waters>
(nwyt: nuwi-t)	"waters"	flood what is	Faulkner Concise	[127:17.1]	<water adze pot quail reeds bun waters>
(nwy: nuwi)	"water"	flood	Faulkner Concise	[127:16.1]	<water adze pot quail reeds waters>
(nwy: nuwi)	"water"	flood	Gardiner	[628.2:12.2]	<water adze pot quail waters>
(nw: nu)	"water"	flood	Faulkner Concise	[127:16.22]	<water adze pot waters canal>
(nwy: nuwi)	"water"	flood	Gardiner	[573.1:14]	<water adze32 pot quail reeds waters>

From this it can be deduced that Wallis Budge’s last two words “that same” and “lake” should in fact be placed together as a single word meaning ‘waters’ or, say, ‘flood’.

Wallis Budge himself recognised this fuller form of “ennui” rather than “ui” earlier in his book, on page 101:4:

Here EAWB presents “ennu” as meaning 'this', followed by the same five glyphs as the start of “ennui” meaning ‘canal’ (i.e. a ‘waters’ equivalent). It can be seen that this second word is the same word as used split into two parts on page 246:1.

Without the database, this simple and quick investigation would not have been possible to undertake.

Jeremy Steele

Sunday 11 August 2013

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