The Egyptianness of the Coptic basic vocabulary: A typological view

The notion of ‘basic vocabulary’ is associated with the linguist and anthropologist Morris Swadesh, who proposed a list of 200 (and later 100) items. These lists, while widely used in historical and comparative linguistics, are based on Swadesh’s intuitions rather than on empirical research. More recently, however, the Leipzig Loanword Typology Project conducted a cross-linguistic survey of loanwords (Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009). One of the results is a 100-item list of basic vocabulary entries — the ‘Leipzig-Jakarta list of basic vocabulary.’ This list is the product of four factors, computed for a database of 1440 meanings in 41 languages: borrowability, representation in the database, analyzability / simplicity, and age. As Tadmor (2009) points out, this is the first list of basic vocabulary items based on extensive cross-linguistic comparison, and it constitutes a ‘full-fledged basic vocabulary’ that ‘comprises the notions normally associated with this concept: stability (our age score), universality (our representation score) and simplicity (our analyzability score), as well as resistance to borrowing (our unborrowed score)’ (2009: 68). In this talk, we examine this list of 100 meanings in order to evaluate the influence of Greek on the Coptic basic vocabulary, or — to put it the other way around — the ‘Egyptian¬ness’ of the Coptic lexicon, which seems to reflect an intense language contact situation. As a first step, Coptic data were collected from Crum (1939), the most extensive Coptic dictionary, for four dialects: Sahidic, Bohairic, Fayyumic, and Akhmimic. All Coptic lexemes associated with a meaning on the list were collected, even if poorly attested. Additionally, a questionnaire was been submitted to Copticists in order to detect Greek loanwords that would also be used for expressing these 100 meanings. Furthermore, we used etymological tools (Černý 1976; Westendorf 1977; Vycichl 1983) in order to attribute an age score (from 0 = Greek loanword to 4 = Old Egyptian) to the lexemes at two levels: the formal level (when is the word first attested in Ancient Egyptian) and the semantic level (when is the Coptic meaning first associated with this word). The vast majority of meanings (ca. 85%) have at least one pre-Coptic Egyptian cognate, most of which are already attested in Old Kingdom texts. As a result of this study, we are able (1) to evaluate the influence of Greek on the basic vocabulary of the main Coptic dialects, (2) to describe the basic vocabulary of Coptic dialects independently and to observe how they differ from one another, (3) to produce a first estimate of the rate of change in basic vocabularies over the course of Egyptian as a whole.