Le livre a pour objet les manières de dire en linguiste, envisagées pour les gestes discursifs qu’elles activent, et pour les imaginaires épistémiques qu’elles convoquent. La variété des formes énonciatives du faire linguistique est détaillée à travers une série d’analyses de cas concrets, portant sur des figures paradigmatiques comme Benveniste (ch. 1) ou Chomsky (ch. 7), sur des ensembles textuels plus diffus (comme le champ de la typologie, au ch. 6) ou apparemment moins « actuels » (comme les travaux de phonétique sur l’accent, au ch. 4), tant dans le domaine francophone que dans le domaine anglo-saxon. L’ouvrage apporte ainsi une articulation inédite de l’histoire et de l’épistémologie de la linguistique, de la rhétorique des discours de savoir, et de l’anthropologie des connaissances. Il révèle la forme d’artisanat discursif sur lequel repose le faire linguistique, dans une enquête transversale qui sera utile à tous les linguistes et, plus largement, aux praticiens des Humanités.

In a digital representation of a text, a control character (or ‘control’ for short) influences how normal, visible characters are rendered. In the case of ancient Egyptian, control characters are indispensable for expressing the relative positioning of hieroglyphs. As of September 2022, Unicode 15 contains 38 control characters for ancient Egyptian. This includes nine controls that were introduced with Unicode 12 in 2019. This article discusses the 29 newly added controls, the constraints that they had to satisfy, and the process that led to their design. A number of implementations are presented and evidence is provided that the controls are adequate to encode most hieroglyphic texts.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the long-term evolution (OK–TIP) of two hieroglyphic signs that Lacau (1954: 15–18) identified as “images inverses,” namely 𓂘 and 𓂜. Both signs have been integrated in the hieroglyphic repertoire early on (Sourdive 1984: 506–507; Stauder 2022) and display features that testify to the interdependence between various written and iconographic norms, with notable (and repeated) hieratic influences on the evolution of 𓂘 (e.g., Meeks 2004: 48, §124; Servajean 2011: 22, §38), as well as cases of iconic dissimilation (see, e.g., Spalinger 1979) and re-motivation for 𓂜 (e.g., in the Netherworld Books of the New Kingdom).

The goal of this lecture is to use the scribal environment of Deir el-Medina (Egypt), namely the village of highly literate workmen who built and decorated the royal tombs in the Theban necropolis during the New Kingdom (c. 1350–1000 BCE), as a laboratory for showcasing and discussing recent methodological advances in studying and documenting text objects from the ancient world. Based on a series of case-studies, the first part of the lecture will be devoted to the analysis of the actual manufacture and use of ostraca and papyri in this community. In a second step, I will introduce the “Thot Data Model” and explain how it has been implemented within the Turin Papyrus Online Platform for documenting the materiality of a collection of papyri stored at the Museo Egizio (Turin), which originates precisely from Deir el-Medina. Finally, I will introduce the “Virtual Light Table”, a software tool that has been developed by Stephan Unter in the framework of the “Crossing Boundaries” project for supporting the virtual reconstruction of fragmentary written material.

Le vitalisme en linguistique, quelle qu’en soit la version, faible ou forte, c’est-à-dire simple projection métaphorique ou assomption ontologique, est un postulat de partage d’imaginaire. Car la notion de vie fait partie de ces idées régulatrices qui organisent et unifient nos connaissances sans qu’on puisse en avancer une définition satisfaisante. Ce n’est pas que nous « croyions » en la vie, ou qu’elle désignerait seulement une réalité virtuelle : le savoir est susceptible d’être fondé sur la puissance d’intelligibilité qu’elle apporte aux actions humaines, y compris aux phénomènes langagiers, et par-delà le monde humain aux comportements animaux et aux croissances végétales. Le principe conceptuel de la vie a nécessairement une portée collective, voire, pour les communautés de savants, une portée sociale. La biolinguistique fédère des travaux contemporains en linguistique en fonction de ce principe vitaliste en dépit des divergences assez nettes qu’on constate entre les méthodes et les objectifs de recherche des uns et des autres — la méthode variationniste d’un Mufwene tranche par exemple avec le projet universaliste d’un Chomsky. Quoique les « perspectives biolinguistiques » (Larson, Deprez & Yamalido 2010) soient appelées à dessiner un domaine de spécialisation en linguistique, les chercheuses et chercheurs qui y font reconnaître leurs travaux partagent moins une façon de concevoir la linguistique qu’un espace de représentation constitutif tout à la fois de la lisibilité et de l’intelligibilité des phénomènes linguistiques à observer. La linguistique n’est évidemment pas seule à y trouver un prétexte d’association. Le postulat vitaliste est largement répandu dans le champ des sciences humaines et sociales. Citons à cet égard la psychologie de Cournot (Segond 1911), la sociologie de Georg Simmel (Vandenberghe 2009), la philosophie vitaliste de Henri Bergson ou de Gilles Deleuze (Janvier 2010) ou encore le « tournant vitaliste » (Lafontaine 2021) que l’anthropologie a amorcé ces dernières années, notamment avec Baptiste Morizot (2020). Ces champs de recherche, différenciés selon bien des aspects épistémologiques, ont en partage un espace de représentation ou, si l’on préfère, un imaginaire épistémique dans et par lequel se déploient l’étude et la pensée. On observera cependant que les sciences non humaines et non sociales, parfois rassemblées, par effet de contraste, sous l’appellation de « sciences de la nature », ne trouvent guère, quant à elles, à se fédérer autour du principe vital. Il a fallu des philosophes, surtout dans la tradition française de l’épistémologie (Canguilhem 1952), pour qualifier de « vitalistes » certains travaux en biologie. Ces philosophes opposaient ainsi leurs vues à celles d’autres philosophes (Descartes en tête) qui avaient défendu, pour les sciences et pour le savoir en général, un postulat « mécaniciste ». Pourvu qu’on admette cet état des lieux, que notre communication tâchera d’étayer, deux questions d’épistémologie générale peuvent être soulevées, en invitant à considérer le vitalisme en regard d’autres imaginaires épistémiques. D’une part, l’alternative du vitalisme et du mécanicisme que les épistémologues posent parmi les sciences de la nature peut-elle aider à comprendre les enjeux du vitalisme en linguistique ? Les linguistes seraient-ils vitalistes aussi pour des raisons de défense contre des perspectives plus mécanicistes, lesquelles semblent par exemple plus prégnantes au sein des écoles structuralistes ou générativistes ? Comment l’imaginaire vitaliste s’articule-t-il à d’autres imaginaires dans les théories linguistiques, et pour remplir quelles fonctions ? En quoi l’épistémologie des sciences sociales peut-elle aider à comprendre la dialectique entre vitalisme et mécanicisme, ou plus largement la pluralité impure des « modèles épistémologiques » (Gusdorf 1990) ? D’autre part, Hans Blumenberg (1981) a montré que le savoir est travaillé, dès l’Antiquité, par un désir de correspondances entre la description du monde et la lecture des textes. Ces correspondances se révèlent particulièrement fructueuses dans les sciences du vivant au XXe siècle. La métaphore du vivant comme écriture à déchiffrer et texte à lire a en effet été très importante pour le décodage du génome humain. Ainsi, dans le même temps que l’étude du langage est fédérée par un imaginaire vitaliste, l’étude du vivant fait des progrès décisifs quand elle est nourrie par un imaginaire qu’on pourrait qualifier de philologique : ce sont ici les Humanités qui offrent un espace de représentation et des idées régulatrices (code, texte, interprétation) à même de fonder la pratique de savoir. Cette évolution en miroir (plutôt qu’en parallèle) d’une science de la nature et d’une science de l’homme permet d’interroger d’une manière renouvelée les aspirations universalistes des savants. Notre communication développera les deux questions en s’efforçant de souligner leurs points de recoupement autour de l’hypothèse directrice suivante : toute pratique de savoir s’alimente nécessairement à un substrat imaginaire qui en autorise le déploiement en même temps qu’il en cultive les porosités ; ces imaginaires épistémiques s’inscrivent dans une dynamique à la fois cyclique (dans la diachronie d’un même champ disciplinaire) et croisée (entre différentes disciplines). Références Blumenberg H. (1981), La lisibilité du monde, Paris, Cerf, 2007. Canguilhem G. (1952), La connaissance de la vie, Paris, Vrin, 2e éd., 1965 Gusdorf G. (1990), « Les modèles épistémologiques dans les sciences humaines », Bulletin de psychologie, 397, p. 858-868. Janvier A. (2010), Vitalisme et philosophie critique. Thèse de doctorat. Université de Liège. Lafontaine C. (2021), Bio-objets. Les nouvelles frontières du vivant, Paris, Seuil. Larson, R.L., V. Deprez & K. Yamalido, eds. (2010), The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistics Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. Morizot, B. (2020), Manières d’être vivant, Arles, Actes Sud. Segond J. (1911), Cournot et la psychologie vitaliste, Paris, F. Alcan Vandenberghe, F. (2009), La sociologie de Georg Simmel, Paris, La Découverte.

Les protestations et manifestations des ouvriers de Deir el-Médineh à la fin du règne de Ramsès III sont bien documentées, notamment grâce au fameux papyrus ‘de la Grève’ (P. Turin Cat. 1880). Le projet ‘Crossing Boundaries’ (http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/x-bound/) a permis d’étudier une série de fragments de papyrus inédits du Museo Egizio de Turin rédigés par un même scribe, qui jettent un éclairage nouveau sur ces événements. Ils montrent non seulement que d’autres grèves ont eu lieu peu après, sous le règne de Ramsès IV, mais en outre que ces dernières se situent dans une longue lignée d’expressions diverses de mécontentements et de révoltes qui ont été mâtées par les autorités depuis des temps anciens dans toutes les régions du pays.

A semantic map is a way to visually represent the relationships (or similarity) between meanings based on patterns of co-expression across languages (Georgakopoulos & Polis 2018; 2022). In this talk, I will first present a brief history of research in the field, starting with the so-called ‘classical semantic maps’ (Haspelmath 2003; van der Auwera 2013) — which typically take the form of a graph, with nodes standing for meanings and edges between nodes standing for relationships between meanings —, before turning to the so-called ‘proximity maps’ — which resort to statistical techniques that position the meanings in a two-dimensional space (Klis & Tellings 2022; Wälchli 2023). In a second step, I will demonstrate how both types of maps may be inferred from large-scale typological data and evaluate the pros and cons these two methods for creating co-expression maps (Croft 2022). Finally, three fundamental questions of the semantic map model will be addressed based on case studies in the fields of PERCEPTION/COGNITION and of EMOTIONS/VALUES: (1) the validity of the basic assumption, namely, to what extent does co-expression reflect semantic similarity; (2) the central problem of identifying analytical primitives in the domain of semantics; and (3) the possible use of semantic maps to support diachronic and synchronic descriptions of individual languages.

Durant les quatre dernières années (2018–2022), le projet conjoint des universités de Bâle et de Liège avec le Museo Egizio de Turin intitulé Crossing Boundaries (http://web.philo.ulg.ac.be/x-bound/) a permis de documenter un peu plus de 10 000 fragments de papyrus hiératiques ramessides. Si beaucoup d’entre eux ne conduiront vraisemblablement jamais à des reconstructions substantielles en raison de leur petite taille ou de leur mauvais état de conservation, quelques résultats notables peuvent être attendus. Ce séminaire sera l’occasion de discuter les méthodes, à la fois traditionnelles et numériques, qui ont été utilisées dans cette entreprise et de présenter quelques « beaux cas » tant dans le domaine littéraire (Prohibitions et Divinations) que dans le champ documentaire (Grèves et Journaux). Pour chacun des documents, je proposerai la lecture d’extraits représentatifs en cursive hiératique.

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, les travaux sur les compositions énigmatiques en Égypte ancienne se sont multipliés, faisant sensiblement progresser notre compréhension des principes orthographiques et des mécanismes de dérivation à l’œuvre dans cet emploi ‘déstandardisé’ de l’écriture hiéroglyphique. Élargissant les perspectives, je proposerai dans cet exposé un panorama des pratiques dites ‘cryptographiques’ attestées dans les productions des lettrés de Deir el-Médineh à la période ramesside. Depuis le pôle iconique des images qui demandent à être lues, jusqu’au pôle scriptural des textes qui attirent le regard, la communauté des artisans a en effet laissé un nombre important de témoignages qui permettent d’envisager une typologie égyptienne de ces pratiques.

Currently, Unicode includes a core of approx. 1,000 Egyptian hieroglyphs. For more than five years, a group of scholars from Egyptology, Microsoft, and Unicode, as well as independent researchers have been working on the expansion of this core set. Between Jan 16th and 18th 2023 international scholars from Egyptology and Unicode have met and finalized the set of proposed new hieroglyphs for the next update of Unicode (v16).

This panel discussion explores how and why, some 200 years ago, the exciting race developed between French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion and England's Thomas Young to decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone. This event is part of the public programme supporting the exhibition "Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt". The participants to this discussion are : Irving Finkel, Stéphane Polis, Ilona Regulski, and Andrew Robinson

Recent years have witnessed a substantial increase of interest for the so-called ‘cryptographic’ — more appropriately labelled ‘enigmatic’ — compositions. In the footsteps of Erik Hornung, scholars such as J.C. Darnell, A. von Lieven, L. Morenz, J.A. Roberson, and D.A. Werning have significantly advanced our understanding of the orthographic principles, underlying mechanisms, and contextual functions of these non-standard uses of the hieroglyphic system during the New Kingdom. The volume Enigmatic writing in the Egyptian New Kingdom, edited by D. Klotz and A. Stauder, as well as its companion, the Lexicon of ancient Egyptian cryptography of the New Kingdom by J. Roberson, can be seen as key milestones in this respect, topping off twenty years of research in the field. One dimension, however, is almost systematically absent from those studies, namely the one of the agents who composed, copied, monumentalized, deciphered and interpreted these enigmatic texts. For the New Kingdom, this is all the more surprising that the community of Deir el-Medina, who was in charge of building and decorating the royal tombs in which many of these texts occur, provides an ideal setting for studying such questions. Vice versa, the studies and handbooks that deal specifically with the inhabitants of the village of craftsmen and with their written production do not address directly the question. The aim of this talk is to fill this gap, providing a systematic overview of the types of evidence that can be used in order to better our understanding of the Egyptian perspective about these particular uses of the hieroglyphic system.

Hieroglyphic Sign Lists have been a staple of modern Egyptology since the decipherment of the Hieroglyphic script, and are known to most Egyptologists as very beneficial tools. In this lecture, a short history of signs lists will be given, up to and including the development of the Thot Sign List. Beside this history, I intend to show you some of the issues one can encounter during Hieroglyphic research, and what type of complexities arise during research. I will provide you an introduction into the Thot Sign Lis as well, and the underlying framework and ideals, and how the work has progressed since its launch in 2019. Following the discussion about the TSL, the I will talk about the current work being done in order to prepare a Hieroglyphic extension in Unicode, which will include control characters used for the arrangement of signs in a two-dimensional space, as well as a high number of new characters. Finally, I want to introduce the ongoing work on a Unicode Hieroglyphic font. This font will not only aid in the encoding of Hieroglyphic material, but will be a tool that can be integrated seamlessly into text-processing software.

Dès le Précis du système hiéroglyphique (1824, p. 214–217), Jean-François Champollion commente divers cartouches royaux où les signes hiéroglyphiques interagissent les uns avec les autres et sont agencés en compositions complexes. Malgré quelques difficultés de lecture, il comprend d’emblée qu’il s’agit « de simples variantes du prénom ordinaire » du pharaon. Il réserve dans cet essai le terme « énigmatique » à une catégorie particulière de hiéroglyphes symboliques (1824 : 292–295), mais il y propose la première analyse de frises et soubasse¬ments (1824 : 362–363) qui seront plus tard qualifiées de compositions cryptographiques (Fig. 1). Si les principes fondamentaux de ce type d’inscriptions de nature « énigmatique » (Klotz & Stauder 2020) sont alors identifiés, il n’en sera pas moins confronté, en particulier au cours de son voyage en Égypte de 1828–1829 (Lauth 1866 : 24), à des textes qui résistent à son système, les signes ne pouvant être lus avec les valeurs phonographiques régulières qu’il avait si brillamment mises au jour : il s’agirait « d’une sorte d’écriture secrète ». À partir de notes, lettres et publications du père de l’égyptologie, je propose d’explorer ici la préhistoire de la cryptographie (Morenz 2008 : 18–19) en examinant l’attitude du déchiffreur vis-à-vis de ces hiéroglyphes qui demeuraient alors largement incompréhensibles.

Les textes de Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) fourmillent de remarques et d’exposés plus ou moins élaborés sur les tentatives antérieures et contemporaines de déchiffrement de l’écriture hiéroglyphique égyptienne. C’est en suivant ce fil rouge que seront présentées les conditions historiques et modalités pratiques de ce qui demeure, deux siècles plus tard, un véritable exploit intellectuel et une authentique révolution pour tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la terre des Pharaons.

Deux cents ans après les faits, le déchiffrement des hiéroglyphes égyptiens par Jean-François Champollion demeure le parangon de tout déchiffrement . Si les écritures cunéiforme, maya ou aztèque constitueront, à sa suite, des réussites fameuses en la matière, l’exploit de Champollion est fondateur, en ce qu’il convoque tous les ingrédients nécessaires pour parvenir à lire une écriture inconnue. Il a ainsi inspiré non seulement des générations d’égyptologues, dont il inaugurait la science, mais aussi l’ensemble des spécialistes d’écritures inconnues. Dans cette contribution, je propose un exposé des étapes logiques qui sous-tendent le déchiffrement en fonction de cinq piliers : l’existence d’un corpus de textes suffisamment riche et d’un ou plusieurs documents bilingues, la formulation d’une hypothèse concernant la langue notée, une bonne connaissance du contexte culturel dans lequel les textes ont été rédigés et l’identification du type de système d’écriture auquel on a affaire.

Les textes de Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) fourmillent de remarques, de commentaires et d’exposés plus ou moins élaborés sur les tentatives antérieures et contemporaines de déchiffrement de l’écriture hiéroglyphique égyptienne. C’est en suivant ce fil rouge que je propose dans cette contribution de détailler les conditions historiques et modalités pratiques de ce qui demeure, deux siècles plus tard, un véritable exploit intellectuel et une authentique révolution pour tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la terre des Pharaons

This special issue contains 8 papers discussing the current directions of research resorting to semantic maps in linguistics. They are based on lectures initially given during the workshop “Semantic maps: Where do we stand and where are we going?” held on the 26th–28th of June 2018 at the University of Liège (Belgium).

Dans cet exposé, je propose d’explorer l’enseignement de Champollion ‘à la Plutarque’, c’est-à-dire comme celui d’un « homme illustre » devant nous permettre d’interroger nos pratiques contemporaines. L’enseignement de Champollion s’entend ici dans les deux sens qui suivent : l’enseignement qu’il a reçu, d’abord, entre sa ville natale (Figeac), sa ville d’adoption (Grenoble) et la capitale parisienne ; l’enseignement qu’il a prodigué, ensuite, en mettant en œuvre les principes de l’« enseignement mutuel » à Figeac et à Grenoble, en prenant sous son aile différents disciples, et en professant dans des cadres institutionnels plus stabilisés (tel l’université de Grenoble et le Collège de France). En m’appuyant sur sa correspondance privée et les préfaces de ses principaux essais et traités, je montre que son ethos est caractérisé, aussi bien dans la sphère personnelle que professionnelle, par une défiance systématique envers toute forme d’autorité — que celle-ci soit académique, familiale, morale, religieuse ou politique — et que cette remise en cause permanente des organes et représentants du pouvoir a guidé tant ses recherches, menant au déchiffrement des hiéroglyphes, que ses formes d’enseignement. Plus largement, on constate que les gestes discursifs qui traversent sa production scientifique évoluent de la démonstration, à la généralisation, puis à la systématisation. Cette systématisation anticipe une transmission, qui constitue l’horizon historique de ses pratiques de recherche et d’enseignement.

Maîtres du déchiffrement et de l’interprétation des textes hiératiques ramessides, J. Černý et G. Posener ont laissé en héritage aux générations futures le soin de regrouper les textes rédigés par un même scribe et d’identifier l’individu se cachant derrière une main donnée. Dans cette entreprise, il est des écritures plus personnelles, qui sortent de l’ordinaire et facilitent singulièrement la tâche des égyptologues. C’est le cas des textes rédigés par le dessinateur Pay de Deir el-Médineh, qui est originaire de Karnak et inaugure une lignée de sš-ḳd dans le village des ouvriers de la Tombe. Sa main experte, mais très peu soignée, est en effet aisément reconnaissable dans la riche documentation hiératique du site et permet de reconstruire l’activité d’un lettré de la première moitié de la XIXe dynastie, à la fois peintre et auteur de compositions littéraires et religieuses originales.

Présentation de la distribution chronologique de la documentation textuelle de la nécropole thébaine au Nouvel Empire et discussion d'une série de fragments montrant que les grèves d'ouvriers remontent à des temps anciens en Égypte et ont été particulièrement importantes en l'an 2-3 de Ramsès 4.

Unpublished fragments of papyri containing new evidence of strikes and demonstrations under Ramesses 4 (and previous kings) were presented, discussed, and contextualized.

Many aspects of ancient Egyptian scribal culture are still poorly understood: previous research mostly focused on the content of the texts when striving to reconstruct literary compositions, to explain historical events, or to describe administrative and judicial customs. In this presentation, we introduce a large-scale joint project between the University of Basel, the University of Liège and the Museo Egizio (Turin) dealing with the Ramesside hieratic papyri of the Turin collection, which stem mostly from Deir el-Medina (c. 1300–1000 BCE). The project aims at a contextualised approach of this written material: crossing the epistemological and methodological boundaries between traditional disciplines, it sets out to understand the life of a particular category of complex documents, the so-called ‘heterogeneous’ papyri, namely the papyri that bear several texts belonging to various genres (such as, for instance, accounts, poems, hymns and letters). These documents are of primary importance for the study of the competence and performance of ancient scribes at work. The main goals of this research project are (1) to document the fragments of papyri in the Turin collection; (2) to reconstruct the original documents digitally; (3) to study the variety of texts attested on each papyrus, to assess the numbers of scribes (hands), and ultimately to suggest individual scenarios and generalisations concerning the history of these documents; (4) to enrich the results with data coming from other ancient Egyptian archives from Deir el-Medina; and (5) to broaden the perspective by comparing, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the data from Deir el-Medina with complex scribal practices of other periods and places in ancient Egypt. We intend to provide an overview of the project and to show, based on selected case studies, how it can contribute to a better understanding of the agents, forms and function of hieratic writing during the New Kingdom.

Crossing the epistemological and methodological boundaries between traditional disciplines in Egyptology and beyond, the present project sets out to understand the life of a particular category of complex documents: the ‘heterogeneous’ papyri which bear several texts belonging to various genres (such as, for instance, accounts, poems, hymns and letters). They are of primary importance for the study of the wide competence and the performance of ancient scribes at work. In this project, we target the rich papyrological material that stems from the village of Deir el-Medina, which housed the families of the workmen who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the New Kingdom (c. 1350–1000 BCE). This highly literate community produced an unparalleled quantity of texts and inscriptions. Building on existing collaborations between the partners (the university of Basel, the university of Liège, and the Museo Egizio of Turin), the five main goals of our research project are (1) to document the fragments of heterogeneous papyri in the Turin collection; (2) to reconstruct the original documents digitally; (3) to study the variety of texts attested on each papyrus, to assess the numbers of scribes (hands), and ultimately to suggest individual scenarios and generalisations concerning the history of these documents; (4) to enrich the results with data coming from other ancient Egyptian archives from Deir el- Medina; and (5) to broaden the perspective by comparing, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the data from Deir el-Medina with complex scribal practices of other periods and places in ancient Egypt.

Introduction to the encoding of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs in Unicode, with a focus on the 9 control characters recently introduced in Unicode (2019). The talk focuses specifically on features of the hieroglyphic writing system that would require additional control characters (such as center insertion, rotation and mirroring).

Conclusions de la journée d'étude qui envisagent la programmation comme écriture et le code comme texte, rendant de ce fait pertinentes les méthodes et outils d'analyse de la rhétorique. Repartant de 'The elements of programming style' de Kernighan & Plauger (1974), on analyse les caractéristiques du 'bon' style en matière de codage dans les domaines (1) des conventions de nommage, (2) de la syntaxe visuelle (indentations, alignements et espaces signifiants), (3) du péritexte (commentaires expliquant ce que l'on fait et pourquoi on le fait), et (4) du paratexte (typiquement de le 'readme'). La forme (modularisation, recours aux classes) et l'emploi de méthodes 'built-ins' sont également considérées comme participant du bon style et contribuant à l''human readability'. Enfin l'exemple du Python est pris pour étudier le style 'pythonic' et les valeurs associées sur les forums d'aide et de discussion.

In this talk, I first presented the project 'Crossing Boundaries. Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt' in the framework of which this research is situated. After having introduced divination practices in Ancient Egypt as a whole, discussing evidence from before and (mostly) after the New Kingdom, I turn to types of divinations that are attested during the New Kingdom (hemerology and menology, oneiromancy and lecanomancy). Fragments from the Museo Egizio (Turin) that have been identified by Roccati back in 1984 are then presented, which includes divinations by thunder (brontologion), earthquakes, and divinations for the foundation of a house. Previous discussions have linked similar Demotic fragments to the Mesopotamian Enūma Anu Enlil (Collombert 2014), but one can argue that the monthly organization of the Mesopotamian Iqqur Ipuš divinations is a closer parallel to these texts. Based on the available fragments, at least two different original scrolls can be reconstructed.

L'objectif de cette conférence est de présenter une méthode de description des registres graphiques dans les sources hiératiques ramessides en fonction de cinq dimensions relevant des unités segmentale (unité minimale de graphe), linéaire et tabulaire du texte inscrit. Cette méthode est appliquée de manière contrastive aux papyrus hiératiques de Turin et aux écrits sur ostraca d'un scribe polygraphe de Der el-Médineh.

A semantic map is a way to visually represent the relationships between meanings based on patterns of co-expression across languages. It is plotted on the basis of cross-linguistic data and it articulates implicational hypotheses that are considered universal as long as they are not contradicted by new empirical evidence (Anderson, 1982; Croft, 2001; Haspelmath, 2003). In this talk, we address one of main pending methodological issues within the semantic map tradition, namely the integration of the diachronic dimension into lexical semantic maps. From a more practical point of view, we argue for the use of complex multi-edge graphs, which can capture directionalities in semantic change as well as diverse types of semantic extension. As a case study, we focus on the semantic extension of time-related lexemes. The principle underlying our choice has been the cross-linguistic availability of the concepts. To achieve cross-linguistic comparability, our point of departure has been the three time-related concepts appearing in the 200 word Swadesh-list (Swadesh, 1950), i.e., DAY/DAYTIME, NIGHT and YEAR. This method ensured also comparability with other studies that used cross-linguistic polysemy data to measure semantic similarity between concepts (Youn et al.,2016). The main body of the talk consists of three parts: a synchronic, a diachronic, and a representational. In the synchronic part, our goal is to identify the cross-linguistic polysemy patterns attested for the three TEMPORAL concepts. In our case, the identification of patterns relied on the language sample included in CLICS2 (List et al., 2018; https://clics.clld.org), which is an online database of synchronic lexical associations that provides information about 2638 distinct polysemy patterns in 1220 language varieties. Based on this dataset, we infer a weighted lexical map of the semantic field of ‘time’, which visualizes the frequency of colexification of each meaning pair. This map is constructed with the help of an adapted version of the algorithm introduced by Regier, Khetarpal, and Majid (2013), and generates more interesting implicational universals than regular colexification networks. Although CLICS2 was designed to also facilitate work in diachronic semantics, the tool does not contain any evolutionary paths of the lexemes. For the diachronic section of our talk, we rely on data that we collected from ancient Greek (8th c. BC – 4th c. AD) and ancient Egyptian (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD). In this section, we report on attested diachronic connections between the meanings identified in the synchronic investigation of the first part. Then, we use these diachronic connections to construct lexical diachronic semantic maps. In order to do so, we resort to an enriched version of the algorithm that we used to plot the synchronic map. This algorithm, designed for inferring oriented edges, turns the undirected graph into a directed one. The resulting diachronic lexical semantic map of the TEMPORAL domain is visualized and analyzed with Cytoscape (Shannon et al. 2003), a powerful open source solution for network visualization and analysis. In Fig. 1, the directed arrows, which represent directionality of change, have been added on the basis of a diachronic analysis of the TEMPORAL concepts in ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian. Different representational conventions are employed in the map for different types of semantic extensions. The talk concludes with a discussion about how visualization techniques and actual semantic analysis can be combined in an instrumental and meaningful way.

The aim of this talk is threefold. First, it shows that – using synchronic polysemy data from large language samples, such as CLICS (List et al., 2014), the Open Multilingual Wordnet (http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/), or BabelNet (https://babelnet.org/ about) – one can infer large-scale weighted lexical semantic maps. These maps, which are constructed with the help of an adapted version of the algorithm introduced by Regier, Khetarpal, and Majid (2013), respect the connectivity hypothesis (Croft, 2001) and the ‘economy principle’ (Georgakopoulos & Polis, 2018). As such, they generate more interesting implicational universals than regular colexification networks. Additionally, the automatically plotted semantic maps can be examined using standard network exploration software tools. These tools reveal much information otherwise ‘hidden’ in the graph — such as the modularity of the network, the centrality of meanings, etc. — and are essential when it comes to interpreting large-scale crosslinguistic datasets. Second, this talk seeks to demonstrate how information on the paths of semantic extensions undergone by content words may be incorporated into synchronic lexical semantic maps. We illustrate the principle with the semantic extension of time-related lexemes (e.g. TIME, HOUR, SEASON, DAY) in Ancient Greek (8th BC– 1st c. AD) and Ancient Egyptian – Coptic (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD). Both languages give access to significant diachronic material, allowing us to trace long term processes of semantic change within the lexicon. From a methodological point of view, we argue for the use of various types of graphs, including mixed multi-edge ones, which can capture bidirectionalities in semantic change and cases when information about pathways of change are not available (see already van der Auwera and Plungian, 1998 for the use of directed graphs). Third, in an effort to address some critiques that are voiced against the classical semantic maps approach, we suggest that this type of map can be used conjointly with (1) statistical techniques for dimensionality reductions (such as MDS, t-SNE, etc., see already Croft & Poole, 2008) and (2) Formal Concept Analysis (FCA, see Ryzhova & Obiedkov 2017). Based on a case-study on verbs of perception and cognition, we illustrate the complementarity between the three approaches for revealing universal areal and language specific patterns within the lexicon.

The semantic map model is relatively new in linguistic research, but it has been intensively used during the past three decades for studying a variety of cross-linguistic and language-specific questions. The number of linguistic domains to which the model has been applied highlights its efficiency in capturing regular patterns of semantic structure and crosslinguistic similarities of form-meaning correspondence (for a complete list of domains, see Georgakopoulos & Polis, 2018). One of the advantages of the model is that any type of meaning can be integrated in semantic maps, such as the functions of grammatical morphemes, the meanings of entire constructions, or the senses of lexical items, resulting in grammatical, constructional, and lexical semantic maps, respectively. However, the different types of maps have not received equal attention in the literature. Rather, there is a strong bias towards studies describing the cross-linguistic polyfunctionality of grammatical morphemes and constructions. Additionally, the bulk of research using the semantic map method has been adopting a synchronic perspective and the limited research that has added the diachronic dimension has focused almost exclusively on the grammatical domain (e.g., van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998; Narrog, 2010). A notable common denominator of most of the studies is that semantic maps have been plotted manually (cf., however, the studies using the Multidimensional Scaling procedure). The aim of this talk is threefold. First, it shows that – using synchronic polysemy data from large language samples, such as CLICS (List et al., 2014) or the Open Multilingual Wordnet (http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/) – one can infer large-scale weighted lexical semantic maps. These maps, which are constructed with the help of an adapted version of the algorithm introduced by Regier, Khetarpal, and Majid (2013), respect the connectivity hypothesis (Croft, 2001) and what we call the ‘economy principle’. As such, they generate more interesting implicational universals than regular colexification networks. Additionally, the automatically plotted semantic maps can be examined using standard network exploration software tools. These tools reveal much information otherwise ‘hidden’ in the graph — such as the modularity of the network, the centrality of meanings, etc. — and are essential when it comes to interpreting large-scale crosslinguistic datasets. Second, this talk seeks to demonstrate how information on the paths of semantic extensions undergone by content words may be incorporated into lexical semantic maps. We illustrate the method with the semantic extension of time-related lexemes (e.g. TIME, HOUR, SEASON, DAY) in Ancient Greek (8th – 1st c. BC) and Ancient Egyptian – Coptic (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD). Both languages give access to significant diachronic material, allowing us to trace long term processes of semantic change. Third, in an effort to address some of the shortcomings of classical semantic maps, we suggest that they can be used conjointly with a new approach, namely Formal Concept Analysis (FCA, see Ryzhova & Obiedkov 2017). This complementarity between the two approaches proves to be efficient in revealing both language universals and areal patterns within the lexicon. A case-study on verbs of perception and cognition based on different datasets allows us to illustrates both the potentialities and the limitations of such an approach.

Presentation of the history, data model and online implementation of the Thot Sign-list (TSL)

The semantic map model is relatively new in linguistic research, but it has been intensively used during the past three decades for studying a variety of cross-linguistic and language-specific questions. The plethora of linguistic domains to which the model has been applied highlights its efficiency in capturing regular patterns of semantic structure and crosslinguistic similarities of form-meaning correspondence (for a complete list of domains, see van der Auwera & Temürcü, 2006: 132; Cysouw, Haspelmath, & Malchukov, 2010; Georgakopoulos & Polis, forthcoming). One of the advantages of the model is that any type of meaning can be integrated in semantic maps, such as the meanings or functions of grammatical morphemes, of entire constructions, or of lexical items, resulting in grammatical, constructional, and lexical semantic maps, respectively. However, it is fair to say that the different types of maps have not received equal attention in the literature. Rather, there is a strong bias towards studies describing cross-linguistic polysemies of grammatical morphemes and constructions. Additionally, the bulk of research using the semantic map method has been adopting a synchronic perspective and the limited research that has added the diachronic dimension has focused almost exclusively on the grammatical domain (e.g., van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998; Narrog, 2010). A notable common denominator of most of the studies is that the classical semantic maps have been plotted manually. The aim of this talk is threefold. First, it will show that existing synchronic polysemy data in large language samples, such as CLICS (List et al., 2014) or the Open Multilingual Wordnet (http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/), can be converted into homogeneous lexical matrices using Python scripts. From these lexical matrices, one can infer large-scale weighted classical lexical semantic maps, using an adapted version of the algorithm introduced by Regier, Khetarpal, and Majid (2013). With this approach, we are able to automatically plot lexical semantic maps from a significant amount of cross- linguistic data. These maps are structured respecting the connectivity hypothesis (Croft, 2001) and what we call the ‘economy principle’. As such, they generate more interesting implicational universals than regular colexification networks and can be falsified based on additional empirical evidence. Second, this talk seeks to demonstrate how information on the paths of semantic extensions undergone by content words may be incorporated into a semantic map. In order to illustrate the method, we take the example of the semantic extension of time-related lexemes (e.g. TIME , HOUR , SEASON , DAY ) in Ancient Greek (8th – 1st c. BC) and Ancient Egyptian – Coptic (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD). Both languages give access to significant diachronic material, allowing us to trace long term processes of semantic change. This diachronic take on the polysemic networks of content words has a methodological bearing on the model, since it serves as a compass on how to plot automatically diachronic semantic map. Third, the talk will illustrate how the automatically plotted semantic maps can be examined using standard network exploration systems. These tools, with many built-in statistical methods, reveal much information otherwise ‘hidden’ in the graph — such as the modularity of the network, the centrality of the meanings, etc. — and are essential when it comes to interpreting large- scale crosslinguistic datasets. The potentialities in this area will be illustrated throughout the talk.

The so-called "Map of the gold mines" (P. Turin Cat. 1879) is among the most famous papyri of the Turin collection (and of ancient Egypt as a whole), but it has never been properly published, nor systematically studied up until today. Most of the egyptological attention was indeed captured by the ‘map’ side (e.g., Goyon 1949; Harrell & Brown 1992), but the verso of the document, which contains many hieratic texts belonging to different genres, has not been examined thoroughly (exceptions are Janssen 1994 and Hovestreydt 1997 for col. 1-2 of frag. A, vo). As a prelude to a complete edition of this papyrus, the goal of this lecture is threefold. First, we provide an overview of history of this papyrus since its acquisition in 1824 (as part of the Drovetti collection), and we discuss various scholarly interpretations. In a second part, we focus on the map, discussing some unacknowledged iconic features as well as its topographical and geological significance. The third section of the talk is devoted to the texts found on the verso, to the relationship between these texts and the map, and to the identification of the hands and scribes who worked on this papyrus. We conclude with a discussion of the scribal practices — at Deir el-Medina and beyond — that led to the creation of such an exceptional document.

The notion of ‘basic vocabulary’ is associated with the name of Morris Swadesh, who proposed a list of 200 (and later 100) items. These lists, widely used in historical and comparative linguistics, were based on intuition 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 items — 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) states, 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 (Indo- European) on the basic vocabulary of Coptic (Afroasiatic), which shows massive lexical borrowing. First, Coptic data were collected from Crum (1939) for four dialects: Sahidic, Bohairic, Fayyumic, and Akhmimic. Additionally, a questionnaire was submitted to specialists in order to detect Greek loanwords that also lexicalized these meanings. Furthermore, we used etymological dictionaries (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 meaning attested in Coptic first associated with this word). As a result of this study, we (1) evaluate the influence of Greek on the basic vocabulary of the main Coptic dialects, (2) describe the basic vocabulary of Coptic dialects independently and to observe how they differ from one another, (3) produce a first estimate of the rate of change in basic vocabularies over the course of Egyptian as a whole. Some of our main findings are as follows: 233 items lexicalize the 100 meanings. Of these, nearly half are attested already in the oldest Egyptian texts; a major peak in lexical replacement is around 1500 BCE, a time of considerable political and cultural upheaval in Egypt. Rates of lexical change do not always correspond to neat semantic categories: while body part terms were generally replaced, semantic categories like perception show heterogeneity (e.g., the verb ‘to hear’ remained throughout the entire history of Egyptian, while the verb ‘to see’ was replaced several times; similarly, ‘to come’ remained stable, while ‘to go’ was replaced several times). All in all, very few of the meanings on the Leipzig-Jakarta list are lexicalized by loanwords in Coptic, and no meanings show complete replacement of a native word by a loanword. This study has broader methodological implications. One is the clear distinction between (and possible independence of) overall lexical borrowing and borrowing of basic vocabulary: while Coptic borrowed an estimated 5000 lexical items (types), with a basic vocabulary borrowing score of 7.53, it is only a low-to-middle borrower in terms of basic vocabulary (cf. Fig. 1). The comparison of scores in overall borrowing vs. borrowing of basic vocabulary raises important questions about the types of socio-historical contact situations that lead to these different situations.

This paper aims at contrasting the semantic extension of time-related lexemes in Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian – Coptic in order to identify shared cognitive motivations and to assess the potential impact of cultural factors on the evolution of this lexical field in both languages. In doing so we first take as a point of departure semantic networks inferred from synchronic polysemy data in large language samples, such as Youn et al. (2016) and CLICS (List et al., 2014). In a second step, we identify the lexemes that lexicalize meanings associated with DAY/DAYTIME/TIME in Ancient Greek (8th – 1st c. BC) and Ancient Egyptian (26th c. BC – 10th c. AD), two languages with significant diachronic material. The data are extracted from dictionaries, grammars, and from the Perseus digital library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) for Ancient Greek, and from the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/), the Ramses corpus (http://ramses.ulg.ac.be), and Coptic etymological dictionaries for Ancient Egyptian. Based on this diachronic material we describe the semantic extensions of time-related lexemes and map them onto the synchronic polysemy networks. In a final step, our results are checked against The Catalogue of Semantic Shifts in the Languages of the World (http://semshifts.iling-ran.ru/). Fig. 1 exemplifies how meaning extension may be added to polysemy networks. A diachronic analysis reveals that, for the Ancient Greek lexical unit hṓra, the meaning ‘time’ is historically prior to the meaning ‘hour.’ Accordingly, we may add a directed arrow representing the directionality of change from ‘time’ to ‘hour.’ Similarly, Ancient Egyptian data points to an extension of the polysemy network of the lexical unit tr – originally meaning ‘time,’ ‘moment in time’ – to ‘season’ (cf. Coptic ⲧⲏ tê ‘time, season’). One can then describe the cognitive motivations (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, etc.) for meaning extensions and analyze the cultural factors underlying the observed evolutions. In the case of the Greek word hṓra, for instance, a metonymic motivation between TIME and HOUR could be established. Finally, the analysis can be refined by searching in the corpus bridging contexts that allow such extensions of the polysemy networks of content items. The approach adopted here is closely connected to the semantic map method, which has recently shifted its focus from the study of the polysemic patterns of grammatical morphemes (in this respect, see, e.g., Haspelmath, 2003) to the study of lexical items (e.g., François, 2008, Perrin, 2010, Wälchli and Cysouw 2012, and Georgakopoulos et al., 2016). As such, our paper has also a methodological bearing on the semantic map model, both because of its focus on content words and on diachrony (see van der Auwera, 2008; Narrog, 2010; Luraghi, 2014; Juvonen and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2016). All things considered, this diachronic take on the polysemic networks of lexemes belonging to a particular semantic domain offers a new perspective on dealing with the question of the directionality of meaning change.

Based on systematic observations regarding the encoding of hieroglyphs in an electronic corpus, specifically the Ramses corpus (ramses.ulg.ac.be), the aim of this presentation was to introduce and discuss the data-model of the Thot Sign-List (under development at the university of Liège) and to present online resources made available for documenting the elements of this model (http://thot.philo.ulg.ac.be/index.html). Among the future goals is a strengthened collaboration between the AKU project and the Thot Sign-List (e.g., a shared hieroglyphic sign-list and a connection between the graphemes analysed by the AKU project and the texts of Ramses Online).

An introduction to the main aspects of the project 'Le Diasema: Lexical Diachronic semantic maps. Representing and explaining meaning extension'.

Use of Information Technologies in Egyptology can be traced back to the early 1960s, when first efforts were made in documenting Meroitic scripts or emblematic corpora such as the Pyramid Texts. With the rise of the Digital Humanities in the mid-2000s, many new academic projects that implement IT solutions not only as a way to manage and present data, but also to produce, process and analyse the material, have come to light in the field. The aim of this paper is to give a survey of current digital projects related to the study of ancient Egyptian and Coptic texts. Our goal is not to be exhaustive, but to discuss the methods and tools that are being used and to describe the variety of scholarly practices. The first set of projects to be examined are those related to digital text editions and annotated corpora (including the types of representation format). Second, the question of how to handle the complex writing systems of Ancient Egypt will be addressed by looking at projects that focus on encoding (Manuel de Codage vs Unicode), on establishing hieroglyphic sign-lists (the Thot-Sign-List), on palaeographical databases and on ways to OCRize original texts efficiently. The issue of interoperability and data sharing will then be investigated through a presentation of several related projects working on a XML/TEI interchange format as well as on digital resources for enabling a Linked Open Data approach to the ancient Egyptian written material (http://thot.philo.ulg.ac.be/). Finally, we will argue in favour of a coherent data model so that encoding of data and metadata is done in the most effective way.

L'exposé est articulé en trois parties. Il s'ouvre sur un typologie de la variation dans les sources hiératiques du Nouvel Empire et vise à explorer les causes de cette dernière. Après quelques éléments de contextualisation concernant la communauté des ouvriers de la Tombe à Deir el-Médineh, la seconde partie est consacrée, d'une part, à la question de la construction de la norme - entre enseignement collectif et apprentissage individuel - et, d'autre part, à la diversité de la performance écrite (à travers l'examen de textes littéraires produits par Amennakhte et son ‘école’). En conclusion, je présente trois cas illustrant des voies fructueuses dans l'identification des mains de scribes et le regroupement de documents sur base paléographique.

Papyrus Turin 1879 (and other fragments) — the so-called ‘Map of the gold mines’ or ‘Turin map’ — is among the most famous papyri of the Turin collection, but it was neither systematically published, nor studied up until today. Most of the egyptological attention was indeed captured by the ‘map’ side (e.g., Goyon 1949; Harrell & Brown 1992, with previous references), but the other side, which contains many hieratic texts belonging to different genres, has never been examined thoroughly (exceptions are Janssen 1994 and Hovestreydt 1997 for col. 1-2 of frag. A, vo). The goal of this talk is twofold. First, I will provide an overview of the texts found on this papyrus, focusing on the types of hieratic hands. A special attention will be devoted to the repertoire of hieratic signs as well as to the amount of variation in terms of signs formation for a single hand. Second, I will explore the possibility of ‘individualizing’ the hands of this papyrus by connecting their features to other hieratic sources of the 20th dynasty. Harrel & Brown’s (1992) suggestions regarding the attribution of these texts to specific scribes will be challenged and an alternative methodology will be suggested.

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.

Cette bibliographie - divisée en deux sections, les "monographies" et les "articles" - ne reprends que les publications de Pascal Vernus à portée directement scientifique. Les nombreux articles ayant un objectif de vulgarisation n'ont pas été retenus. Enfin les compte-rendus d'ouvrages ainsi que les compte-rendus annuels qui ont paru dans l'Annuaire de l'École pratique des Hautes Études n'ont pas été inclus afin de ne pas gonfler une bibliographie déjà riche de près de deux-cents titres.

Three talks about forthcoming developments in the field of Ancient Egyptian corpus annotation.

Une série de communications relative

The goal of the talk is to put on the table for discussion ideas about the interaction between types of context and meaning change characteristic of grammaticalization. Specifically, to ask what – if any – pragmatic mechanisms facilitate the relaxation of selectional restrictions on grammaticalizing items/constructions, leading from ‘bridging contexts’ to ‘switch contexts’ (Heine 2002), i.e, from utterances with multiple available readings to utterances in which the older reading is unavailable.

The goal of this paper is to describe the gradual emergence of an innovative future construction in the extant Late Egyptian and Demotic textual material and to discuss the grammaticalization of this construction down to Coptic, where it became a regular future form known as the “First Future” or “Future I”. We propose that, during the grammaticalization process, the selectional restrictions of the construction are relaxed due to the spread of speaker-oriented inferences. As a consequence, new types of subject and predicates can appear and innovative grammatical meanings associated with future time reference, e.g., prediction, become increasingly entrenched. In a final section, we briefly comment on the future cycles in Ancient Egyptian and propose that the comparative notion of allative future is not only useful for comparing specific patterns across languages, but also within a single language with a lengthy attested history.

This volume is the outcome of a workshop on ancient Egyptian syntax held in Liège in 2011. The contributions deal with several central topics in syntactic analyses – like coordination, raising, gradience or non-expression of participants –, but also investigate the relationship between syntax stricto sensu and other fields, from morphology to pragmatics (with a special attention to construction types and grammaticalization processes). The studies cover the whole Ancient Egyptian corpus, from Old Egyptian down to Coptic, with a striking common concern, which is to relate systematically the formal dimension to the functional one. Thereby, the papers go beyond the descriptive level and address numerous stimulating ‘why?’ questions.

Based on graphemic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic evidence, the paper shows that a clear-cut distinction can be made between a verb ib expressing an epistemic judgment (“to think”) and a non-verbal predicative construction ib=f r sDm (literally “his heart is towards hearing”), expressing volition (“to want”). In a second step, the volitional construction ib=f r sDm is shown to occasionally display features of syntactic gradience, reflecting its quasi-verbal semantics (“volitive agent-oriented moda-lity”): in particular, this construction can combine with a marker of passive voice, a verbal category that is otherwise alien to non-verbal constructions. Problematic late occurrences of the construction ib=f r sDm are discussed in turn: in some of these, ib=f may have been subjected to alternative construals as a verb.

Four lectures about the Ramses and the Thot project.

This volume is the first to be devoted specifically to the study of lexical semantics in Ancient Egyptian. While much research has been dedicated to a wide range of grammatical issues in past decades, lexical semantics has rarely been treated in a systematic fashion. The papers collected here treat a range of semantic phenomena, from the lexical semantics of spatial expressions, to the problems of analyzing polyfunctionality and even to the semantics of the Egyptian writing system. The scope of these issues goes well beyond the individual 'word' or lexical item, as a number of papers address the semantics of syntactic constructions. Some authors call into question the distinction between lexicon and grammar, or analyze the lexical semantics of items usually considered 'grammatical' or 'function' words, such as discourse particles. This volume also spans a number of theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have not been prominent in Egyptian linguistics and philology, such as typologically-oriented semantic maps and other visual tools. The papers in this volume do not aim to define the 'state of the art,' but rather seek to stimulate the study of meaning in Ancient Egyptian, to point to innovative avenues for future research, and to engage in a broader dialogue between Egyptian linguistics and philology, on the one hand, and the research frameworks and agendas of general linguistics, on the other.

Manuel décrivant les procédures d'encodage et d'annotation des textes néo-égyptiens dans la base de données "Ramsès". Mises à jour régulière.

The aim of this lecture was to investigate the relation between scribal variation and language change in pre-Demotic Egyptian, focusing more specifically on “The best case scenario in the worst cultural environment”, i.e. the text community of Deir el-Medineh during the 20th Dynasty. The talk was methodologically oriented and several case-studies (related to the diaphasic and diachronic dimensions of variation) were presented in order to illustrate some principles and to suggest new ways of investigation in the description of Ancient Egyptian variation. Additionally, the possibility of a scribal network analysis of the written material found in Deir el-Medineh has been discussed.

Le projet Ramsès ambitionne de constituer un corpus électronique qui rassemble la totalité des textes conservés en néo-égyptien (Nouvel Empire et Troisième Période Intermédiaire). Loin de se limiter à la saisie informatique des documents, le corpus sera enrichi d'une série d'annotations ecdotiques et linguistiques propres à permettre une compréhension plus fine de la langue des Ramsès.

Trois étude de linguistique égyptienne intitulée respectivement: [1] "Réflexions critiques sur l'étude de la modalité en égyptien ancien", [2] "Recherche sur les relations entre futur et modalité en néo-égyptien", [3] "Notes de lexicographie égyptienne: le cas de rx 'apprendre à connaître'".