Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
integrated in the power structure of Ptolemaic Egypt. Its foundations ran deeper than
the temperament of any given ruler into the structure of Ptolemaic society itself.
The determinative is prescribed and yet chosen. A systematic view on Egyptian
Classifiers
Eliese-Sophia Lincke
Stimulated by the publication of Orly Goldwasser’s first book on the Egyptian writing
system (Goldwasser 1995) a discussion about the Egyptian determinatives has
emerged among Egyptological linguists. Because of its parallels to similar phenomena
in other linguistic systems the sign class traditionally called “determinatives” may be
labelled as “classifiers”. The discussion focuses mainly on the question whether the
Egyptian classifiers are chosen or prescribed (cf. the title of Loprieno 2003). One
group of researchers argues in favour of the choice of a particular classifier being
prescribed. They believe in a more or less fixed system of classifiers whose use was
independent of the contents of the text and instead dominated by rules of mental
categorization and processing. Those who doubt the effect of systematic classification
in the Egyptian writing system claim that the classifier for a particular word was
chosen freely by the writer according to the co-text of the word within a text or on an
even more general level along with the socio-cultural or political contexts of the
scribal environment.
Astonishingly, the debate disregards the circumstance that a crucial point
concerning Egyptian classifiers has not yet been clarified: the relationship between
the classifying element and the element classified. It is, however, not impossible to
formulate a model that permits the description of almost every attested relation
between a graphemic classifier and the element it is attached to. Goldwasser (2002)
has provided a frame to deal with classifiers on typical nouns. Her theses are based
upon models borrowed from Cognitive Science and research conducted in the field of
linguistic categorisation in general as well as on other languages using classifiers.
Thus they have the advantage of allowing generalisations. She describes two types of
relations between a classifier and its classified, taxonomic (e.g. superordinate–
subordinate) and metonymic (e.g. part–whole). Since these relations are applicable
only for noun classifiers, Frank Kammerzell (2004) supplemented the model by
suggesting a third type. In analogy to concepts of semantic phrase analysis he
postulated a set of thematic roles which can systematically describe the relationships
between a verbal classifier and the classified verbal lexeme.
Recent research in this field has led to a further systematisation permitting to
incorporate a specific group of verbs and adjective verbs that Kammerzell’s model did
not take into consideration. Now it is also possible to explain the principles
underlying certain cases of double or multiple classification. The results show that
even though Egyptian classifiers can be systematised and are far from being a random
phenomenon, the ancient scribe could nevertheless choose between several possible
classifiers or even invent new ones – but always within the limits of certain systematic
rules. These rules will be shown in the paper which also attempts to reveal the mental
strategies employed for the choice of a classifier. On the one hand, it will be pointed
out how a classifier might have been selected for an innovative or until then unknown
word or in difficult cases. On the other hand, references for the limits of these rules
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