By Simon Willis For those of you grappling with the differences between present simple and present continuous in English, the influence of Celtic languages spoken before the Angles and Saxons colonised parts of the British Isles is of little or no consolation. However, it is probably due to the ancestors of Welsh speakers that the pronunciation of English is distinct from the speech habits found in related languages such as German and the Scandinavian tongues. There is no present simple as such in modern Welsh. Instead of saying ‘I work', one says ‘I am in (a state of) work'. As for variations in question tags, that would be due to Celtic influence, wouldn't it? Regarding vocabulary inherited from Celtic, the experts tell us that only three words in everyday use have come down to us, viz ‘ass', ‘brock' and ‘bin'. One moment, what is a ‘brock'? A badger. What on earth is one of those? It's a black and white striped animal we do not get in these parts. It carries tuberculosis so farmers kill thousands of these creatures every few years. Apart from those three words, the names of London, the Thames and such arcane river names as ‘Esk', ‘Ouse' and ‘Avon', we English have little to show for our Celtic heritage. Meanwhile, one cannot say that the Egyptian language etched in ancient and not so ancient stone is dead. The language of hieroglyphic inscriptions is still alive in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Bear in mind that the texts in stone were but one variety of language, just as journalistic Arabic differs from that used in religious discourse and from the colloquial medium. Besides, we can merely deduce what ancient Egyptian sounded like. After centuries of evolution – much of it unrecorded – the Coptic language was still in common use when the Arabs first came to Egypt in 638AD. To find out more about the influence (if any) of Coptic, I found a wordlist compiled by one William B. Bishai, author of Coptic Lexical Influence on Egyptian Arabic in Journal of Near Eastern Studies (volume 23, January 1964), published by the University of Chicago Press. The impressive list of words claimed by the author to be in common use today must be treated with caution. One has to test them out and many citations were greeted with quizzical looks by my informants. Let's kick off with something affirmative: aa meaning ‘yes'. Apparently, this is derived from the Coptic aha (yeah), and the ‘h' was dropped, causing vowel lengthening. That stretches credulity somewhat, because Arabic has adequate words for ‘yes', unlike some languages such as Latin which did not. But, unless you are involved with the Vatican State, who speaks Latin anyway? The stuff they feed livestock is barsiim from Coptic bersim. Fair comment. A bursh is a mat made with palm leaves. The Coptic porsh means ‘to spread' or ‘something which is spread', related to Semitic prsh or the Arabic root frsh as in mafruushaat ‘drapery'. Goodness me, there is little excitement here. What about injecting a bit of controversy? The verb yiddi (he gives) is said to derive from the language of the ancient Egyptians, hence the Coptic from ti. Ha! A likely story. Rather than bore you with an account of vocalisation and retrogressive assimilation, the modern colloquial Egyptian verb is a remodeling of what is considered the classical yu3Ti. Perhaps the author of the paper on the lexical influence of Coptic on Egyptian vernacular has an ethnic-linguistic axe to grind. One wonders what such an implement would look like. What, if anything, would it cut? Certainly no ice with me. For ‘spit' we have Taff which Mr Bishai claims comes from Coptic. Granted, there is the Arabic baSaq, but the former term lends itself better for the joke about the elderly man who shuffles into a coffee shop and orders a double ziyaada. Unfortunately, his weak bladder disallows him from sitting in one place for long, so he spits (yiTaff) in his coffee, writes a notice on a piece of cardboard ana Taffeet fi-l-2ahwa-di (I have spat in this coffee) and leans the card against his beverage. He then shambles off to the nearest convenience. When he returns to his seat, he sees someone else has added to his note, writing, w-ana Taffeet fiiha barDu (I spat in this as well). Sounds better than ana baSaqtu fiihaa ayDan as the former has more of a humorous ring to it. The Coptic beere is applied to, say, radishes when one wishes to comment on their freshness. This word has evolved into wirwir which might have denoted freshness at one time, but now describes a girl of broad gestures and lightness of spirit and gaiety. You might try this one out on your wife. If you end up with a red impression of a female right hand on your cheek, you must have mispronounced this word. Other words which are said to derive from Coptic include gallaabiyya, 7anTour (gharry), timsaa7 (crocodile), Tuuba (wall brick) and shabboura (mist). One might scold a child with the word shinf for doing something that is unacceptable, such as wiping its nose on the tablecloth or using a newly sharpened pencil as a toothpick. However, I find this last one far-fetched, as the original Coptic jnof or jenof denotes a basket or a crate, the kind of which you see blocking the pavement to support bananas or cheap toys. There is the charming mboou which is used when addressing babies and toddlers on the subject of water to drink. Again, that a Coptic word is needed when there is the Arabic mayya if find hard to swallow.
