Hello, could you help me with a answer to a belief that is raising in various chat groups online. Recently I watched a lecture where an individual claimed that the Egyptian language is the father of the Sumerian language. That assertion is based on his "comparative historical linguistics" where the word "km.T" the original name of Egypt, is "cognate" with the Sumerian word "ki.duru", the claim is that both means "riparian land", wet, irrigation. Quote: duru[5] is the proposed cognate with km The morpheme denoting place is ki- in Sumerian but -t in Egyptian, that is to say toponymic morphemes giving the proposal of ki.duru & km.t. This comes only after a systematic analysis of the sound meaning correspondences between the two language via a large set of core vocabulary of each.
I find this to be an interesting belief, but would love to know if it's true from those more familiar with Sumerian language and history.
Thanks in advance
I hesitated to answer this question publicly because this claim is so incredibly wrong and unsupported by any linguistic evidence that I'm loath to even have my regular readers seeing it. Unfortunately archaeolinguistics is filled with misinformation and charlatanry, and the idea that Sumerian is ârelatedâ to Ancient Egyptian is just another example of this.
Egyptian was an Afroasiatic language, related (in a demonstrable way supported by credible linguistics) to modern Arabic, Hebrew, Hausa and Amharic, as well as to Akkadian, which coexisted with Sumerian. But Sumerian itself is distinctly not an Afroasiatic language, and has completely unrelated grammar, native vocabulary, etc. Claiming that there is âsystematic analysis of the sound meaning correspondencesâ is completely untrue - as evidenced by the fact this person can give one (false) âexampleâ, and no others at all!
For an example of how this kind of thinking is totally false, I recommend this article by Mark Rosenfelder, which âdemonstratesâ that Quechua and Semitic languages are ârelatedâ, which they obviously are not, using the same ârandom matchingâ quoted above (and debunks such an attempt). Maybe when you see this falsehood spread online, you can share a link to the article as well.
And to everyone reading this, please be very careful when anyone âclaimsâ that Sumerian is related to another language. Very often, they are (at best) not sharing truthful materials, or often have ulterior motives - you can find âinformationâ out there that Sumerian is related to any of a vast number of other languages, often from nationalists of those linguistic communities who want to lend credence to some racist or prejudiced historical argument by tying their language to Sumerian. I receive such asks (on this platform and others) often, and have learned to delete them right away rather than lend a moment to such nonsense.
Be careful out there; misinformation lurks around every corner!
