I don't know where the "Ta" comes from
I was under the impression it meant "land", as in "Ta-Seti".

And so it is, at least with some guesswork involving the vowel. According to "Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache" (Berlin : Akademie-Verlag, 1950), p. 95: Land = tȝ.

So, why on earth is it written with an i?

I think it's pretty nifty that there is a name in which graphic i is pronounced /a/
Excellent! Now we can write [fɪʃ] the way God intended it: ghati.

No wait, that's the other way around. Ah nevermind. Sorry. Way past my bedtime.

bulbul: Ta for the "Ta"! (No, I don't normally use that Brit expression for "thanks," but it was irresistible here.)

lukas: You'd have to ask the elder Coates.

TLA entry.

Bulbul, if you're still awake, do you remember mentioning the name of an eastern European woman poet three of four weeks ago? Maybe it was someone else. I googled her poetry, found little bits of it translated, and loved it (I'm not usually big on poetry) but now I can't remember her name. I think she was also known for being involved in politics and for interpreting/translating some other poet or writer.

In some dialects of English, /aI/ gets realised as [a].

That's been bugging me for quite a while. I can't stand romanizations that make no sense. Does this really count as "English orthography"? What if he pronounced it "Throatwobbler Mangrove"? He should at least have the decency to explain or apologize.

hieroglyphs transliterated as nḥsy
The determinative after the transliterated glyphs is ‘man with arms tied behind his back’, used in the words for ‘rebel’ and ‘enemy’.

Land = tȝ.
Strictly speaking, it’s tA (= t plus two stacked apostrophes, which may not display correctly here), not tȝ (= t plus yogh). The A is a glottal stop – though may have been a trill in Middle Egyptian – (in hieroglyphic Neophron percnopterus), corresponding to Hebrew ’āleph and Arabic ’alif hamzatum, and is transliterated a.

I agree with faure, it was probably originally supposed to be /ai/, in which the off-glide disappears (a pretty common process in AAVE I think).
The only weird thing is other people whose dialects don't do that following that pronunciation (maybe like rhotic-speakers 'dropping' r's when speaking of certain hip-hop artists?)

As for orthographic i as /a/. How do you pronounce 'I'll' in connected speech? In my speech the i-glide drops out and it sounds a lot like 'all'.

An AAVE pronunciation spelling for an Egyptian word? That sounds pretty far-fetched to me, but then I don't know where '70s Baltimore got its African first names from. Some book? Word of mouth?

like rhotic-speakers 'dropping' r's when speaking of certain hip-hop artists

Like which?

Dredging from memory my almost non-existent knowledge of Roumanian, I seem to recall that in that language â is sometimes used to represent /i/ (most notably in the word România), so if â can represent /i/ maybe i should be allowed to represent /a/.

Salt 'n Peppa (I alternated between saying Peppa and Pepper myself)

Nijma,
I honestly don't remember such a comment, you are probably thinking of somebody else.

fiosachd,
yogh/ȝ/3 is what Gardiner uses to transcribe the glottal stop, so I'll stick with that.

It's actually Salt-n-Pepa, and why on earth would anyone pronounce that with final -r? It would sound ignorant.

How do you pronounce 'I'll' in connected speech?
[ɒl] or even [ɒɫ].

Farris is not down with the street.

Maybe the Polish street, I suppose.

it was probably originally supposed to be /ai/, in which the off-glide disappears (a pretty common process in AAVE I think).

That's quite plausible. One would have to hear Coates's father talk to be sure, but if he pronounces rise, say, as /raz/ and spice as /spas/, then it would make sense that his pronunciation of the penultimate vowel of the name would correspond to standard American long i (/ai/).

An AAVE pronunciation spelling for an Egyptian word? That sounds pretty far-fetched to me

Why? AAVE pronunciation isn't applied only to certain chunks of the word-hoard, it's how AAVE speakers pronounce everything. And foreign names with i tend to get pronounced with "long i" in American English (Iraq, Iran), so it makes sense that Nehisi would go the same route.

I shouldn't have said "It would sound ignorant," which sounds like a putdown; what I meant was that the more familiar one is with Salt-n-Pepa, the likelier it is that one will pronounce the name as it is written and normally said rather than being distracted by the phrase "salt and pepper."

Michael & Language, do you know where this non-rhotic hip-hop comes from?

Incidentally, I noticed recently that John Emerson has started calling me 'dude' and telling me to 'chill'. Is that related? (I think of him as utilising the rhotic 'r', Garrison Keillor certainly does.)

Farris is not down with the street.
Well, duh. Salt-n-Pepa is sooo 90s.

You all are right (he wrote burning with shame and trembling in humiliation) being .... 'down with the street' as you young whippersnappers call it is not one of my defining features.

As for Salt-n-Pepa, yeah I shoulda looked it up. That was just the first example I could think of, and I remember, since I knew about them in the 80's in their pre-Push it days (he said trying to claw back a little self respect) being conflicted as to whether I should pronounce an 'r' since I was concerned that leaving it off could sound like I was being condescending and faux hip. (I was living in a heavily Stuff-White-People-Like environment at the time and we worried about things like that).

... Roumanian, I seem to recall that in that language â is sometimes used to represent /i/ (most notably in the word România) ...

The sound is not "regular" /i/ as in French dire, which is a high front vowel similar to that in English feet. See Wikipedia, Romanian language:

the letters "â" (used inside the words) and "î" (used at the beginning or the end; it can also be used in the middle of a composite word) both represent the same close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/.

The vowel in question is about the same as the Russian vowel in such words as (transliterated) my 'we' and vy 'you (= vous)'.

being conflicted as to whether I should pronounce an 'r' since I was concerned that leaving it off could sound like I was being condescending

I'm gonna blame this conundrum on the prescriptivists. It's only natural to feel uncomfortable pronouncing words in a language or dialect you don't speak; you throw in a little extra emphasis, you smile self-consciously, ironically (at least that's what I do with French phrases while reading aloud). But because prescriptivists have denigrated certain dialects for so long, it's not always neutral (as it is with French); you have to worry about seeming condescending, even if you don't look down on Black or Southern English at all. (For Black English maybe I should blame racists too.)

If you've got last spring's Code2000 update, you can use U+A722 ꜣ.

Sometimes the two right half rings don't touch and so look even less like 3 or ȝ. That's true in the font Allen uses and in the hand-written Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache.

For comparison, here are two early papers: Steindorff and Erman.

Nijma (star?),

maybe you're thinking of:

http://english.tsvetayeva.com/poetry

Oh, and although the Harvard copy of the 1889 ZÄS in GB is defective / misscanned and starts on page 2 after the all important table, Toronto's is in the Internet Archive.

Why? AAVE pronunciation isn't applied only to certain chunks of the word-hoard, it's how AAVE speakers pronounce everything.

Sure. I'm just trying to imagine a scenario in which Coates Sr. comes across Ta-Nehisi. Egyptologists don't use AAVE very much for their transcriptions, I presume, but on the other hand /ˌtanɘˈhaɪsi/ probably doesn't come close to the Egyptian model, however that was pronounced.

i like the new word 'obamabilia', for the badges and chochskis that are being sold on the street to mark the inauguration of the new US president. I get almost 40,000 hits for it. Its being linked to one person only may inhibit its potential, though that hasn't happen with 'crown', for example.

Sure. I'm just trying to imagine a scenario in which Coates Sr. comes across Ta-Nehisi.

Ah, sorry for misunderstanding you. I dunno, you see all sorts of weird vocalizations of Egyptian words, or he might have seen it unvocalized and read it to himself as Ta-Nehisi and remembered it that way.

Does anyone know how Yosef Ben-Jochannan pronounces it? (See here for connection to Paul Coates.)

Did you listen to the radio interview linked from the Wikipedia page?

Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache

Lower-case ä. In German, there are no separate rules for headlines; adjectives only get an uppercase letter if they're part of a proper name (like in "the Black Sea": das Schwarze Meer) -- being derived from a proper name is not enough.

The page to which I linked and from which I copied the link title really does say:

<title>W&ouml;rterbuch der &Auml;gyptischen Sprache</title>

Did you listen to the radio interview linked from the Wikipedia page?

I had not; I have to avoid sound while there are still other people around here at work.

But I have now gone through some of the many clips there and the pronunciation here at about 04:15 is pretty much what LH thought originally at the head of this post. So while his work might be the source of that particular spelling, that is all.

What are "chochskis" ?

Nicknacks (a small trivial article usually intended for ornament). Yiddish.

I see another spelling, 'tchotchke', gets 57,00 hits and can be seen on wiki.

Yeah, it's normally spelled tchotchke. Hey, it's even got a Wikipedia article! "A variety of spellings exist for the English usage of the term, e.g. tshotshke, tshatshke, tchatchke, chachke, or chochke, because there is no standardized transliteration." Odd they don't provide the Yiddish spelling.

Well, we could provide one. And by 'we' I mean 'you'. Where's that NY doctor who publishes yiddish? He could do it.

That Polish etymology sounds fishy, the only thing that comes close is cacko 3 = "Christmas tree decoration" and even then, both the Polish and the Russian word have [t͡s] and not [tʃ]. A dialectism, a loan-word from Byelorussian or something else? Incidentally, it's čačky in Slovak.

Slovak sounds like a much better bet.

I've never heard cacko as Christmas tree decoration (though I suppose that must be an original meaning?

The first two are how I've always heard it.

1. «artystycznie wykonany przedmiot» artistically produced item
2. «o czymś, o kimś delikatnym, wypieszczonym» someone/something delicate and pampered

If I may interject some additional (possibly irrelevant) information for the pleasure of all:

t3-nḥsy

Bulbul correctly identifies t3 as 'land', but the /3/ consonant is conventionally pronounced as an /a/ vowel by Egyptologists, so hence this is probably the source of the /a/ vowel here. The actual pronunciation of /3/ is unknown, although the consonant has been used to transliterate /l/ and /r/ in non-Egyptian names. In any case, it is definitely not a glottal stop as Gardiner once thought. In addition, t3 itself is quite possibly cognate with Semitic 'tel' 'mound, hill' from Afroasiatic.

'Tchotchke' is sometimes used in architectural discussions that take place in New York as a way to refer to bits of gratuitous, object-like massing in a building design. When they are also without any apparent function, these small tchotchkes seem symbolically frivolous -- a tchotchke is never a good thing, not in architecture.

Thanks, Matt! And how can it be irrelevant when it's actually about the subject of the post? Now, tchotchkes, those are irrelevant—not that they're any less welcome, of course. (Except to architects.)

I neglected to point out explicitly that the earliest reference does explain the intent of the two more unusual symbols used by Egyptologists:

Die Wahl des ꜣ für [Gardiner G1], soll nur die Unsicherheit seines Lautes ausdrücken. Die Bezeichnung des [Gardiner M17] durch ı͗ mag als Combination des א-Zeichens mit dem i auf die alte Doppelrolle dieses Buchstabens hindeuten, der, ganz dem Befinde im Koptischen entsprechend, im neuen Reich das semitische א umschreibt und im alten Reiche zur Vokalandeutung des i mancher Endungen steht, da wo man später [Gardiner M17 twice] und [Gardiner Z4] dafür schreibt.

Μὴ παυσάσθω ὁ ζητῶν τοῦ ζητεῖν ἕως ἂ εὕρη, καὶ ὅταν εὕρῃ θαμβηθήσεται καὶ θαμβηθεὶς βασιλεύσει καὶ βασιλεύσας ἀναπαήσεται.

Is the second logion of Thomas really about you?

What does ἀναπαήσεται mean?

he will rest. There is nothing in the Coptic version to correspond with the last three words of the Greek. Where the Greek reads and reigning he will rest the Coptic reads only over the All.

Like fiosachd says. Some more info here.

@MMcM

Ahh! Academic German! My only weakness!

@fiosachd

no, the second saying isn't really about me, but I like the quote. It has a nice ring to it.

tsatski,
we have tsatsag, which means loose ornament, something like the longs strips used to decorate the Native American costume

long

Let's call the whole thing eef.