Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Back to the Future — Theme
Entry tags:	english

2nd day of the Egyptian-Coptic conference... and visiting Ulrike again
I'm trying to force myself to post daily again... I know I won't succeed, but at least I can try. So here's today — the second day of the Egyptian-Coptic conference here at the MPI in Leipzig.

I got up extra-early just to get to the MPI right in time, although today is Tag der deutschen Einheit (I wonder if this might be called "Dependence Day" / "Abhängigkeitstag" for us easterners?) and thus a holiday in Germany. I noticed that when waiting for the bus in vain. Busses drive only half as often on Sun- and holidays. So I took the tram, which gave me time to read in my "Terug naar de jungle" again, but also made me miss the first talk today. No big deal, I got the handout.
The second talk was something complex about passive constructions in Middle Egyptian and how they changed and got reanalysed over time. Too difficult, I didn't get very much of that... not sure if due to lack of knowledge in linguistics or egyptology. In the coffee break I went to my office to work a bit and thus I also skipped the next topic because I wasn't interested enough.
Talk #3 was by Ildar A. Kadirov about Temporal and aspectual features of the two Middle Egyptian verb forms: śḏm=f and śḏm.n=f, which didn't sound that new and innovative for me, but caused quite an intense discussion among the experts about tense and aspect. Martin Haspelmath suggested we should not be too Europeanly or Slavically biased and perhaps even disregard the classical notion of "tense" and "aspect" as languages might employ a different system. Hmm... not sure what to think of that suggestion. The following talk was by Wolfgang Schenkel, also on aspect and tense... but in German. This time, the main focus was on their translations in other languages.

Lunchbreak. I talked to Wolfgang Schenkel and Sebastian Richter when waiting in line, then joined Mrs. López Palma at her table to eat my soup and salad. Her talk was later the day, about fractional numbers... it was like a little introduction in Egyptian mathematics and it seemed that everything was already clear to everyone as no one asked any questions afterwards.

After lunch, I attended Tom Güldemann's talk on quotative constructions (mainly jn), which was quite interesting. There are some similarities to the quotation particle of Tsez (namely ƛin), but they work differently. But he also showed various other methods, both in Egyptian itself and cross-linguistically in other languages...
Carsten Peust had his talk afterwards — he's one of the few Egyptologists I know, because he wrote a little phrase book for Late Egyptian (this one here). Did I mention that already? I think so... anyways, his topic was rhymes in Coptic and other languages. Turned out to be more on other languages than on anything else. I felt reminded of that seminar by André Meinunger, last year, where we talked about rhymes as well. However, this time I learned that there might also be "graphical rhymes" in the glyphic representation. Makes me wonder if one would consider something a rhyme when every line ends with, say, a quail chick? ;) Oh, and what was really nice/fun was that he played some examples of rhymed texts from Arabic, Old Norse and German — the latter being a rap song by Bushido!
Coffebreak then, and I skipped the next talk. Then came that talk about fractionals and partitives, followed by something about the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of citations in Middle Egyptian. I first intented to skip this one as well, but it turned out to be quite interesting to see the various ways of citations and quotations used in that language.

End of this day's presentations. I left the MPI, met Melanie at the main station where we bought pizza and visited Ulrike in her new flat share. We watched "Back to the Future" (still 8 points), in English, and Ulrike pointed out an interesting scene: In the beginning, Martin and the Doc are standing in front of the "Twin Pine Mall". Then, when Martin travel back to 1955 and runs over one of the (still small) pine trees standing there, we later see him back in 1985 running towards the "Lone Pine Mall". No wonder I didn't notice that when I was still a kid. Ulrike also gave me something she bought for me in China: this Vietnamese phrasebook (in Chinese)! :D

Oh, by the way, the number of people interested in my Esperanto course steadily grows... Ozan G., Joha H., Juliane B. and Jürgen S. already told me they would like to attend the course. Yay!

G'night!