In honour of my husband finally finding the necessary cables to fire up the N64, finally allowing us to play Mortal Kombat 4 on date night again, here's "finish him" (lit. "impose death upon him") in Middle Egyptian.
The reason it says "impose death upon him" rather than "finish him", despite the existence of the verb "to finish" in Middle Egyptian, is that the ancient Egyptians didn't use "finish (off)" as an idiom for killing something or someone. Yes, I think my shitposts through an inordinate amount.
I study Akkadian and I am stunned whenever I see an idiom still used today. It's always a little thrill
I still need to correct the dirty joke in my profile, because Old Bab didn't, as far as I know, use the causative to indicate ability to do something -- they just left it implicit
As a classicist I cannot applaud this strongly enough.
(I once spent a good hour working out exactly how to best represent "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" in properly classical Latin.)
Oh man it was years ago, but as I recall we finally settled on "nugas" for the type of joke we wanted to have people appreciate, but went back and forth for some time about a more literal "may they be fucked" vs. a more period-appropriate curse (which would be more like damned/destroyed).
On the request of the person I was motto-ing for, we did go with the more literal type of getting fucked, which turned into a nice elegant single word. The subjunctive present passive third person plural, as a jussive "let them be fucked!"
And I believe rather than "if" we used the substantive relative clause: (those) who are not able to appreciate jokes/trifles.
(I don't have my dictionaries handy so I can't reconstruct on the fly.)
Haha no worries, I know how that goes! In translation even to my largely untrained eye/ear (no knowledge of the language except what I osmosed after 19 years of being with a Latinist), that reads very Latin. 👌🏻
Ohh, I love that consideration! I'm often deliberately selecting known puns for certain of my translations for the period/culture appropriateness value.
Yeah, I would've been inclined towards a more period-appropriate "may the gods destroy--!" but the friend I was building it for preferred the wittiness of the more literal translation, which is quite fair.
True, it really depends on what one wants to achieve overall, and I enjoy doing this exactly because it's such a good brain exercise. "What would capture the vibe the best" versus "How might an actual ancient person have said something similar".
Speaking from having read every marginal annotation in 350 Renaissance copies of Lucretius (esp the heavily annotated sex bits), rendering nuances of ‘fuck’ in properly Classical Latin has been a major goal of scholarship for a good 600 years.
Sometimes I think I'm very lucky that Plautus worked from New Comedy and not Old Comedy, because my dissertation would've been a lot harder if I had to deal with that much sexual & scatological & political humor amidst everything else I was doing with the plays. JN Adams was largely enough for me.
Though I /did/ attend a fascinating talk that had a whole chart with gender and active/passive uses of some specific Latin sexual verbs & derived adjectives/nouns specifically within graffiti, centering on futator/futatrix for its point of study.
(Okay and also at one point I ended up three layers deep trying to find a citation for something I'd learned in an Aristophanes class about uses of "piglet" and "sow" as specific sexual innuendo because I was trying to properly explain the sexual/violent aspect of an exchange in Truculentus.)
No; to the ancient Egyptians, for most of their history (there's 3000 years of Pharaonic history so funerary beliefs do tend to shift, but you'll find that this next statement holds true for most of it), death was instead a passage, from life on earth to life beyond. A temporary state of being.
That is to say, there are attestations of them using "end" to denote the end of earthly life, but death itself was not considered "the End (complete)". In general you'll also find the ancient Egyptians rarely directly talked about death; it was often couched in metaphor.
neat; was this pattern of thinking at all related to social class? the impression i've gotten is that noble egyptians worried a lot about the afterlife, but idk if people with, like, more immediately pressing concerns would think the same way
It depends; archaeological bias and an only 2% literacy rate means we don't directly know an awful lot about the belief systems of poorer folk, but in the burials of regular people we do have, we do see things like burial gifts and simpler versions of funerary cults.
While not everyone, not even among nobles, would have necessarily given the same importance to those beliefs, we can say that in general, the (journey to the) afterlife was important to the Egyptians.
(I wouldn't call it "worried" myself - archaeological bias also means that funerary equipment is heavily represented among the corpus of artefacts, which has often coloured views of ancient Egyptian beliefs in the past, i.e. the oft-heard "Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death".)
