Overall borrowing and borrowing in basic vocabulary: A typological perspective on lexical change in Ancient Egyptian-Coptic

The notion of ‘basic vocabulary’ is associated with the name of Morris Swadesh, who proposed a list of 200 (and later 100) items. These lists, widely used in historical and comparative linguistics, were based on intuition rather than on empirical research. More recently, however, the Leipzig Loanword Typology Project conducted a cross-linguistic survey of loanwords (Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009). One of the results is a 100-item list of basic vocabulary items — the ‘Leipzig-Jakarta list of basic vocabulary.’ This list is the product of four factors, computed for a database of 1440 meanings in 41 languages: borrowability, representation in the database, analyzability / simplicity, and age. As Tadmor (2009) states, this is the first list of basic vocabulary items based on extensive cross-linguistic comparison, and it constitutes a ‘full-fledged basic vocabulary’ that ‘comprises the notions normally associated with this concept: stability (our age score), universality (our representation score) and simplicity (our analyzability score), as well as resistance to borrowing (our unborrowed score)’ (2009: 68). In this talk, we examine this list of 100 meanings in order to evaluate the influence of Greek (Indo- European) on the basic vocabulary of Coptic (Afroasiatic), which shows massive lexical borrowing. First, Coptic data were collected from Crum (1939) for four dialects: Sahidic, Bohairic, Fayyumic, and Akhmimic. Additionally, a questionnaire was submitted to specialists in order to detect Greek loanwords that also lexicalized these meanings. Furthermore, we used etymological dictionaries (Černý 1976; Westendorf 1977; Vycichl 1983) in order to attribute an age score (from 0 = Greek loanword to 4 = Old Egyptian) to the lexemes at two levels: the formal level (when is the word first attested in Ancient Egyptian) and the semantic level (when is the meaning attested in Coptic first associated with this word). As a result of this study, we (1) evaluate the influence of Greek on the basic vocabulary of the main Coptic dialects, (2) describe the basic vocabulary of Coptic dialects independently and to observe how they differ from one another, (3) produce a first estimate of the rate of change in basic vocabularies over the course of Egyptian as a whole. Some of our main findings are as follows: 233 items lexicalize the 100 meanings. Of these, nearly half are attested already in the oldest Egyptian texts; a major peak in lexical replacement is around 1500 BCE, a time of considerable political and cultural upheaval in Egypt. Rates of lexical change do not always correspond to neat semantic categories: while body part terms were generally replaced, semantic categories like perception show heterogeneity (e.g., the verb ‘to hear’ remained throughout the entire history of Egyptian, while the verb ‘to see’ was replaced several times; similarly, ‘to come’ remained stable, while ‘to go’ was replaced several times). All in all, very few of the meanings on the Leipzig-Jakarta list are lexicalized by loanwords in Coptic, and no meanings show complete replacement of a native word by a loanword. This study has broader methodological implications. One is the clear distinction between (and possible independence of) overall lexical borrowing and borrowing of basic vocabulary: while Coptic borrowed an estimated 5000 lexical items (types), with a basic vocabulary borrowing score of 7.53, it is only a low-to-middle borrower in terms of basic vocabulary (cf. Fig. 1). The comparison of scores in overall borrowing vs. borrowing of basic vocabulary raises important questions about the types of socio-historical contact situations that lead to these different situations