Potential Old Nubian Cognates for Meroitic 'aleqese'

In this article we will analyse three potential Old Nubian cognates of the Meroitic word aleqese, taking up a prior suggestion of Claude Rilly. After providing an overview of the linguistic relationship between Meroitic and Old Nubian and the extant analyses of aleqese in the extant literature, we will inspect the Old Nubian conditional clause marker ⲁⲗⲉⲥⲛ̄, as well as the words ⲁⲗⲕⲁⲥⲛ̄ and ⲁⲗⲓⲕⲟⲧⲛ̄, both with an unknown, but seemingly adverbial function. It will be our claim that ⲁⲗⲉⲥⲛ̄, which is frequently used in Old Nubian literary texts, is a true cognate, a word supposedly deriving from the same potentially reconstructable root. The existence of this cognate relationship, which follows the sound correspondences that have so far been proposed by Claude Rilly, further substantiates the claim that Meroitic is a Nilo-Saharan, and, more precisely, a Northern East Sudanic language. We will suggest that, by contrast, ⲁⲗⲕⲁⲥⲛ̄ and ⲁⲗⲓⲕⲟⲧⲛ̄ are loanwords from Meroitic, which give us further evidence concerning the pronunciation, phonetic variation, and orthography of Meroitic