The Meaning of the Preposition N as a Part of an Adverbial Predicate
Sokolova M. I.
The paper offers a reinterpretation of the meaning of the preposition n as a part of adverbial predicate. It argues that n in this construction does not have the meaning of possession, but means something like «intended for, destined to, related to», etc. For illustration the author analyses two disputable fragments from Middle Kingdom literary texts, namely pPrisse 12, 4–5 («The Teaching of Ptahhotep») and pBerlin 3024, 99–101 («The Dispute between a Man an His Ba»), stating that the meaning of the preposition n is a crucial point for their interpretation. Assuming the above-mentioned meaning of the preposition n («intended for, destined to, related to») she proposes a way to explain these two difficult literary fragments. For the verses of «The Teaching of Ptahhotep» in question the author offers the following translation: «Like one making the rudder (one) time to the land, another (time the same action is intended) to keep away (from the land)». That agrees perfectly with the general context of the corresponding maxim in which the undesirable behavioral extremes are compared to each other. And for the mentioned verses of «The Dispute between a Man an His Ba» the following interpretation is suggested: «Behold, my name is detested because of you more than (that of) a manly (qn) lad, who is said to be related to something hateful for him». The author thinks that H. Goedicke was quite right offering for the fragment an interpretation implying homosexual relations («a valiant lad against whom it is said: He belongs to the one he hates!»), but the accurate translation should be a little different. The lad does not belong to anybody, he is said (defamatorily) to be related to homosexuality. The suggested interpretation of the preposition n as a part of an adverbial predicate agrees with the specific Egyptian conception of property, which has been studied in detail by Yu. Perepelkin in his monograph «The Domain of Old Kingdom Dignitaries» (Moscow, 1988). Proceeding from vast evidence he convincingly demonstrated that the Egyptian content of the concept «property» in the Old Kingdom differed markedly from the present-day one. All the examples cited in this paper belong to the Middle Kingdom, and in fact they give the evidence that there were no considerable shifts in the sphere of property concept in that period. It is well known that Egyptian (as well as many other languages of the Afro-Asian family) does not have the verb «have». Therefore the imparting of the possessive meaning to the predicative construction ‘n + name’ reflects mental stereotypes of modern scholars rather than the real situation of the Egyptian language, which does not seem to have had such meanings at all.