dc.description.abstract | Meroitic is attested by written records found in the Nile valley of northern Sudan
and dating from the 3rd century B.C. through the 5th century A.D. They are inscribed in
a particular script, either hieroglyphic or more often cursive, which has been deciphered,
although our understanding of the language is very limited. Basing himself on about fifty
words, the meaning of which is relatively well established, on a few morphological features
and phonetic correspondences, Claude Rilly proposes to regard Meroitic as a North-Eastern
Sudanic tongue of the Nilo-Saharan language family and to classify it in the same group
as Nubian (Sudan), Nara (Eritrea), Taman (Chad), and Nyima (Sudan). The examination
of the fifty words in question shows instead that most of them seem to belong to the
Afro-Asiatic vocabulary, in particular Semitic, with some Egyptian loanwords and lexical
Cushitic analogies. The limited lexical material at our disposal and the extremely poor
knowledge of the verbal system prevent us from a more precise classification of Meroitic
in the Afro-Asiatic phylum. In fact, the only system of classification of languages is the
genealogical one, founded on the genetic and historical connection between languages as
determined by phonological and morpho-syntactic correspondences, with confirmation,
wherever possible, from history, archaeology, and kindred sciences. | pl_PL |