Royaneh 2012

This year at Royaneh saw a lot of action up on Pioneer Hill. The new flush toilet had some starting difficulties – as unattractive as a kybo can be, it cannot be jammed up. The migration to Big Egypt has not ebbed. Speaking of Egypt, the international Scout this year, Sharif, was from Cairo, and many of the neat things in the Trading Post were Egyptian-themed. It's a testament to the power of Scouting that Mubarak, the former ruler of Egypt, banned Scouting in his country. Opening campfire was a bit rough, as it always is, and some of the first years became confused on Monday about which classes they were taking. Gladiators was restored to a semblance of its rodeo days glory, complete with a rodeo-style opening ceremony. Horsemanship was popular with the Scouts this year, as was Astronomy/SpaceEx merit badge. Scouting heritage appears to have joined the regular stable, rather than remaining a centenary phenomenon. A lot of merit badge classes at Royaneh are doubled, so that you can get two badges at once. It's great to have more badges for your sash, especially at a traditional Fourteener color guard, but part of me does wonder whether the doubling diminishes the information content of each badge.


There was a touch of the plague at camp, but it passed over Fourteen with one unfortunate exception. Other troops, however, were not so lucky – one lost nine kids, half its contingent. The good side effect of the reports of sickness was cooperation with the shower patrol for the dirty little first years. The troop skit was well-executed, thanks to preparation by one of the older Scouts. I missed the first closing campfire because I had whacked my shin, but I did have the pleasure of chasing away some miscreants from a different troop who (believe it or not) wanted to steal the 14 and transport it to the top of camp. Saturday, of course, contained a game of Capture the Flag and some very cold and wet, but poison oak-free Scouts. The Scout leading Sunday's Scout's Own is the descendant of a rabbi and it showed. I do not know where the parent who was scheduled to speak was during the Scout's Own, so I spoke instead.

Monday, of course, brought classes. Beck and I were the uniformed leadership for week 2. Fourteeners were more active during this week, and one of our own designed an Advanced Riflery class. All the first years did the Trail of the Thunderbird. I held my own in the Scoutmaster dance-off on Tuesday, but I did not win. On Wednesday, Gladiators both went long and had a snarled schedule. I'm sure that by next year the staff will have the format streamlined. The skit for the second week was the same as the first, but with a slightly different cast, although all the actors were once again first years. Friday night, of course, was the Troop Feed, which lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Those Scouts who had brought guitars, ukuleles, and other instruments entertained the group, but I didn't get to bed until 3 because I was out with the fire crew cooling the fire.

Copts and Mobbers

The recent news that Egyptian mobs attacked a Coptic church distresses me greatly. The excitement of the Arab Spring has faded, when Egyptians were united against Mubarak, and normal, ugly political discourse has reasserted itself. The fundamental problem with many rebellions is the lack of a cause for which it is fighting. Attacks on Copts are not a new phenomenon in contemporary Egypt, but such rioting and unrest provides a pretext by which the allegedly provisional military government can cement its base or weaken its opposition. If the mobile vulgus is busy attacking non-Muslims (in which case Christians will have to do in the absence of Jews), then it cannot attack the true and established opposition.

Ad rem Aegyptiae intelligendam

One of the forms of the Egyptian verb, and one which we recently studied, is called the "pseudo-verbal" form. This consists of a limited number of prepositions followed by the Egyptian "infinitive". The citation forms for the most common pseudo-verbals are transliterated conventionally as "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm". Although it is difficult to describe concisely an English structural parallel, students of the Romulan tongue might find a better comparison between the Egyptian pseudo-verbal form and the Latin gerundive.

In this case, the Egyptian forms "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm" correspond (with due allowance for prepositional semantics) to the Latin forms "de aliquo audiendo", "in aliquo audiendo", and "ad aliquid audiendum". The Latin trio, however, is crippled in its syntactical ability compared to that of the Egyptian, which can support a complex noun phrase.

Since the meanings of the constructions differ, I am presenting this as a mnemonic rather than a detailed grammatical analysis.

Ra, Set, Russkiy!

  I don't have any profound spiritual commentary for the end of 2009, so in terms of another year around the Sun, this news seems appropriate. The Russians have devised a scheme to try alter the orbit of Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid which in 2004 was calculated to have a 1-in-37 chance of hitting the Earth (That figure was later revised to less panic-inducing odds). The timing of this announcement, just as NASA's shuttle program is expiring, appears to be a bid for the space portion of the news cycle, and fits well with Russia's "muscular patriotism". The plan does sound heavily inspired by movies, but then many space scientists have been inspired by science-fiction movies and stories, and quite a few science fiction authors have worked for NASA. On the positive side, Russia is the country over which the "path of risk" is imminent and the only country in which a large meteorite has exploded in recent times (I do not believe that the Tunguska Explosion was an exploding alien spacecraft). That experience does give it a little more authority than other nations in this matter, just as Japan has more authority than other nations when it comes to suffering nuclear attack.

Apophis appears to be an appropriately menacing name for the asteroid, but is less so if one has sufficient familiarity with Egyptian mythology. The namers of the asteroid seem to be bigger fans of Stargate than Sinuhe. Apophis is the Greek name for the Apep serpent, the cosmic embodiment of all that is evil, which threatens the sun god Ra as travels nightly through the Duat, but is always defeated by the god Sutekh/Set - despite his use as a Satan-equivalent in fiction, that is not his primary role in Egyptian cosmology-cosmography. Sometimes the struggles of Ra, Sutekh, and the Apep serpent resulted in earthquakes, storms, and eclipses when the Apep serpent got the upper hand, but Ra was ever victorious.Apophis, therefore, is a good name for an object in the darkness, be it Duat or Outer Space, which periodically threatens, but never prevails.

Budge Like An Egyptian

On Friday night, after Thanksgiving, I went to the Egyptian performance,"Psalms of Ra", at the DeYoung. It was fortunate that I had decided to go that evening, since it was the last performance of the year by the DeYoung's artist in residence, Gregangelo, and the Velocity Circus. I had wanted to go to an earlier performance, but some event (I don't remember which) prohibited such revelry. Despite the attractive cost (free) of the event, I had some hesitation. I had not been to anything with "Circus" in its name since I burned out on the pretentiousness of Cirque du Soleil several years ago.

Like a fanboy at a Dan Brown conspiracy movie, I took my copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Budge's edition) with me. I have been reading it occasionally lest I forget my hieroglyphic writing. The transliteration (as opposed to translation) of Ancient Egyptian is contentious and involves rapid evolution. The net result is that Budge's system of transliteration is quite different from that which I learned last spring at San Francisco State University, which in turn varied slightly from the version I had learned back in 2000.

I ate dinner in the dip between the DeYoung and the California Academy of Sciences where the seals used to live and read my Book of the Dead, although I used the academic pronunciation which I had been taught, as far as I could. I may be an Egypt geek, but even I was not going to lug my Middle Egyptian dictionary to the park with me. After I had supped, I went up to the DeYoung and walked through the exhibit of the artist in residence. This did nothing to alleviate my skepticism, since it was all glitter and illusion - fun but not as thought-provoking as traditional art. Gregangelo appears to enjoy creating portmanteaux, since his exhibit shared that feature with his stage name. At least there wasn't any of the Black Athena nonsense, and my ability to read hieroglyphs did impress my companions in the entrance line.

The performance itself, viewed from the perilously steep seating arrangements of the theater, was a mixed bag. The incorporation of Mongolian hand dancing was inevitable, given the provenance of three of the members of Velocity Circus, but I found it hard to accept until I had thought about it after the performance. Several of the rather short numbers featured the transcription and translation of the Egyptian lyrics of the dance number, but were there presumably for visual sitimulation alone, since I could not read them before the screen changed. I suppose I have been spoiled by the supertitles at the opera One of the later pieces was too flush with neon; overall, however, I enjoyed the performance. My attitude is that I have come to enjoy a show and I will! When it comes to performances with themes of ancient cultures and languages, sometimes you have to be grateful that they exist at all.

But I suppose I'll have to write the Etruscan language mob drama myself.

Aphaeresis and (Co-)Efficients

As Mr. Hawkins and the lovely Misses Tew and Ung are aware, I have been attempting to learn some Malay. The initial chapters presented no serious difficulties beyond those which any language book for beginners contain, but two features of the language struck me once I had reached Chapter V. The first, and lesser, of these features is the occasional, and occasionally rather extreme, aphaeresis of words beginning with a schwa or h and a schwa when the previous word ends in a vowel. Elision is the disappearance of a vowel before a following word which begins with a vowel; aphaeresis is the opposite effect. The reduction of hendak to ‘nak and helai to lai after a final vowel is understandable, since the schwa is never the stressed syllable in a two-syllable Malay word, and I presume that the occasional example of (pseudo-)aphaeresis before a final consonant is the result of linguistic analogy. The alternate forms present a minor difficulty to the learners who has not digested the full vocabulary and its linguistic isotopes, but the very preface of my book warns that Malay is not a book language at heart.

If I may digress for a moment to engage in linguistic geekery, the production of ’nak rather than *’ndak from the aphaeresis of hendak should not surprise; the pre-nasalized voiced plosive nd seems to require in Malay an epenthetic schwa in order to be pronounced; thus the elimination of that schwa requires a reduction of the pre-nasalized voiced plosive to either a (voiced) nasal, n, or a voiced plosive, d. Languages, such as Welsh, which face this question, appear to favor the nasal.

The other feature of Malay which struck me was the use of classifiers, which the author of my little blue-and-yellow book chooses to call coefficients. I am familiar with the concept, since Chinese possesses ‘classifiers’ and (Ancient) Middle Egyptian uses a similar system. Chinese places a classifier, which limits the possible meanings of the following monosyllabic or disyllabic word, between the numeral and the head word. Thus, the words for ‘deer’ and ‘road’, which are homonyms, are distinguished in speech by their respective classifiers. Middle Egyptian uses classifiers in the opposite way; since hieroglyphic writing only provides the consonants and omits the semantic content of the vowels, the homonyms are a visual kind (I would greatly appreciate it if anybody could provide me with the appropriate word for this phenomenon) and the scribes distinguished the senses by adding a visible but silent classifier. My experience with these languages aided me in understanding the concept of classifiers or co-efficients in Malay, but this conceptual knowledge is less useful than I would like in the practical application, especially since no dictionary of a language which uses classifiers seems to indicate the appropriate one(s) in their entries. This may be a practice akin to languages which use stress not marking this in their dictionary entries. An additional difficulty which I am experiencing in learning Malay is determining when to use a classifier and when to refrain. I trust that practice will give me a better sense of the presence or absence of this feature, although any practical advice would be received with gratitude.

Egyptians and Astronauts

One of the blessings of living in San Francisco is the presumption of literacy, but the literacy which some possess is not what others would consider "respectable". My habit of studying Ancient Egyptian in public has highlighted this local characteristic. It would be presumptuous to expect that many citizens would display much archaeological acumen, but the sight of hieroglyphs seems to draw the "ancient astronaut" crowd.

My quarrel with this sort is not that extrahuman life exists, but that aliens must have helped the ancient civilizations, which afterwards deified them. The deification of illustrious or notorious humans as their deeds become increasingly remote from the present of the incipient worshipper has happened (the technical term is 'euhemerism'), most notably in Egypt, where the Pharaoh already possessed divine characteristics. The suggestion, however, that the Sumerians and the Egyptians received extraterrestrial aid denigrates the ingenuity of the men and women who lived at the dawn of civilization. The requirement of external help is a remnant of racial attitudes which are no longer acceptable,; since it would be impossible for non-white tribes to accomplish such mighty deeds unaided, but white aid is chronologically impossible, aliens must have helped the savages of yore.

Presentation of the aliens as a "more rational" explanation for the deeds of gods in whom no-one (including yours truly) believes is really a re-mythologizing and displacing in time those very gods. The shift from numinous or divine forces to extraterrestrial ones occurred in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century, the very era when technological progress was replacing (and in some cases threatening) the theological establishment. The fundamental characteristics, however, of contemporary systems of human thought do not change instantly, and just as the sixteenth century reformers replaced a Papal absolutism with a Biblical one, so too the congregants of technology replaced the unknown, watching God of Heaven Above with new watchers who had superior technology rather than supernatural potency. The aliens may not demand incense and burnt sacrifice, but belief in them is no dfferent than belief in elves and brownies, and the aid the (allegedly) gave no more than a modern version of the myth of Prometheus, with the added satisfaction of confirming the superiority of modern man.