LA NARRATIVA MEXICANA EN EL SIGLO XX: PANORAMA GENERAL

It is important to examine meticulously the form and degree of lan-guage interference in the magical spells, because modern sociolinguistic studies have made it abundantly clear that contact induced language change is not a self-evident and straightforward phenomenon. In fact, it is a prime indicator of the form and direction of cultural change, because it is governed by social and cultural constraints that are nego-tiated among the members of a speech community.¹Roman Egypt was

1 This and the next paragraphs are based on the following useful introductions to the study of language and cultural change in bilingual settings: René Appel and Pieter

a bilingual society in which Greek was the language of upward social mobility, dominant in the civil administration throughout the country as well as public life in the major cities. Consequently, the Egyptian lan-guage underwent substantial changes under the influence of Greek in the course of several centuries, very similar to the way native iconogra-phy, traditional notions of kingship and consumption patterns changed to a degree through contact with Hellenistic culture. By adopting lex-ical and grammatlex-ical forms from a prestigious donor language, in this case Greek, speakers of a recipient language of lesser cultural status, namely Egyptian, may express their wish to identify with the culture of the donor language’s speech community, that is to say Hellenism.

Changes of this nature are no autonomous developments, but the result of choices made by individuals who adjust to ever occurring shifts in the access to economic resources, while competing with other individuals for sources of power in the social arena. This means that any study of cultural change in Greco-Roman Egypt has to account for the creative impetus of individuals and the interests of various social groups, who adopt opportune social strategies and appropriate cultural identities depending on the situation and their aims. Any student of the ancient sources should therefore be prepared to take into account conflicting stands and contradictory perspectives articulated in the material.

The form and degree of contact induced language change is deter-mined by a speech community’s language attitude towards a donor language and the type of contact situation. Language attitude is the degree to which speakers of the recipient language valorise positively or negatively the donor language, its speakers and its associated cultural settings.² Since language and group identity are usually felt as closely related, speakers can perceive linguistic borrowing as corruption of their cultural traditions or, in contrast, as innovations that enable iden-tification with a prestige language and its culture. Accordingly, language attitude determines to what extent a speech community is inclined to adopt foreign elements into its language. Suzanne Romaine formulates it as follows:

Muysken, Language Contact and Bilingualism (London 1987); Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley1988);

Suzanne Romaine, Bilingualism (Oxford1989); William A. Foley, Anthropological Linguistics (Oxford1997) 381–397.

2 Most lucid discussion: Muysken and Appel, Language Contact and Bilingualism,16–

20.

It is true of most multilingual societies that the differential power of particular groups is reflected in language variation and attitudes towards this variability. The study of language attitudes is important because attitudes represent an index of intergroup relations and they play an important role in meditating and determining them. [Bilingualism,258]

With respect to language interference and the type of contact situation, the sociolinguist Pieter Muysken distinguishes three processes at work in bilingual speech:³

1.a. Insertion of single lexical elements from a donor language into a structure of a recipient language.

2.a. Alternation between structures from two or more languages within a single speech event.

3.a. Congruent lexicalisation of material from different lexical inventories into a shared grammatical structure.

These processes conform roughly to a particular contact situation each:⁴

1.b. Colonial settings and recent migrant communities, where there is a considerable asymmetry in the speaker’s proficiency in the two languages involved.

2.b. Stable bilingual communities with a tradition of language separa-tion.

3.b. Second generation migrant groups, dialect/standard and post-creole continua, and bilingual speakers of closely related lan-guages with roughly speaking equal prestige and no tradition of language separation.

If one wants to apply this scheme to the society of Roman-period Egypt, it is necessary to differentiate between social groups on the basis of their ethnic origin, occupation, social position and place of residence, because not every Egyptian subject is likely to have been exposed to Greek language and culture to the same degree. Willy Clarysse has demonstrated with the help of Demotic and Greek documentary texts that, in the Ptolemaic period, Egyptians who were active in the administration and Hellenistic cultural life, took on a Greek name when dealing with Greeks, while retaining their Egyptian name in

3 Pieter Muysken, Bilingual Speech. A Typology of Code-Mixing (Cambridge2000) 3–10 and the respective chapters.

4 Op. cit.,8–9.

an Egyptian setting.⁵ This practice of name switching suggests that the language situation of the upper layers of the native population could be described as under point 2.b, namely, as a stable bilingual community with a tradition of language separation. In all likelihood, the vast majority of the native population, especially in the countryside, was only occasionally required to deal with Greek language and if so, mainly through intermediaries, so that their knowledge of Greek will have been minimal, if extant at all.

To reconstruct the effect of these differing contact situations upon the true nature and degree of language change in the Roman period is nearly impossible, since the sources are written, the majority of which preserves rather a history of textual transmission than real life speech events. Nonetheless, the outcome of the process can be studied in Coptic, the successive language stage, while some information about its progression can be gained from analysing the Demotic ostraca from Narmuthis in the Fayum, dating from the second century CE. These ostraca were found near the temple of the goddess Triphis in a dump of what was probably once a temple school.⁶ A high number of them served as exercises in copying legal documents, drafts of dispatches and vocalized word lists, so that they are likely to come close in lexicon and grammar to contemporary speech.⁷ Coptic can assuredly be called a mixed language, because it contains Greek borrowings on the level of lexicon, phonology, syntax and even information structure.⁸In the light

5 The best discussion of this social strategy is: Willy Clarysse, ‘Ptolemaeïsch Egypte.

Een maatschappij met twee gezichten’ Handelingen van de Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maat-schappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis45 (1991) 21–38. See also Idem, ‘Greeks and Egyptians in the Ptolemaic Army and Administration’ Aegyptus65 (1985) 57–66.

6 To date, a total of 93 ostraca are published in two separate volumes: Edda Bresciani, Sergio Pernigotti, Maria C. Betro, Ostraka demotici da Narmutti (Pisa 1983) and Paolo Gallo, Ostraca demotici e ieratici dall’archivio bilingue di Narmouthis II (Pisa1997).

Three astrological ostraca are published in Richard A. Parker, ‘A Horoscopic Text in Triplicate’, in: Heinz-J. Thissen and Karl-Th. Zauzich (eds.), Grammata demotika. Fs.

Lüddeckens (Würzburg1984) 141–143.

7 For a description of the material, see, Gallo, Ostraca demotici e ieratici, xli-lx.

8 A lucid analysis of the bilingual phenomena in Coptic can be found in Chris Reintges, ‘Code-Mixing Strategies in Coptic Egyptian’ LingAeg 9 (2001) 193–237; see also John David C. Ray, ‘How demotic is Demotic?’ EVO17 (1994) 251–265, 256–257.

See for Greek loanwords in Coptic documentary texts: Hans Förster, Wörterbuch der griechischen Wörter in den koptischen dokumentarischen Texten (TU148; Berlin and New York 2002). A study of the nature of Greek loanwords in Coptic literary and religious texts is still very much a desideratum. See for a definition of the term ‘mixed language’: Fredric W. Field, Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts (Studies in Language Companion Series 62; Amsterdam, Philadelphia 2002) 13–15.

of the ‘hierarchies of borrowability’ that linguists established on the basis of comparative data as scales to study which linguistic categories are universally borrowed more freely than others, Coptic is evidently the result of long-standing and intense contact between Egyptian and Greek.⁹ The Narmuthis ostraca corroborate this conclusion, because the Demotic texts incorporate a high number of Greek loanwords, which are written in the Greek script in an opposite direction to the Demotic reading direction.¹⁰

The majority of these loanwords are nouns, to wit, administrative titles, legal terms, objects of daily use and ingredients, that are embed-ded in Egyptian grammatical structures as object and genitive construc-tions (with loss of case endings), occasionally preceded by a Demotic possessive or demonstrative pronoun in correct gender. In a fair num-ber of cases, a Greek infinitive occurs as a bare noun in direct object position to the agentive verb "ır, ‘to do’, which is a common proce-dure in Coptic to incorporate a Greek verb into the Egyptian syntax.¹¹ One ostracon preserves the prepositionκατ followed by a Greek noun phrase embedded in a Demotic sentence. The ostraca demonstrate hence that colloquial Egyptian of the Roman period was undergoing a process of significant re-lexification under the influence of Greek while retaining its Egyptian grammatical structure, with the result that Coptic evolved into a mixed language.¹²

This conclusion is highly relevant in the light of the general lack of Greek borrowings in Demotic texts that are contemporary or a little earlier than the Narmuthis ostraca. In a study of Greek loanwords in Demotic documentary texts of the Ptolemaic and Roman period, Willy

9 See for a discussion of the ‘hierarchies of borrowability’: Muysken and Appel, Language Contact and Bilingualism,170–172 and Field, Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Con-texts,34–40. The specific order of borrowed linguistic categories depends on the two languages involved, but one could say in general that content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) are more easily borrowed than function words (prepositions, pronouns, articles, conjunctions), while nouns are universally borrowed most easily. The longer and more profound the contact between two languages is, the more grammatical categories of the donor language are likely to enter the recipient language.

10 A representative, albeit not complete, list of Greek loanwords in the ostraca can be found in: E. Bresciani and R. Pintaudi, ‘Textes démotico-grecs et greco-démotiques des ostraca de Medinet Madi: un problème de bilinguisme’, in: S.P. Vleeming (ed.), Aspects of Demotic Lexicography (Studia Demotica1; Leuven 1987) 123–126; see also Ray,

‘How demotic is Demotic?’,257–258.

11 A discussion of hybrid light-verb constructions in Bohairic and Sahidic Coptic is given in: Reintges, ‘Code-Mixing Strategies in Coptic Egyptian’,196–207.

12 See on re-lexification: Muysken, Bilingual Speech,266–268.

Clarysse concludes, ‘the Demotic vocabulary was remarkably free of Greek influence’ and ‘the Demotic scribes consciously tried to translate rather than to transliterate the Greek vocabulary’.¹³John Ray is there-fore correct in questioning the widely held assumption that Demotic represents colloquial Egyptian of the Greco-Roman period by asking in reference to Herodotus’ definition of the Egyptian script varieties, ‘how demotic (<δημοτικ , “of the people”) is Demotic?’.¹⁴His answer is that

‘the true description of Demotic is not vernacular; it is a purified and filtered vernacular which was subject to its own rules’.¹⁵A close inspec-tion of the Greek loanwords in the Demotic documentary texts reveals that they can be grouped into three main categories: honorific and offi-cial titles, administrative terms and objects of daily life. With only a few exceptions, these loanwords are additions to the Egyptian lexicon that only became relevant after the introduction of Greek administration.

Together with the apparent preference for loan translations rather than loan words, the lack of substituting borrowings suggests that Demotic scribes were reluctant to adopt Greek borrowings into the written lan-guage, despite the fact that colloquial Egyptian was undeniably chang-ing under the influence of Greek. These observations are reminiscent of speech strategies to disguise inevitable foreign influence in contact situ-ations where the speakers of the recipient language have a negative lan-guage attitude towards the donor lanlan-guage and its associated culture.¹⁶ Yet, one must refrain from extrapolating rashly from the Demotic doc-umentary texts to the language attitude of Demotic scribes at large, because documentary texts were written in a highly specific and for-mulaic speech register, which by its nature was rather resistant to any sort of modifications. Nonetheless, Greek borrowings are also remark-ably absent from letters and literary texts in Demotic. Therefore, the following section will study the Greek loanwords and Greek invocations

13 W. Clarysse, ‘Greek Loan-Words in Demotic’, in: S.P. Vleeming (ed.), Aspects of Demotic Lexicography (Studia Demotica 1; Leuven 1987) 9–33; a list of 92 Greek loan words can be found on pgs.21–32. An update to this list with 13 new loanwords can be found in: Katelijn Vandorpe and Willy Clarysse, ‘A Greek Winery for Sale in a Fayum Demotic Papyrus’, in: A.M.F.W. Verhoogt and S.P. Vleeming (eds.), The Two Faces of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Fs. P.W. Pestman (P.L.Bat30; Leiden 1998) 127–139, the list is on page 139.

14 Herodotus gives the following remark in his Histories: ‘They (the Egyptians, jd) use two different kinds of writing; one of which is called sacred (9ρ ) and the other common (δημοτικ )’ (II,36). Herodotus’ sacred writing is the hieroglyphic script.

15 Ray, ‘How demotic is Demotic?’,264.

16 Romaine, Bilingualism,56–58.

in the Demotic spells in the light of the general lack of Greek borrow-ings in Demotic texts. This is to determine in what way the spells relate to the contemporary process of re-lexification of the vernacular and the religiously motivated negative language attitude as articulated, for example, in treatise XVI of the Corpus Hermeticum.

4.3. The process of insertion: Greek loanwords in the Demotic spells