The Linguist

The Linguist 59,5 - October/November 2020

The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology

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24 The Linguist Vol/59 No/5 2020 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES But this isn't a really satisfying reading, so let's go back to the text and see what else we can get from it. What if we did not read the two lines as the dual and kept the word sn-nw? With nsw ('king') following it, we would have sn-nw nsw, which sounds like the Egyptian sn nsw ('brother of the king'). Sn ('brother') is normally written with different hieroglyphs, but it looks as though the writer is exploiting different readings of the same signs to allow us to understand this phrase in two ways. We can read it either as 'the syngenes and dioiketes of the king' or as 'the syngenes [which means] brother of the king'. I like the second option best because it both borrows the Greek word into Egyptian and explains what it means. This may seem like a lot of effort to go to in order to understand an aural and visual pun which was last vaguely amusing to someone over 2,000 years ago, but it is a good example of the kind of thing that can emerge when you look really closely at multilingual inscriptions from the ancient world. The Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions project, and others like it, can give us a fresh perspective on some of the most familiar and recognisable objects from the ancient world. Notes 1 Funded by the AHRC, the project began in 2013, directed by Professor Alan Bowman at Oxford University's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. In addition to a hefty set of printed volumes, all the information will be published online for free. 2 https://rosetta-stone.dh.uni-leipzig.de/rs/the- digital-rosetta-stone Sometimes we have to contend with mysteries like this when we work with texts whose authors are long dead Joanna Biernat-Sowka asks if linguistic or a hindrance, as she explores a world W e know it is common for children to invent new words and phrases in order to express themselves, but it is increasingly apparent that adults, too, create large numbers of new words, particularly in the fast-moving world of business and social media. Abbreviations have become especially noticeable in corporate and office environments. We spot them on a daily basis in emails, letters, leaflets, advertisements, notes, flash cards and phone conversations. Next to standard abbreviations, including FYI ('for your information'), MD ('Managing Director') and OOO ('out of office'), are offerings such as FBM ('fine by me'/'agreed'), GA ('go ahead') and LMK ('let me know'). Entire sentences may be represented by a combination of letters, with 'sorry I missed your call' reduced to SIMYC and 'I could not agree more' to ICAM. During the pandemic, WFH ('work from home') came out the office with the rest of us, becoming a household expression. This phenomenon raises some questions. Should we understand it as a sign of laziness or are we just being creative in our language use? In the age of real-time data transfer, businesses have to show greater flexibility and reflect the growing speed of Say it short

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