THE SOUND OF MEANING: COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN, MAYA AND NAHUATL

In the book Sounds, Symbols, and Meaning: Ancient Egyptian, Nahuatl and Maya, we examine the possible linguistic correspondences among these languages. Interestingly enough, one can identify ancient Egyptian in innumerable words of the Nahuatl language simply by dropping the letter “l” in the latter. Or, one may add the letter “l” to many ancient Egyptian words, and the similarity with Nahuatl becomes striking. Many words between ancient Egyptian and these Mesoamerican languages share a linguistic correspondence on three levels: phonemes, morphemes and even the symbolic or graphic (glyphs and hieroglyphs) level. We discuss the possibility of there having existed a Mesoamerican-Kemi proto-lingua possibly in the past, before these language groups were formed.