Mapping the Ancient Mind: iClassifier, a New Platform for Systematic Analysis of Classifiers in Egyptian and beyond

Sumerian, an agglutinative language of unknown affiliation, surfaced in mankind’s earliest written sources around 3300 BCE. It continued to play a salient role in the transmission of cuneiform cultures for more than three millennia, even after its disappearance as a vernacular (around 2000 BCE). From its beginnings, semantic classification played an important role in this initially predominantly semasiographic-ideographic script. Here, such classifications are contrasted with and compared to the normalized ‘consolidated’ standard set of pre- and post-nominal classifiers – generally known as ‘determinatives’ – which function chiefly as sortal classifiers. It is further suggested here that the relationship between classifying nouns and classified nouns is best described in terms of nominal apposition. This article further provides updated examples of how the relevant information was entered into the iClassifier digital tool, specially designed for such comparisons in order to improve our understanding of how cuneiform classifiers mark their host words and to make them comparable with similar features in other complex scripts and other languages. We will then briefly survey how the answers to queries in the iClassifier may help to illuminate ‘the diverse mindsets of ancient Mesopotamia’.

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Classification in Sumerian cuneiform and the implementation of iClassifier

Selz,

Zhang

2024

Semantic classifiers (determinatives) and categorization in the ancient Egyptian writing system: Rules, list of classifiers, and studies byiClassifieron theStory of Sinuhe

Goldwasser,

Soler

2024

Self Cite

In the last two decades, we have extensively explored the semantic classifiers in ancient Egyptian scripts, showing how they encode the world from two complementary perspectives: universal cognitive tendencies of classification along with Egyptian society's categorization of the world. Our central hypothesis is that each graphemic classifier in the Egyptian writing system heads a conceptual category. The assemblage of words classified by a particular classifier presents us with a dynamic map of an emic category in the mind of a culture. Classifiers in the Egyptian script allow us to trace central and marginal members of conceptual categories, spot interrelations and overlaps between categories, observe diachronic developments and changes, and discover incompatibility of categories. The number of classifier occurrences in complex script systems amounts to millions (i.e., big data). In the last decade, we developed in the ArchaeoMind Lab the digital tool iClassifier 1 (© Goldwasser, Harel, and Nikolaev) designed to check our hypothesis on a large scope of texts from different periods and different scripts. We mark classifiers in imported digitalized corpora—in ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptian, and Sumerian cuneiform. This contribution introduces the reader to the rules of the classifier system in the Egyptian script and presents new results from a pilot project on a genuine Egyptian corpus (variants of the Story of Sinuhe).

iClassifier: A digital research tool for corpus-based classifier networks in complex writing systems

Harel,

Goldwasser,

Nikolaev

2024

Self Cite

This article presents the method applied by the iClassifier (©Goldwasser/Harel/Nikolaev) digital research tool for the study of the linguistic phenomenon of classifiers. The tool was created in 2019 with the objective of curating corpus-based and data-driven documentation of classifier systems. The record of classifiers comprises millions of tokens worth of “big data” analysis. By tagging classifiers in various corpora, a topography of categories emerges, visualized as complex, multilayered networks. This article offers an overview of how classifier-based networks are created and how network analysis methods can be applied to analyze knowledge organization. We present the data structure and annotation scheme of the iClassifier research tool, demonstrating how one can plot classifier networks and generate reports of lemma and classifier repertoires in each corpus. The iClassifier tool provides quantitative reports, including classifier frequency, variation and co-occurrence statistics. Each data subset, such as a certain part of speech, timespan, geographical location or textual genre, can be queried and visualized. The tool is meant to allow browsing between a macro-overview of all categories in a corpus and zooming in into micro-analysis of the individual categories and lemmas that built up a corpus. Each classifier is seen as a category head, and the categories are drawn in their multilayered and multidimensional relationships. The potency of this tool is in documenting the phenomenon in large corpora of texts and expanding our knowledge about the rules and functions of classifier systems, leading us to a more refined mind-mapping of ancient cultures. Currently, very little systematic analysis has been done on this ancient record of emic information.