Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues
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Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei Independent Scholar, The Hague, Netherlands.
Abstract In this essay, I venture to describe my own trajectory, through linguistics and continental philosophy, to becoming a philologist specialized in the Old Nubian language, in tandem with a broader analysis of the destabilizing powers of philology that resonate in both deconstruction and psychoanalysis: the problem of the material carrier of writing as that which eventually determines the reading, the humbling idea that the most abstract thought of Plato can be traced to a crumbling fourth-century papyrus. In parallel, I also address the current state of Nubiology and how I have inserted myself into the field as an advocate of both accessible scholarship and a reanchoring of the scientific field within the local political and social context of Egypt and the Sudan. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 301–309. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00182-9 Even if one could bypass all institutions, all academic apparatuses, all schools […], all disciplines, all (public or private) media structures, recourse to language is indispensable for the minimal practice of philosophy. This massive and trivial evidence must be remembered not for itself but for the conclusions to which it should lead, and which we do not always draw – Jaques Derrida. As long as a single person must pay to be able to speak with others and toread and listen to them, language and philology are not free – Werner Hamacher
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postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 301–309
Gerven Oei
My parents had a friend called D. He possessed a magical book containing a collection of writing systems from around the world: Alphabete und Schriftzeichen des Morgen- und des Abendlandes (Bundesdruckerei, 1969). Each time we visited D., he would give me a copy of an alphabet, and write my name in it: вынceнт, विन्सेन्त्, ビンセント. I collected coins, stamps, and labels, matching them with their respective writing systems. I started experimenting with adapting non-Latin scripts to write Dutch: Armenian, Hangul, Katakana, Arabic, Devana¯garı¯. I dreamed of writing systems. I invented languages. Xargas hixnam, se`xanrouzau se`gers, avananr arxarerus, […]
1 See, for example, Yaguello (2006) and Okrent (2009). Rasula and McCaffery (1998) remains a necessary starting point.
2 For a lineage of this argument see De Man (1986), Hamacher (2019). See also van Gerven Oei (2014a, b, 2015), where I explore some of these themes.
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This is a poem I wrote in a language whose name I can no longer recall. I also lost the translation. But according to my marginal notes, -am in hixnam is a locative singular and the final -s in se`gers an adjectival second singular marker. This language is supposed to have derived from an older language called Martrar, in which the same poem would start as follows: Ktarkh’sˇ se¯kŋ’mı¯ / tsa¯kraktsˇ sa`khos / tph’nerak rkareros / […]. There were sound laws d
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