242 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



(g) The remaining lines are very bad. Cf. this juxtaposition of 

 the two renderiags : 



on whom men were wearied out auquel on a inflige 

 and gave up, .... 



and could not conquer him ; .... 



but we, poor wretches, .... 



are overcome, wittout any torment ! tani de supplices. 



Here he has {g) misunderstood auhise ; {h) wrongly edited and 

 then omitted, auke tootw ebol [cf. 252, i] ; («") left out the 

 next clause ; {j) omitted the following ; (h) failed to grasp the 

 meaning of tiicotp as a. present passive, and (J) made no attempt at 

 rendering ajS. 



Surely this is a deficient tale of bricks ! It may be said that the 

 ipyo8iwKT7]<; is strict, but at all events the axvpov was abundantly 

 supplied, so that the cnJvTafts t-^s TrXty^etas should have been forth- 

 comiag. Would a little ' chaff ' mixed with the criticism lead to a 

 better treatment of the ' syntax ' in the future ? 



[II. ] 



These examples will sufiice to bring into relief the kind of errors 

 committed by this school of Egyptologists. And curiously enough, 

 just a century ago [1785], Mingarelli made the same complaint about 

 "W'ilkins : Ceterum si ut IlempMtic(B linguce peritus fuit WilJcinsiits, 

 ita et thebaicam calltiisset, .... mendis, quce .... notavi, lihrum 

 suwn neqiiaquam fcedavisset, Aegyp. Cod. Eel., Ease. 2, p. 5. That is 

 precisely the position : — 



The Editors of South Coptic will have to learn South Coptic : 

 they must not rely on their [great or small] skill in Korth Coptic. Eor 

 example, jS^orth Coptic use ai, ak, &c., as both perfect and present 

 prefix, but South Coptic does not. That is surely an elementary piece 

 of knowledge not hard to comprehend, but apparently it is hard to 

 realize ! The confusion in the translation of these verbal prefixes is 

 lamentable, and leads to all sorts of misconceptions, as will appear 

 from the numerous examples of defective editing now to be given 

 nearly in the order of the pages. 



33. In the very second line of his translation, M. Bouriant errs on 

 this score, by rendering [147, 2] eke-wonh-k nai ebol qui vi'es 

 apparu, instead of thou wilt appear to me. 



