The Egyptian origin of names and forms of the West Semitic (Canaanite) consonantal graphemes illustrated by MĪM / MĒM and NŪN

Abstract

Being a result of fruitful cooperation of Semitologist (A. Nemirovskaya) and Egyptologist (A. Soushchevsky) the article proposes a reconstruction of graphic and lexical prototypes of the two West Semitic graphemes that are presumed to stem from two- (MĪM) and three-component (NŪN) Egyptian groups: MĪM with the internal structure in Hieratic ‘owl + an arm with a round cake in the palm’, and lexically meaning m-im(j) (the deictic particle + ‘to give’, imperativ); NŪN with the internal structure in Hieratic ‘rippling wave + pot + reduced w’, and lexically meaning n-w-nw.