The Sambar is a large deer endemic to India and other parts of Asia. It has a peculiar name in Malayalam: mlav മ്ലാവ്. Now, the generic word for “deer” in Malayalam is maan മാൻ. mlav shares with maan the first sound, ma. But it differs in the next sound: whereas mlav has a consonant la following ma, maan has a vowel a following ma. Could these two words have derived from a common root?
I’ve written about the roots of Malayalam in ancient Egyptian in my previous articles. The ancient Egyptian word for “antelope” was m3, attested from 2686 BCE to 1843 BCE (and possibly later).¹ The first letter m was pronounced as ma. The last letter ‘3’ evolved into two different pronunciations in Egyptian. In old Egyptian, it was la. It changed to a in later Egyptian.² Thus, according to old Egyptian, m3 was mla, remarkably close to Malayalam mlav; according to later Egyptian, m3 was maa, remarkably close to Malayalam maan. Thus, if mlav and maan derived from Egyptian word, m3, they did so at different times according to the evolving pronunciation of ‘3’ in Egyptian.
Adding a twist to this hypothesis is an alternate Egyptian synonym for “antelope” dating to around 2400 BCE: hbn.³ The first two letters are ha and ba, possibly joined together into hba. The last letter n had two alternate pronunciations: la and na, the former only in old Egyptian and the latter in both old and later Egyptian.⁴ Thus, “antelope” was hbla or hban in old Egyptian (it has not been attested in later Egyptian). Because it is unlikely that the same spelling for the same word would have two different pronunciations contemporaneously, it is logical to conclude that in old Egyptian, as mla was the word for antelope, its synonym was the differently pronounced hban. Egyptian b evolved into ma in many words in Malayalam, while h was dropped. Thus, hban hbn became Malayalam maan.
According to modern scientific classification, deer belong to the family Cervidae, a group that includes elk, moose, reindeer, and the roe deer. Antelopes, on the other hand, belong to the family Bovidae, which means they are more closely related to cattle, bison, and buffalo than they are to deer. Yet, to the unscientific eye, the deer and the antelope, especially their larger varieties, look strikingly similar. It is no wonder then, that the Egyptian “antelope” m3 and hbn became, respectively, Malayalam “deer” mlav and maan.
Notes
[1] Thesaurus Lingua Aegyptiae, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/66130.
[2] Carsten Peust, An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language (Gottingen: Peust und Gutschmidt, 1999).
[3] Thesaurus Lingua Aegyptiae, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/98160.
[4] James Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
