Nefertiti, the beauty queen
QUESTION How did Nefertiti get her name and how was it expressed in Egyptian hieroglyphs of the time? Is it true the last part of this queen’s name is the origin of the modern common slang expression for the female bosom? Students of egyptian hieroglyphs will know that this writing system includes no vowels, in the same way that ancient Hebrew, Arabic and Phoenician scripts were written with just the consonants.
educated people in ancient egypt (mainly scribes and priests) could recognise a word from its context and insert the correct vowels when reading the texts aloud.
that knowledge is now lost and we have only a very few rare clues to help us read complete words in the original language.
naming traditions at the time were nothing like those today. People had given names, not family names, and often had several given names, nicknames and/or affectionate pet names.
nefertiti’s two official names were written in a royal cartouche with signs spelling out Nfr nfrw itn Nfr.t jy.tj where the letter ‘i’ represents a consonant sound not found in modern english.
the meaning is ‘Beautiful are the beauties of Aten, the beautiful female has come’. the first of these is clearly derived from the new Aten religion which briefly supplanted the egyptian gods, while the second is more likely to have been a simple comment on her pleasing appearance as an infant.
It’s the second of these names that has been simplified in modern english to make pronunciation easier for students: nefertiti — but this isn’t how it would have been said in ancient times.
the word nfr means good, beautiful, happy, perfection or goodness and in this case has the standard feminine ending -t. the verb following it means ‘has come’ and in its modern, conventionalised form would be read ‘iti’.
there is no connection between this name and the modern slang word mentioned which is closely connected to ‘teat’.’It was used in Middle english as early as the 12th century in the form tytta — many centuries before any renewed understanding of egyptian hieroglyphs.
David Rayner, Canterbury. QUESTION In at least two cities, Worcester and York, there are historical shopping areas named The Shambles. What is the origin of this name? tHe ultimate source of ‘shambles’ is in the Old english sceamul, a stool or table from the Latin scamnum, a bench. this was the word used for a market stall on which meat was sold and from there passed in the plural form to the term for a slaughterhouse where the meat was prepared.
Hence ‘shambles’ in its colloquial use for any scene of disorder or confusion, as formerly applied to slaughterhouses.
the meat stall sense of the word remains in the streets or markets in some older towns, as in York and Chesterfield.
John Buxton, Chesterfield, Derbys. QUESTION What was ‘government cheese’? AS PARt of the World War II rationing effort, the Ministry of Food decreed that all cheese produced for sale had to be a certain type of cheddar and this was nicknamed Government cheddar or Government cheese.
the ban on all cheese production except cheddar lasted until 1954, nine years after the end of the war.
For years, people in Britain could obtain only a rather bland uniform cheddar and the regulation had a devastating effect on the cheese industry.
Before World War I, there were about 3,500 independent cheese makers in Great Britain. By 1945 there were fewer than 100. It also practically wiped out all farmhouse and artisanal manufacture of cheese. even popular cheeses such as Red Leicester and Wensleydale almost disappeared.
Government controls on milk prices through the Milk Marketing Board continued to discourage production of other varieties of cheese until well into the eighties and it was only in the midnineties (following the effective abolition of the MMB) that the revival of the uK cheese industry began in earnest.
British government cheese should not be c confused with the u.S. version, a more m modern product. In the early eighties the u u.S. department of Agriculture found itself with an abundance of cheese and butter purchased from u.S. dairy producers, who couldn’t sell it all on the open market. the practice of buying up surplus dairy p products started in the depression as a w way to maintain the dairy industry. In december 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a measure releasing 30 million pounds from the cheese s stockpile. In 1983, the temporary emergency Food distribution Program was formed to distribute to the poor cheese in large unsliced blocks stamped ‘Government Cheese’. the giant cheese stockpile was stored in cold caves near Springfield, Missouri. the new York times reported that by 1983 the value of the national cheese-and-butter stockpile was more than $4 billion. Eric Bader, oban, Argyll and Bute. QUESTION Does the title of the movie Gattaca spell out a DNA sequence? FURTHER to the initial answer, the chemical bases A, t, G and C may be likened to an alphabet, from which 64 alternative, three-letter ‘words’ (the only kind used by the genetic code) may be formed.
Consecutive sequences of these words all become translated during bodily celldivision, mostly as the identities of amino acids. these become strung together as proteins, of which many thousands are used, and many more are possible.
But some words are translated as a ‘stop’ instruction, which marks the end of a gene. So, a gene may be likened to a meaningful genetic sentence.
Most of the time, when cell-division isn’t taking place, DNA separates itself into long sequences of genes, which fold themselves up into compact chromosomes. So, chromosomes might be likened to very long paragraphs, or chapters, in the complete book of life — the genome.
the name ‘ Gattaca’, seen as seven genetic letters, can represent a maximum of two three-letter words, along with one unused base/letter; or a single word, with two incomplete words on either side.
In either case, the sequence is so short that it could have no useful genetic meaning, in isolation.
Astrologers and their followers may like to note that the names of the first four signs of the Zodiac (literally ‘circle of little animals’) A(ries), t(aurus), G(emini) and C(ancer) all share the initial letter of a genetic chemical base.
David S. Bradford, Belmonte, Portugal.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also fax them to 01952 780111 or you can email them to charles. legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.