The eyes cannot hear nor feel? A contrastive view on perception verbs in Ancient Egyptian and Kirundi

Senses connect all human bodies and minds to the surrounding environment, but the languages of the world differ in how they segment and categorise the different types of perception. Taking as a point of departure identified universal (and macro-areal) patterns of semantic structure in the field of perception and cognition (Georgakopoulos et al. in press), the goal of this lecture is to contrast the polysemy patterns of perception verbs in Ancient Egyptian (Afroasiatic) and Kirundi (Bantu), and to situate the results in a typological perspective (resorting to CLICS3, https://clics.clld.org). Although perception has attracted much attention in linguistics and cognitive sciences (e.g., Aikhenvald & Storch 2013; Evans and Wilkins 2000; Howes 2003; Levinson & Majid 2014, Majid & Burenhult 2014, Maslova 2004, San Roque et al. Sweetser, 1990, Vanhove 2008, Viberg 1983, and Wälchli 2016), there are only a few studies available for Egyptian (Steinbach 2015, Steinbach-Eicke 2017) and virtually none for Kirundi. These two languages however display both diachronic and synchronic patterns of co-expression that shed new light on long-standing questions, such as the prevalence of vision over audition, the relationship between perception and cognition, and the types of polysemy patterns that are possible in this semantic field – in Kirundi, for instance, a corpus-study reveals that the same root kwumva ‘to hear’ (and morphologically derived forms) can be used to express all types of perception except for the visual one.