روح

Three main questions on this Site

Who am I?


My name is Bayoumi Andil, given Andil (Ar.Kandil) is my surname & Bayoumi is my first one.
I am a teacher, a translator and an editor by profession., yet I am a researcher in linguistics and a writer of drama, short story, novel., sometimes of poetry, by occupation. A few yet well-cultivated people call me philosopher or theoretician of modern Egyptian Nationalism.
Dr. Nabil Abdel Malik, an Egyptian nationalist who is living now in Canada and is heading the Canadian-Egyptian Organization wrote to me, after reading one of my main books, namely, "Present-day Culture in Egypt" these words: "It is not a book, it is a national civilized message to the present generation and to generations to come. You are one of the true, sincere Egyptians who escaped annilation. You are a part of the continuity of our glorious past towards a hoped-for better present and brighter future"
Dr. Emad Abu Ghazi, another Egyptian nationalist who is living in Egypt and teaching at Cairo University, Faculty of arts, Department of History, referred to me as "A guardian of the Egyptian national Heritage".
Dr. Milad Hanna, a one-time professor of engineering at Ein-Shams University, called my book, " a new perspective which ought to prevail in the 21st century, not only in Egypt, but also in the whole Middle East".
Ingvar Rydberg, a Sweedish orientalist wrote to me after reading my book: "it's a powerful book".

It all started by searching for the real meaning of my first name: Bayoumi. All what I learned then from les miens about the name, was no more than it was the name of a prominant "Wali" i.e.Saint and even before my birth I was given it by a Spirit, who was disguising herself in the attire of a poor seller of oranges. She predicted miraculously, so the legend goes on to say, that the coming baby would be male bearing its own divine name. However this name with its extraordinary consonant-vowel sequence was becoming more and more strange to the ears of modern Egyptians, as Arabization of Egypt, under the veil of a supposedly unstained target: eradication of disgraceful Illiteracy, was going on speedily on all levels and in every aspect of life, in particular education&information systems. Consequently modern Egyptians were losing at almost the same rate their Egyptianity, rather their Egyptian Nationalism, through forgetting, neglecting and even disparaging their grandfathers, the builders of one of the most civilized civilizations in the Ancient Middle East, I mean, the Great Pharaohs, in other words Modern Egyptians are being cut off from their roots in their own land: Egypt. A British acquaintance of mine told me sadly one day "Modern Egyptians don't deserve their name During my search I passed by so many stopovers which I am going to dwell upon later on.

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Of-the-Sea:

In the end I came to know that my name is Coptic i.e. Egyptian and it means etymologically "Of the Sea" i.e. belonging to Lower Egypt as it is nearer geographically to the Mediterranean Sea. If /ba/or more precisely /Pa/(the phonemic contrast between b&p was lost due to the influence of Arabic language in Egypt) for masculine, = /of/ in English(nearer /du/ in French), we should expect to have in Coptic another particle for feminine gender as French does:/de la/, which is really the case as we learn from professor Ranke: We have in Coptic Ta-ioum, the feminine form of Pa-ioum rather Bayoum. So /of/. + ioum more accurately (Der See, in German) + i which stands for Nisba that is a possessive particle, both in Hamitic and Semitic languages. Only after learning what my personal name means & in which language, I began taking pride in bearing it.

To cut a long story short, my pursuit of the meaning of my personal name, which started to seem, to the ears of modern "literate Egyptians" unfortunately enough, meaningless, worn-out and even ridiculous, lead me to the search of a lost identity of one of the most influential ,most civilized nations of the Ancient Middle East.

What is this Site?

This Site, as you may see for yourselves dear readers, is some sort of compiling, classifying and publishing material, authored by me(unless otherwise is noted) or rather The Poor Free, as I usually refer to myself, in an explicit contrast with the common reference by modern Egyptian writers, to be sure "Arabized-Egyptian" ones to themselves as "The Poor Slaves". That material varies from prose to poetry and from research works to children dramas and from poems to translations.

My Mother Tongue:

The main language of the Site is Modern Egyptian Language, a term coined by The Poor Free in the eighties, exactly in 1985 that is more than a quarter of a century ago. The term refers to my native, rather my mother language, which is dubbed sometimes a dialect or a slang, sometimes colloquial, whose derivation goes back in either case to Arabic language, something which I categorically reject and hence is the term MEL, which I shoulder the full responsibility of it. MEL.is in my own view the fourth stage in the never-ceasing evolution of the Egyptian tongue, provided that the three previous stages were Hieroglyphics (Hieratic was no more than a script), Demotic and Coptic, successively.
In addition MEL.is in my opinion, the greatest wealth modern Egyptians and perhaps the rest of the modern Middle East peoples, have. But the Site doesn't exclude the possibility of using any other foreign language, Arabic, English, French, Spanish etc. in publications which are supposed to appear on it. Given that English may have the Lion's share in this respect, being my first foreign language, rather my second foreign tongue after Arabic.
As I envisage that we won't be able to build up solid facts without carrying on with continuous, objective, impartial dialogue, based on the saying of one of our greatest theologists "Elshafeae"(an Egyptian Faqih(=thinker) of Arabian origin): My guess is right but liable to be falsified & yours could be false yet liable to be verified I would be more than grateful to hear ,read and see your comments.

Why is this Site ?

This Site has two closely-related objectives to achieve: the first which may be of some personal flavor is to break the "Siege of Silence" my Arabized-Egyptian contemporaries have been subjecting my works to during the greater part of my life. Sometimes I think in this vein: I am a little bit arrogant & I may deserve that conscious negligence on their part which I attempt to portray for myself as a Siege of Silence. However the fact that those who ignore my works claim parts of them to be theirs, argues against that way of thinking.
The second is simply to "carry" my works via such an effective means: The Net, to those who may not have access to my works, which are mostly unpublished or published on a comparatively small scale.
As MEL. is verte as the French say of newly-born languages, it lacks real codifications, first of all it is in bad need for an alphabet of its own. An alphabet which could unveil its phonemic system as what came to be known as Arabic alphabet does obscure that particular system, both on the consonant as well as the vowel level.
But we have to bear that distorting obscurity for a time, not a long one ,I hope, as The Poor Free is putting the last touches on a new alphabet based on Coptic script, particularly those famous seven (or so) characters derived from the demotic more cursive script.
This Site comes as a new phase in my efforts not to be the Last, but the First Egyptian, for being the former would be a great loss not only for Egypt, but also for the New Middle East, we all wish to see and perhaps for Humanity in general.
My motto, if I ever care to have any , is :My Egyptian Nationalism is before any other Nationalism ,however my Humanism is before my own Nationalism.
To sum it all up: if I felt any self-commitment, it would go to: Egyptian Spirit, Greek Reason and Human Conscience.
Bayoumi Andil