So, I know οἴκοι and ἐκεῖ are relicts of a locative case that existed at some point, but I haven’t found a source that comes right out and says χαμαί is. Is it, and if so, what was the noun it was the locative of?
Are there any other examples of such relicts?
Here is Beekes:
LSJ also direct χαμαί and χθών to Indo-European origins, but could there be any remotest connection between them and the Χημία(or kmt, the Egyptian name for Egypt, from black-land)? They sound so close to each other.
Without seeing which dialect of Coptic LSJ lists, because it is is only displayed with an asterix on Perseus, I would guess it is the Bohairic (from an Arabic word meaning “near the sea”) dialect (viz. giving the Coptic word ΧΗΜΙ) that was spoken in and near Alexandria. Whatever the dialect, the exact relationship between the Coptic dialects and the standard transcriptions of hieroglyphic symbols is not a well explored area.
Χημία , ἡ,
A.Black-land. Chemmi, Egyptian name for Egypt, Plu. 2.364c. (Egypt. Kmt, Copt. <*> ‘Egypt’.)
One of the words in Middle Egyptian for “the land of Egypt” (as opposed to the surrounding desert - the Red Land) was Km.t "the black land. The name refers to the Nile valley or the black soil deposited in the Nile valley after the yearly inundation. The sense of “to the Km.t” implied in deriving χαμαὶ from Χημία was expressed in Middle Egyptian not by an ending, but by the addition of the preposition “r” “to, toward, in order to” as “r Km.t”. That can be seen in the wiktionary article for kmt. [That article doesn’t give the meaning “soil of Egypt” though.] The characters to look at in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant snipit are the ellipse followed by the triangle with a jagged edge over a semicircle over a shadowed x in a circle. The first character looking like an elipse is “r” (a mouth) being a preposition with the meaning “to” and the others a piece of crocodile skin (phonetic value /km/) over a loaf (phonetic value /t/) over a crossroads (a determinative - a symbol in this case with meaning but no sound). Those three are the characters for Km.t “Egypt - the habitable Black (soiled) land”.
The scholarly reconstruction of the middle vowel for Km.t in Middle Egyptian is /u:/ not the Coptic eta. In the original pronunciation of Coptic before the 19th century reforms to allign it with the Modern Greek pronunciation of the letters, there were 2 values for eta in Coptic. Some words had undergone iotacism, while in others the eta was pronounced as an open /æ/. If memory serves me, and I don’t necessarily trust it on this point, ΧΗΜΙ (the Coptic word) was pronounced with the open /æ/.
The word in question χαμαὶ is used from earliest times (Homer) in Greek and predates Plutarch’s borrowing of the (Bohairic) Coptic word by a millenium at least. The word you have suggested is a record by Plutarch of what the Egyptians call their country in their own language:
I admire a brave imagination, but in this case, you are suggesting that an obsolete ending was affixed to a loan word before it was borrowed. That is possible, but not probable.
A side question about Old Prussian orthography. Is the initial “s” the standard orthography for a /z/ sound?
Thanks for such an enlightenment, ἑκηβόλε !!! 