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Egyptian language
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Egyptian is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family along with the Chadic, Berber, Semitic, Cushitic and possibly Omotic languages. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known.
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Encyclopedia
Egyptian is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family along with the Chadic, Berber, Semitic, Cushitic and possibly Omotic languages. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian survived until the 5th century AD in the form of Demotic and until the late 17th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Coptic is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. It reportedly has a handful of native speakers today.
Periodization
Scholars group the Egyptian language into 6 major chronological divisions:
Egyptian writing in the form of label and signs has been dated to 3200 BC. These early texts are generally lumped together under the term "Archaic Egyptian."
In 1999, Archaeology Magazine reported that the earliest Egyptian Glyphs date back to 3400 BC which "...challenge the commonly held belief that early logographs, pictographic symbols representing a specific place, object, or quantity, first evolved into more complex phonetic symbols in Mesopotamia."
Old Egyptian was spoken for some 500 years from 2600 BC onwards. Middle Egyptian was spoken from about 2000 BC for a further 700 years when Late Egyptian made its appearance; Middle Egyptian did, however, survive until the first few centuries AD as a written language, similar to the use of Latin during the Middle Ages and that of Classical Arabic today. Demotic Egyptian first appears about 650 BC and survived as a spoken language until fifth century AD. Coptic Egyptian appeared in the fourth century AD and survived as a living language until the sixteenth century AD, when European scholars traveled to Egypt to learn it from native speakers during the Renaissance. It probably survived in the Egyptian countryside as a spoken language for several centuries after that. The Bohairic dialect of Coptic is still used by the Egyptian Christian Churches.
Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian were all written using hieroglyphs and hieratic. Demotic was written using a script derived from hieratic; its appearance is vaguely similar to modern Arabic script and is also written from right to left (although the two are not related). Coptic is written using the Coptic alphabet, a modified form of the Greek alphabet with a number of symbols borrowed from Demotic for sounds that did not occur in Ancient Greek.
Arabic became the language of Egypt's political administration soon after the Arab conquest in the seventh century, and gradually replaced Coptic as the language spoken by the populace. Today, Coptic survives as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church.
Structure of the language
Egyptian is a fairly typical Afro-Asiatic language. At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary is a root of three consonants. Sometimes there were only two, for example // "sun" (where the [] represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative), but larger roots are also common some being as large as five // "be upside-down". Vowels and other consonants were then inserted into the consonantal skeleton in order to derive different meanings, in the same way as Arabic, Hebrew, and other Afro-Asiatic languages do today. However, because vowels (and sometimes glides) weren't written in any Egyptian script aside from Coptic, it can be difficult to reconstruct the actual forms of words; hence orthographic "to choose", for example, could represent the stative (as the stative endings can be left unexpressed) or imperfective verb forms or even a verbal noun (i. e., "a choosing").
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic. It also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afro-Asiatic languages, although exactly how the emphatic consonants were realized is not precisely known. In transcription,
Classical Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; the equivalent to "the man opens the door", would be a sentence corresponding to "opens the man the door" (). It uses the so-called status constructus to combine two or more nouns to express the genitive, similar to Semitic and Berber languages. The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words p3, t3 and n3 for this purpose. Like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to Arabic and Tamasheq. It also uses three grammatical numbers, contrasting singular, dual, and plural forms, although there is a tendency for the loss of the dual as a productive form in later Egyptian.
Egyptian writing
Most surviving texts in the Egyptian language are primarily written on stone in the hieroglyphic script. However, in antiquity, the majority of texts were written on perishable papyrus in hieratic and (later) demotic, which are now lost. There was also a form of cursive hieroglyphic script used for religious documents on papyrus, such as the Book of the Dead in the Ramesside Period; this script was simpler to write than the hieroglyphs in stone inscriptions, but was not as cursive as hieratic, lacking the wide use of ligatures. Additionally, there was a variety of stone-cut hieratic known as lapidary hieratic. In the language's final stage of development, the Coptic alphabet replaced the older writing system. The native name for Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is or "writing of the words of god." Hieroglyphs are employed in two ways in Egyptian texts: as ideograms that represent the idea depicted by the pictures; and more commonly as phonograms denoting their phonetic value.
Phonology
While the consonantal phonology of the Egyptian language may be reconstructed, its exact phonetics are unknown, and there are varying opinions on how to classify the individual phonemes. A peculiarity shared with the Semitic languages is the existence of an "emphatic series." It was assumed in the past that the binary opposition in stops that can be reconstructed for Egyptian was one of voicing, but is now thought to be one between voiceless and emphatic stops.
Since vowels were not written natively, reconstructions of the Egyptian vowel system are much more uncertain, relying mainly on the evidence from Coptic and foreign transcriptions of Egyptian personal and place names.
Because Egyptian is also recorded over a full two millennia, the Archaic and Late stages being separated by the amount of time that separates Old Latin from modern Italian, it must be assumed that significant phonetic changes would have occurred over that time.
The vocalization of Egyptian is partially known, largely on the basis of reconstruction from Coptic, in which the vowels are written. Recordings of Egyptian words in other languages provide an additional source of evidence. Scribal errors provide evidence of changes in pronunciation over time. The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by a few specialists in the language. For all other purposes the Egyptological pronunciation is used, which is, of course, artificial and often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was spoken.
Plosives
Earlier Egyptian
Egyptian g may represent two phonemes (g1 and g²) , both continuing Afro-Asiatic .
Palatal (emphatic ) continue Afro-Asiatic and (merged with t and d in Demotic)
Earlier Coptic
Fricatives
s and z were collapsed in the Middle Kingdom.
may have been in the Old Kingdom, evolving into a pharyngeal in the Middle Kingdom. It is called "Egyptian Ayin" after the Semitic pharyngeal fricative.
The nature of vs. is controversial, possibly a voiced vs. voiceless opposition.
3, often identified as "Egyptian Aleph" (a glottal stop), or alternatively a remnant of an r or l phoneme.
i i?, probably an Aleph sound [].
i i y (i?i?) []
w w, either of [] and []
Nasals
m m
n n
Liquids
r r
l, in writing expressed as n, r, j, nr or 3 or often as the lion-shaped biliteral rw.
Traditional alef (3) may also have been a alveolar approximant .
Egyptological pronunciation
As a convention, Egyptologists make use of an "Egyptological pronunciation" in which the consonants are given fixed values and vowels are inserted in accordance with essentially arbitrary rules. Two distinct different consonants, Egyptian alef and the Egyptian ayin, are both often pronounced as . The yodh pronounced as , and similarly, w as . Between the other consonants, is then inserted. Thus, for example, the Egyptian king whose name is most accurately transliterated as R?-ms-sw is transcribed as "Ramesses", meaning "Ra has Fashioned (lit., "Borne") Him".
Change into Coptic
Grammar
Like most other Afro-Asiatic languages, Old and Middle Egyptian have a Verb–Subject–Object word order. This does not hold true for Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic.
Nouns
Egyptian nouns can be either masculine or feminine (indicated as with other Afro-Asiatic languages by adding a -t), and singular, plural (-w / -wt), or dual (-wy / -ty).
Articles (both definite and indefinite) did not develop until Late Egyptian, but are used widely thereafter.
Pronouns
Egyptian has three different types of personal pronouns: suffix, enclitic (called "dependent" by Egyptologists) and independent pronouns. It also has a number of verbal endings added to the infinitive to form the stative, which are regarded by some linguists as a "fourth" set of personal pronouns. They bear close resemblance to their Semitic and Berber counterparts. The three main sets of personal pronouns are as follows:
| | Suffix | Dependent | Independent |
|---|
| 1st s. | -i? | wi? | i?nk |
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| 2nd s.m. | -k | tw | ntk |
|---|
| 2nd s.f. | -t | tn | ntt |
|---|
| 3rd s.m. | -f | sw | ntf |
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| 3rd s.f. | -s | sy | nts |
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| 1st p. | -n | n | i?nn |
|---|
| 2nd p. | -tn | tn | nttn |
|---|
| 3rd p. | -sn | sn | ntsn |
|---|
It also has demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these and those), in masculine, feminine, and common plural:
| Mas. | Fem. | Plu. |
|---|
| pn | tn | nn | "this, that, these, those" | | pf | tf | nF | "that, those" | | pw | tw | nw | "this, that, these, those" (archaic) | | p3 | t3 | n3 | "this, that, these, those" (colloquial [earlier] and Late Egyptian) |
Finally there are interrogative pronouns (what, who, etc.)
| mi? | "who? what?" | (dependent) | | ptr | "who? what?" | (independent) | | i | "what?" | (dependent) | | i?šst | "what?" | (independent) | | zi? | "which?" | (independent and dependent) |
Verbs
The verbal morphology of Egyptian can be divided into finite and non-finite forms. Finite verbs convey person, tense/aspect, mood, and voice. Each is indicated by a set of affixal morphemes attached to the verb — the basic conjugation is sm.f 'he hears'. The non-finite forms occur without a subject and they are the infinitive, the participles and the negative infinitive, which Gardiner calls "negatival complement". There are two main tenses/aspects in Egyptian: past and temporally unmarked imperfective and aorist forms. The latter are determined from their syntactic context.
Adjectives
Adjectives agree in gender and number with their nouns, for example: s nfr "(the) good man" and st nfrt "(the) good woman".
Attributive adjectives used in phrases fall after the noun they are modifying, such as in "(the) great god" (). However, when used independently as a predicate in an adjectival phrase, such "(the) god (is) great" ( ) [lit., "great (is the) god"), the adjective precedes the noun.
Prepositions
Egyptian prepositions come before the noun.
| m | "in, as, with, from" | | n | "to, for" | | r | "to, at" | | i?n | "by" | | "with" | | m? | "like" | | "on, upon" | | "behind, around" | | "under" | | tp | "atop" | | "since" |
Adverbs
Adverbs are words such as "here" or "where?". In Egyptian, they come at the end of a sentence, e.g.,
z?.n n?r ?m "the god went there", "there" (?m) is the adverb.
Some common Egyptian Adverbs:
| "here" | | i?m | "there" | | "where" | | zy-nw | "when" (lit. "what moment") | | mi?-i? | "how" (lit. "like-what") | | r-mi? | "why" (lit. "for what") | | nt | "before" |
Modern-day resources
Interest in the ancient Egyptian language continues. For example, it is still taught in several universities. Many resources are in French or German, in addition to English so it can be useful to know one of these languages though not a requirement.
For the film Stargate, Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith was commissioned to develop a constructed language to simulate the tongue of ancient Egyptians living alone on another planet for millennia. He also created the Egyptian dialogue for The Mummy (1999 film). In the French comedy Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre, a similar attempt was apparently made ( in French). Egyptian taunts and responses are also heard while playing the Egyptian campaign of Age of Mythology.
While Egyptian culture is one of the influences of Western civilization, few words of Egyptian origin are found in English. Even those associated with ancient Egypt were usually transmitted in Greek forms. Some examples of Egyptian words that have survived in English include ebony (Egyptian bny, via Greek and then Latin), ivory (Egyptian abw / abu, literally 'ivory; elephant'), phoenix (Egyptian bnw, literally 'heron'; transmitted through Greek), Pharaoh (Egyptian , literally "great house"; transmitted through Hebrew), as well as the proper names Phineas (Egyptian, sy, used as a generic term for Nubian foreigners) and Susan (Egyptian, , literally "lotus flower"; probably transmitted first from Egyptian into Hebrew Shoshanah).
Literature
Overviews
Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-44384-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-521-44849-2 (pbk) Carsten Peust, Egyptian phonology : an introduction to the phonology of a dead language, Peust & Gutschmidt, 1999. ISBN 3933043026
Grammars
Middle Egyptian - An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, first edition, Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-65312-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-521-77483-7 (pbk) Collier, Mark, and Manley, Bill, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs : A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach Yourself, British Museum Press (ISBN 0-7141-1910-5) and University of California Press (ISBN 0-520-21597-4), both in 1998. Gardiner, Sir Alan H., Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs, Griffith Institute, Oxford, 3rd ed. 1957. ISBN 0-900416-35-1 Hoch, James E., Middle Egyptian Grammar, Benben Publications, Mississauga, 1997. ISBN 0-920168-12-4
Dictionaries
A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Griffith Institute, Oxford, 1962. ISBN 0-900416-32-7 (hardback) Lesko, Leonard H., A Dictionary of Late Egyptian, 4 Vols., B.C. Scribe Publications, Berkeley, 1982. ISBN 0-930548-03-5 (hbk), ISBN 0-930548-04-3 (pbk). Shennum, David, English-Egyptian Index of Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Undena Publications, 1977. ISBN 0-89003-054-5
Online dictionaries
- - Translates English words, sentences, and phrases into ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
- , an online searchable dictionary of ancient Egyptian words (translations are in German)
- , an online service available from October 2004 which is associated with various German Egyptological projects, including the monumental of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Berlin, Germany).
Important Note: the old grammars & dictionaries of E. A. Wallis Budge have long been considered obsolete by Egyptologists, even though these books are still available for purchase.
More book information is available at
See also
External links
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