Egyptian language


The Egyptian language is an Afro-Asiatic language which was spoken in ancient Egypt. Its attestation stretches over an extraordinarily long time, from the Old Egyptian stage. Its earliest known complete written sentence has been dated to about 2690 BC, which makes it one of the oldest recorded languages known, along with Sumerian.
Its classical form is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period. The spoken language had evolved into Demotic by the time of Classical Antiquity, and finally into Coptic by the time of Christianisation. Spoken Coptic was almost extinct by the 17th century, but it remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria.

Classification

The Egyptian language belongs to the Afroasiatic language family. Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afroasiatic are its fusional morphology, nonconcatenative morphology, a series of emphatic consonants, a three-vowel system, nominal feminine suffix *-at, nominal m-, adjectival *-ī and characteristic personal verbal affixes. Of the other Afroasiatic branches, linguists have variously suggested that the Egyptian language shares its greatest affinities with Berber, and Semitic.
In Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants developed into pharyngeal : Egyptian ꜥr.t 'portal', Semitic dalt 'door'. Afroasiatic merged with Egyptian,,, and in the dialect on which the written language was based, but it was preserved in other Egyptian varieties. Original palatalise to in some environments and are preserved as in others.
The Egyptian language has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots, in contrast to the Semitic preference for triradical roots. Egyptian is probably more conservative, and Semitic likely underwent later regularizations converting roots into the triradical pattern.
Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is very different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic in general, and Semitic languages in particular. There are multiple possibilities: Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before it was recorded, the Afroasiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semito-centric approach, or, as G. W. Tsereteli suggests, Afroasiatic is an allogenetic rather than a genetic group of languages.

History

The Egyptian language is conventionally grouped into six major chronological divisions:
Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian were all written using both the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts.
Demotic is the name of the script derived from hieratic beginning in the 7th century BC.
The Coptic alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet, with adaptations for Egyptian phonology. It was first developed in the Ptolemaic period, and gradually replaced the Demotic script in about the 4th to 5th centuries of the Christian era.
s of Egyptian by time period and linguistic register.

Old Egyptian

The term "Archaic Egyptian" is sometimes reserved for the earliest use of hieroglyphs, from the late 4th through the early 3rd millennia BC. At the earliest stage, around 3300 BC; hieroglyphs were not a fully developed writing system, being at a transitional stage of proto-writing; over the time leading up to the 27th century BC, grammatical features such as nisba formation can be seen to occur.
Old Egyptian is dated from the oldest known complete sentence, including a finite verb, which has been found. Discovered in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen, the seal impression reads:
Extensive texts appear from about 2600 BC. The Pyramid Texts are the largest body of literature written in this phase of the language. One of its distinguishing characteristics is the tripling of ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives to indicate the plural. Overall, it does not differ significantly from Middle Egyptian, the classical stage of the language, though it is based on a different dialect.
In the period of the 3rd dynasty, many of the principles of hieroglyphic writing were regularized. From that time on, until the script was supplanted by an early version of Coptic, the system remained virtually unchanged. Even the number of signs used remained constant at about 700 for more than 2,000 years.

Middle Egyptian

Middle Egyptian was spoken for about 700 years, beginning around 2000 BC. As the classical variant of Egyptian, Middle Egyptian is the best-documented variety of the language, and has attracted the most attention by far from Egyptology. Whilst most Middle Egyptian is seen written on monuments by hieroglyphs, it was also written using a cursive variant, and the related hieratic.
Middle Egyptian first became available to modern scholarship with the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the early 19th century. The first grammar of Middle Egyptian was published by Adolf Erman in 1894, surpassed in 1927 by Alan Gardiner's work. Middle Egyptian has been well-understood since then, although certain points of the verbal inflection remained open to revision until the mid-20th century, notably due to the contributions of Hans Jakob Polotsky.
The Middle Egyptian stage is taken to have ended around the 14th century BC, giving rise to Late Egyptian. This transition was taking place in the later period of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.
Middle Egyptian was retained as a literary standard language, and in this usage survived until the Christianisation of Roman Egypt in the 4th century.

Late Egyptian

, appearing around 1350 BC, is represented by a large body of religious and secular literature, comprising such examples as the Story of Wenamun, the love poems of the Chester–Beatty I papyrus, and the Instruction of Any. Instructions became a popular literary genre of the New Kingdom, which took the form of advice on proper behavior. Late Egyptian was also the language of New Kingdom administration.
The Hebrew Bible contains some words, terms and names that are thought by scholars to be Egyptian in origin. An example of this is Zaphnath-Paaneah, the Egyptian name given to Joseph.

Demotic and Coptic

is the name given to the Egyptian vernacular of the
Late and Ptolemaic periods.
It was written in the Demotic script, derived from a northern variety of hieratic writing.
Coptic is the name given to the stage of the language at the time of Christianisation. It survived into the medieval period, but by the 16th century was dwindling rapidly due to the persecution of Coptic Christians under the Mamluks. It probably survived in the Egyptian countryside as a spoken language for several centuries after that. Coptic survives as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church and, still, as the mother tongue of several families in Cairo.

Dialects

Most hieroglyphic Egyptian texts are written in a literary prestige register rather than the vernacular speech variety of their author. As a result, dialectical differences are not apparent in written Egyptian until the adoption of the Coptic alphabet. Nevertheless, it is clear that these differences existed before the Coptic period. In one Late Egyptian letter, a scribe jokes that his colleague's writing is incoherent like “the speech of a Delta man with a man of Elephantine.”
Recently, some evidence of internal dialects has been found in pairs of similar words in Egyptian that, based on similarities with later dialects of Coptic, may be derived from northern and southern dialects of Egyptian. Written Coptic has five major dialects, which differ mainly in graphic conventions, most notably the southern Saidic dialect, the main classical dialect, and the northern Bohairic dialect, currently used in Coptic Church services.

Writing systems

Most surviving texts in the Egyptian language are written on stone in hieroglyphs. The native name for Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is zẖꜣ n mdw-nṯr.
In antiquity, most texts were written on perishable papyrus in hieratic and demotic, which are now lost. There was also a form of cursive hieroglyphs, used for religious documents on papyrus, such as the Book of the Dead of the Twentieth Dynasty; it was simpler to write than the hieroglyphs in stone inscriptions, but it was not as cursive as hieratic and lacked 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.
Hieroglyphs are employed in two ways in Egyptian texts: as ideograms to represent the idea depicted by the pictures and, more commonly, as phonograms to represent their phonetic value.
As the phonetic realisation of Egyptian cannot be known with certainty, Egyptologists use a system of transliteration to denote each sound that could be represented by a uniliteral hieroglyph.

Phonology

While the consonantal phonology of the Egyptian language may be reconstructed, the exact phonetics are unknown, and there are varying opinions on how to classify the individual phonemes. In addition, because Egyptian is recorded over a full 2000 years, the Archaic and Late stages being separated by the amount of time that separates Old Latin from Modern Italian, significant phonetic changes must have occurred during that lengthy time frame.
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants. Egyptian also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afroasiatic languages, but exactly how the emphatic consonants were realised is unknown. Early research had assumed that the opposition in stops was one of voicing, but it is now thought to be either one of tenuis and emphatic consonants, as in many Semitic languages, or one of aspirated and ejective consonants, as in many Cushitic languages.
Since vowels were not written until Coptic, reconstructions of the Egyptian vowel system are much more uncertain and rely mainly on evidence from Coptic and records of Egyptian words, especially proper nouns, in other languages/writing systems. Also, 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, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced.

Consonants

The following consonants are reconstructed for Archaic and Old Egyptian, with IPA equivalents in square brackets if they differ from the usual transcription scheme:
*Possibly unvoiced ejectives.
has no independent representation in the hieroglyphic orthography, and it is frequently written as if it were or. That is probably because the standard for written Egyptian is based on a dialect in which had merged with other sonorants. Also, the rare cases of occurring are not represented. The phoneme is written as in initial position and immediately after a stressed vowel and as word-medially immediately before a stressed vowel and are unmarked word-finally.
In Middle Egyptian, a number of consonantal shifts take place. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom period, and had merged, and the graphemes and are used interchangeably. In addition, had become word-initially in an unstressed syllable and after a stressed vowel.
In Late Egyptian, the phonemes d ḏ g gradually merge with their counterparts t ṯ k. Also, ṯ ḏ often become, but they are retained in many lexemes; ꜣ becomes ; and become at the end of a stressed syllable and eventually null word-finally: > Akkadian transcription -pi-ta 'bow'.
More changes occur in the 1st millennium BC and the first centuries AD, leading to Coptic. In Sahidic ẖ ḫ ḥ had merged into š and . Bohairic and Akhmimic are more conservative and have a velar fricative . Pharyngeal *ꜥ had merged into glottal after it had affected the quality of the surrounding vowels. is not indicated orthographically unless it follows a stressed vowel; then, it is marked by doubling the vowel letter : Akhmimic , Sahidic and Lycopolitan šoʔp, Bohairic šoʔp 'to be' < ḫpr.w * 'has become'. The phoneme was probably pronounced as a fricative, becoming after a stressed vowel in syllables that had been closed in earlier Egyptian. The phonemes occur only in Greek loanwords, with rare exceptions triggered by a nearby : < ꜥ.t n.t sbꜣ.w 'school'.
Earlier *d ḏ g q are preserved as ejective t' c' k' k before vowels in Coptic. Although the same graphemes are used for the pulmonic stops, the existence of the former may be inferred because the stops are allophonically aspirated before stressed vowels and sonorant consonants. In Bohairic, the allophones are written with the special graphemes, but other dialects did not mark aspiration: Sahidic, Bohairic 'the sun'.
Thus, Bohairic does not mark aspiration for reflexes of older *d ḏ g q: Sahidic and Bohairic 'horn'. Also, the definite article is unaspirated when the next word begins with a glottal stop: Bohairic 'the account'.
The consonant system of Coptic is as follows:
*Various orthographic representations; see above.

Vowels

Here is the vowel system reconstructed for earlier Egyptian:
Vowels are always short in unstressed syllables and long in open stressed syllables, but they can be either short or long in closed stressed syllables.
In the Late New Kingdom, after Ramses II, around 1200 BC, changes to , ' Horus' > ., therefore, changes to : 'tree' > .
In the Early New Kingdom, short stressed changes to : "Menes" > . Later, probably 1000–800 BC, a short stressed changes to : "Tanis" was borrowed into Hebrew as *ṣuʕn but would become transcribed as during the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Unstressed vowels, especially after a stress, become : 'good' > . changes to next to and : 'soldier' > .
In Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, Late Egyptian stressed becomes and becomes, but are unchanged in the other dialects: 'brother' > Sahaidic and Bohairic, Akhminic, Lycopolitan and Fayyumic ; 'name' > > Sahaidic and Bohairic, Akhminic, Lycopolitan and Fayyumic. However, Sahaidic and Bohairic preserve, and Fayyumic renders it as in the presence of guttural fricatives: 'ten thousand' > Sahaidic, Akhmimic and Lycopolitan, Bohairic, Fayyumic. In Akhmimic and Lycopolitan, becomes before etymological : 'river' >
> Sahaidic, Bohairic, Akhminic, Fayyumic. Similarly, the diphthongs,, which normally have reflexes, in Sahidic and are preserved in other dialects, are in Bohairic and respectively: "to me, to them" Sahidic, Akhminic and Lycopolitan, Fayyumic, Bohairic. Sahidic and Bohairic preserve before ,: Sahidic and Bohairic 'to you ' < <. may also have different reflexes before sonorants, near sibilants and in diphthongs.
Old surfaces as after nasals and occasionally other consonants: 'god' > has acquired phonemic status, as is evidenced by minimal pairs like 'to approach' < ẖnn vs. 'inside' < ẖnw. An etymological > often surfaces as next to and after etymological pharyngeals: < 'street'.
Most Coptic dialects have two phonemic vowels in unstressed position. Unstressed vowels generally became, written as or null, but pretonic unstressed /a/ occurs as a reflex of earlier unstressed near an etymological pharyngeal, velar or sonorant or an unstressed. Pretonic is underlyingly : Sahidic 'ibis' < hbj.w.
Thus, the following is the Sahidic vowel system c. AD 400:

Phonotactics

Earlier Egyptian has the syllable structure CV in which V is long in open stressed syllables and short elsewhere. In addition, CV:C or CVCC can occur in word-final, stressed position. However, CV:C occurs only in the infinitive of biconsonantal verbal roots, CVCC only in some plurals.
In later Egyptian, stressed CV:C, CVCC, and CV become much more common because of the loss of final dentals and glides.

Stress

Earlier Egyptian stresses one of the last two syllables. According to some scholars, that is a development from a stage in Proto-Egyptian in which the third-last syllable could be stressed, which was lost as open posttonic syllables lost their vowels: > 'transformation'.

Egyptological pronunciation

As a convention, Egyptologists make use of an "Egyptological pronunciation" in English: the consonants are given fixed values, and vowels are inserted according to essentially arbitrary rules. Two consonants, alef and ayin, are generally pronounced. Yodh is pronounced, w. Between other consonants, is then inserted. Thus, for example, the name of an Egyptian king is most accurately transliterated as Rꜥ-ms-sw and transcribed as "Rɑmɛssu"; it means "Ra has Fashioned Him".
In transcription,,, and all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamun was written in Egyptian as twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn. Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience, which is an artificial pronunciation and should not be mistaken for how Egyptian was ever pronounced at any time. For example, the name twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn is conventionally pronounced in English, but, in his lifetime, it was likely to be pronounced something like *.

Morphology

Egyptian is fairly typical for an Afroasiatic language in that at the heart of its vocabulary is most commonly a root of three consonants, but there are sometimes only two consonants in the root: rꜥ "sun". Larger roots are also common and can have up to five consonants: sḫdḫd "be upside-down".
Vowels and other consonants are added to the root to derive different meanings, as Arabic, Hebrew, and other Afroasiatic languages still do. However, because vowels and sometimes glides are not written in any Egyptian script except Coptic, it can be difficult to reconstruct the actual forms of words. Thus, orthographic "to choose", for example, can represent the stative, the imperfective forms or even a verbal noun.

Nouns

Egyptian nouns can be masculine or feminine and singular or plural, or dual.
Articles, both definite and indefinite, do not occur until Late Egyptian but are used widely thereafter.

Pronouns

Egyptian has three different types of personal pronouns: suffix, enclitic and independent pronouns. There are also a number of verbal endings added to the infinitive to form the stative and are regarded by some linguists as a "fourth" set of personal pronouns. They bear close resemblance to their Semitic counterparts. The three main sets of personal pronouns are as follows:
SuffixDependentIndependent
1st sg.-ı͗wı͗ı͗nk
2nd sg. m.-ktwntk
2nd sg. f.-ttnntt
3rd sg. m.-fswntf
3rd sg. f.-ssynts
1st pl.-nnı͗nn
2nd pl.-tntnnttn
3rd pl.-snsnntsn

Demonstrative pronouns have separate masculine and feminine singular forms and common plural forms for both genders:
Mas.Fem.Plu.Meaning
pntnnnthis, that, these, those
pftfnfthat, those
pwtwnwthis, that, these, those
pꜣtꜣnꜣthis, that, these, those

Finally are interrogative pronouns. They bear a close resemblance to their Semitic and Berber counterparts:
PronounMeaningDependency
mı͗who / whatDependent
ptrwho / whatIndependent
iḫwhatDependent
ı͗šstwhatIndependent
zı͗whichIndependent & Dependent

Verbs

Egyptian verbs have 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 sḏm.f "he hears".
Non-finite verbs occur without a subject and are the infinitive, the participles and the negative infinitive, which 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

s agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify: s nfr " good man" and st nfrt " good woman".
Attributive adjectives in phrases are after the nouns they modify: " great god".
However, when they are used independently as a predicate in an adjectival phrase, as " god great" , adjectives precede the nouns they modify.

Prepositions

While Afroasiatic, Egyptian makes use of prepositions, more common in English and other Indo-European languages.
m"in, as, with, from"
n"to, for"
r"to, at"
ı͗n"by"
ḥnꜥ"with"
mı͗"like"
ḥr"on, upon"
ḥꜣ"behind, around"
ẖr"under"
tp"atop"
ḏr"since"

Adverbs

Adverbs, in Egyptian, are at the end of a sentence: in zı͗.n nṯr ı͗m "the god went there", "there" is the adverb. Here are some other common Egyptian adverbs:
ꜥꜣ"here"
ṯnı͗"where"
zy-nw"when"
mı͗-ı͗ḫ"how"
r-mı͗"why"
ḫnt"before"

Syntax

Old Egyptian, Classical Egyptian, and Middle Egyptian have verb-subject-object as the basic word order. However, that changed in the later stages of the language, including Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic.
The equivalent to "the man opens the door" would be a sentence that would correspond, in the language's earlier stages, to "opens the man the door". The so-called construct state combines two or more nouns to express the genitive, as in Semitic and Berber languages.
The early stages of Egyptian have no articles, but the later forms use pꜣ, tꜣ and nꜣ. As with other Afroasiatic languages, Egyptian uses two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. It also uses three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural. However, later Egyptian has a tendency to lose the dual as a productive form.

Legacy

The Egyptian language survived into the early modern period in the form of the Coptic language. Coptic survived past the 16th century only as an isolated vernacular.
However, in antiquity, Egyptian exerted some influence on Classical Greek, so that a number of Egyptian loanwords into Greek survive into modern usage. Examples include
:wikt:ebony|ebony,
:wikt:ivory|ivory,
:wikt:natron|natron,
:wikt:lily|lily,
:wikt:ibis|ibis,
:wikt:oasis|oasis,
perhaps :wikt:barge|barge,
and possibly :wikt:cat|cat; and of course a number of terms and proper names directly associated with Ancient Egypt, such as
:wikt:pharaoh|pharaoh. The name Egypt itself is etymologically identical to that of the Copts, ultimately from the Late Egyptian name of Memphis, Hikuptah, a continuation of Middle Egyptian ḥwt-kꜣ-ptḥ "temple of the ka of Ptah".
A number of words in Biblical Hebrew are also traced to Egyptian; apart from "Pharaoh", most of these have not entered Greek, Latin or English usage.

Literature

Overviews

Important Note: The old grammars and 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 .