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Written records of the ancient Egyptian language have been dated from about 3200 BC. Egyptian is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic (languages such as Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Hebrew). The language survived until the 5th century AD in the form of Demotic and until the Middle Ages in the form of Coptic. Thus it had a lifespan of over four millennia. Egyptian is one of the oldest recorded languages known.
The national language of modern day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Egyptian and its descendant, the Coptic language, as the language of daily life in the centuries after Egypt was conquered by Arab Muslims. Coptic is still used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church.
Development of the language
Scholars group the Egyptian language into six major chronological divisions:
- Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC)
- Old Egyptian (2600 BC – 2000 BC)
- Middle Egyptian (2000 BC – 1300 BC)
- Late Egyptian (1300 BC – 700 BC)
- Demotic (seventh century BC – fifth century AD)
- Coptic (fourth – fourteenth century AD)
It should be noted that 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 gradually replaced spoken Coptic after the Arabian invasion in the seventh century, though Arabic was the language of the Muslim political administration soon thereafter.
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 /r'/ "sun" (where the apostrophe represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative); others, such as /nfr/, which means beautiful; and some could be as large as five /sxdxd/ "be upside-down". Vowels and other consonants were then added to this root in order to derive words, in the same way as Arabic, Hebrew, and other Afro-Asiatic languages do today. However, we do not know what these vowels would have been, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian does not write vowels; hence "ankh" could represent either "life", "to live" or "living". In transcription, "a", "i" and "u" all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen was written in Egyptian "twt 'nkh ymn" (the apostrophe represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative). Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience; however, this artificial pronunciation has often been mistaken for actual pronunciation.
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic.
Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; where we would write "the man opens the door", Egyptians would say "opens the man the door" (wn s a3)
Regarding morphology, Egyptian uses the so-called status constructus construction to combine two or more nouns, more or less like any Semitic language. With this construction, the first noun is sometimes changed - e.g. final -h in feminine nouns becomes -t. Example: mlkt shba "The Queen of Saba", the original form of mlkt being mlkh. 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 (where 3 represents a glottal stop.) Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to Romance languages and Irish Gaelic; it also uses three grammatical numbers: like many other Afro-Asiatic languages, it contrasts singular, dual and plural forms. When saying something like "the man is red", the word "red" (dšrt in Egyptian) acts as a predicative verb.
Notes on pronunciation
A "received pronunciation" of the names of ancient Egyptian words has formed. By and large, this pronunciation is acceptable for most consonants and utterly wrong for the vowels. Egyptologists developed a set of conventions to make it easier to talk about the terms they used. Two distinct different consonants, the glottal stop and the voiced pharyngeal fricative, are both replaced with "a". The semivowel /j/ is replaced with "i", and similarly, /w/ with "u". Between the other consonants, "e" is then added. Thus, for example, the Egyptian king whose name is most accurately transcribed as Rˁ-ms-sw is known as "Rameses", meaning "Ra has Fashioned (lit. "Borne") Him". The actual rendition of his name, however, is thought to be "Riaˁmissa", as discovered from cuneiform documents in Mesopotamia.Egyptian writing
The Egyptian language was primarily written in the hieroglyphic script. It was also written in the script's hieratic and demotic derivatives. In the language's final stage of development, the Coptic alphabet replaced the older writing system. The native name for Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is sẖ3 n mdww nṯr 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. Like many Semitic scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphic consists of a combination of biliteral, triliteral and quadriliteral consonantal roots.
| pr biliteral | pr (house) | pr(y) (go out) |
Apart from hieroglyphs, hieratic (a cursive version of hieroglyphic writing) and demotic (even more cursive and abbreviated) were employed in Egypt's 3,000-year history of hieroglyphic writing. As Egypt became part of the Greek and (later) the Roman empire, the hieroglyphic writing system was replaced by the Greek alphabet used first to write magical and later Christian manuscripts (Coptic). A few extra characters had to be added to represent sounds of the Egyptian language which did not exist in the Greek pronunciation of the time (e.g., the phoneme /f/). These characters were taken from the demotic script.
Hieroglyphic usage
Hieroglyphs were used for most of the surviving forms of written communication during the Old and Middle Egyptian eras, at least for official documents; hieratic was already being used for day-to-day administrative needs during the Old Kingdom. Religious texts during the Demotic era were also typically written in hieroglyphs when they were inscribed on temple walls and stelae; hieratic was used for religious documents on papyrus. (Administrative works were of course written in Demotic.) The last datable hieroglyphic text was written in 394 AD.Hieroglyphic syntax
As explained previously, the majority of hieroglyphs seen in any particular text do not represent the objects they depict. They mostly represent sounds or were used as "determinatives" to show what type of word was being used. Hieroglyphic could be written in the following ways:- horizontal, left-to-right
- horizontal, right-to-left
- vertical, facing left-to-right
- vertical, facing right-left
Written, cursive hieroglyphic is generally written in columns, top-to-bottom or horizontally, right-to-left. In the latter stages of hieroglyphic cursive the only surviving examples are written horizontally, right-to-left; vertical hieroglyphic should be read from top-to-bottom.
It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs even if you are unable to understand their meaning. Hieroglyphs with a definite front and back (for example, a person) will generally:
- face the beginning of the sentence
- face the same direction as any person or large object in a picture they describe
As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right, then all the hieroglyphs with a definite front and back would face to the right as well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these images almost always face the beginning of the sentence.
Hieroglyphic texts that do not display this behaviour are said to be in retrograde. Once one understands hieroglyphic it is easy to determine if one is examining a retrograde text because it will simply make no sense.
As an aid to reading, and perhaps to the ancient Egyptian's sense of aesthetics, hieroglyphs were also packed together into neat patterns. In general, two or more short or thin (depending on which direction one was writing the hieroglyphs) would be written in the same block as each other. Occasionally, a tall or wide symbol would be made smaller and placed with another short or thin hieroglyph.
Finally, hieroglyphic had no standard punctuation. Religious texts generally have no punctuation at all, whilst texts from the latter part of the ancient Egyptian language have full stops between important lines of thought.
Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing
Until recently, given the time span we are talking about, the decipherment of hieroglyphic was hampered because those attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for son, a goose, was chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same sound as the word for son. A further impediment was the lack of complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in close proximity to another translation.
Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic, developed the notion that this last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphic he could not prove this notion. However, in 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars finally had an example of hieroglyphic, demotic and Ancient Greek that they were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In hieroglyphic, the name of the King or Pharaoh and gods' names are often placed within a circle called a cartouche. Jean-François Champollion, a young French scholar, demonstrated how the name Kleopatra could be made in hieroglyphic. Furthermore, by using an impressive knowledge of Coptic he surmised that a number of symbols showing everyday objects could be pronounced as in Coptic.
Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly confirmed Champollion's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other grammatical parts.
Modern-day resources
Interest in the ancient Egyptian languages continues. For example, it is still taught in several universities. Many resources are in French or German and not just 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 Mission Cléopâtre, a similar attempt was apparently made (source in French).
While Egyptian culture is one of the influences of Western civilization, few words of Egyptian origin remain in English. Even those associated with ancient Egypt were usually transmitted in Greek forms.
See also
- Coptic language
- Demotic
- Egyptian hieroglyph
- Egyptian languages
- Egyptian numerals
- Hieratic
- Hieroglyph
- Egyptian Arabic
- Transliteration of ancient Egyptian
Further reading
Overviews
- Loprieno, Antonio, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0521443849 (hbk) ISBN 0521448492 (pbk)
Grammars
- Allen, James P., Middle Egyptian - An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, first edition, Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0521653126 (hbk) ISBN 0521774837 (pbk)
- Collier, Mark, and Manley, Bill, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs : A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach Yourself, British Museum Press (ISBN 0714119105) and University of California Press (ISBN 0520215974), both in 1998.
- Gardiner, Sir Alan H., Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs, Griffith Institute, Oxford, 3rd ed. 1957. ISBN 0900416351
Dictionaries
- Faulkner, Raymond O., A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Griffith Institute, Oxford, 1962. ISBN 0900416327 (hardback)
- Lesko, Leonard H., A Dictionary of Late Egyptian, 4 Vols., B.C. Scribe Publications, Berkeley, 1982. ISBN 0930548035 (hbk), ISBN 09305480403 (pbk).
- Shennum, David, English-Egyptian Index of Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Undena Publications, 1977. ISBN 0890030545
Online Dictionaries
- The Beinlich Wordlist, an online searchable dictionary of ancient Egyptian words (translations are in German)
- Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, an online service available from October 2004 which is associated with various German Egyptological projects, including the monumental Altägyptisches Wörterbuch 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 Glyphs and Grammars
External links
- There are online resources at: http://www.rostau.org.uk/
- A further discussion can be found at: http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm
- Write like an Egyptian: http://www.upennmuseum.com/cgi-bin/hieroglyphsreal.cgi
Afro-Asiatic languages | Ancient Egyptian language | Egyptian languages
لغات مصرية | Египетски език | Ägyptische Sprache | Αρχαία αιγυπτιακή γλώσσα | Idioma egipcio | Egipta lingvo | زبانهای مصری | Lingua exipcia | Lingua egizia | שפות מצריות | Egyptisch | Egyptisk språk | Język egipski | Египетский язык | Egyptin kieli | Egyptiska | 埃及语
"Egyptian language"