Egyptian language

Egyptian
r n km.t
Region	Ancient Egypt
Extinct	evolved into Demotic by 600 BC, into Coptic by 200 AD, and was extinct (not spoken as a day-to-day language) by the 17th century. It survives as the liturgical language of the Christian Coptic Church.
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Egyptian
Writing system	hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally Arabic script in government translations)
Language codes
ISO 639-2	egy
ISO 639-3	Either: egy – Egyptian language cop – Coptic language
Linguasphere	11-AAA-a
Ebers Papyrus detailing treatment of asthma.

Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 7th 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 has a handful of fluent speakers today.

Periodization

Scholars group the Egyptian language into six major chronological divisions:

• Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC, the language of the Early Dynastic Period)
• Old Egyptian (2686 BC – 2181 BC, the language of the Old Kingdom)
• Middle Egyptian (2055 BC – 1650 BC, Middle Kingdom up to the Amarna Period; continued in use as a literary language into the 4th century AD)
• Late Egyptian (1069 BC – 700 BC, Amarna Period through the Third Intermediate Period)
• Demotic (7th century BC – 5th century AD, Late Period through Roman times)
• Coptic (1st century AD – 17th century AD, early Roman times to early modern times)

Egyptian writing in the form of labels and signs has been dated to 3200 BC. These early texts are generally lumped together under the general 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 the 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.

3rd-century Coptic inscription.

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 AD, 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.

The Bible contains some words, terms and names thought by scholars to be Egyptian in origin. An example of this is Zaphnath-Paaneah, the Egyptian name given to Joseph.

Structure of the language

Egyptian is a fairly typical Afroasiatic language. At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary is a root of three consonants. Sometimes there were only two, for example rꜥ [riːʕ] "sun" (where the [ʕ] is thought to have been something like a voiced pharyngeal fricative), but larger roots are also common some being as large as five sḫdḫd "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 Afroasiatic 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 stp "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 Afroasiatic languages, although exactly how the emphatic consonants were realized is not precisely known. In transcription, ‹a›, ‹i›, and ‹u› all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen (1341 BC – 1323 BC) was written in Egyptian twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn. Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience, but this artificial pronunciation should not be mistaken for how Egyptian was actually pronounced at any point in time. For example, twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn is conventionally pronounced /tuːtən.ˈkɑːmən/ in English, but in his time was likely realized as something like [*tawaːt ʕaːnax ʔaˈmaːn].

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" (wn s ꜥꜣ). 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 pꜣ, tꜣ and nꜣ for this purpose. Like other Afroasiatic languages, Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to Arabic, Tamasheq and Somali. 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

Main article: Writing in Ancient Egypt

sẖꜣ n mdw nṯr in hieroglyphs

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 sẖꜣ n mdw 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.

Phonology

Further information: Transliteration of ancient Egyptian

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. Early research had assumed opposition in stops was one of voicing, but is now thought to either be one of tenuis and emphatic stops, as in many of the Semitic languages, or one of aspirated and ejective stops, as in many of the Cushitic languages.

Since vowels were not written, 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

Early Egyptian

	bilabials		alveolars		palatals		velars		uvulars
	transliteration	approximate phonetic value	transliteration	approximate phonetic value	transliteration	approximate phonetic value	transliteration	approximate phonetic value	transliteration	approximate phonetic value
voiceless	p	[pʰ]	t	[tʰ]	ṯ (tj)	[cʰ] ~ [tʃʰ]	k	[kʰ] ~ [kʲ]	q (ḳ)	[qʰ]
voiced	b	[b] ~ [β]
emphatic			d	[tʼ]	ḏ (dj)	[cʼ] ~ [tʃʼ]	g	[kʼ]

Egyptian g may represent two phonemes (g¹ and g²), both continuing Afroasiatic /ɡ/.

Palatal /c/ ṯ (emphatic /cʼ/ ḏ) continue Afroasiatic /q/ and /k/ (merged with t and d in Demotic)

Early Coptic

	bilabials		alveolars		palatals		velars
	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value
voiceless	ⲡ	[p]	ⲧ	[t]	ϭ	[c]	ⲕ	[k]
voiced			ⲇ	[d]			ⲅ	[ɡ]
emphatic			ⲇ	[tʼ]	ϫ	[cʼ]	ⲅ	[kʼ]

Fricatives

	labials		alveolars		palatals		velars		pharyngeals		glottals
	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value
Series I	f	[f]	s (ś)	[s]	š	[ʃ]	ḫ (x)	[x]	ḥ	[ħ]	h	[h]
Series II	b	[b] ~ [β]	z	[z] in Old Egyptian			ẖ	[ç]? [ɣ]?	ꜥ (ˤ)	[ʕ] in Middle Egyptian; [d] in Old Egyptian and some dialects?	ꜣ (3, ʒ)	silent, [j], and [ʔ] in Middle Egyptian; [l] or [ɾ] in Old Egyptian?

s and z were collapsed in the Middle Kingdom.

ꜥ may have been /d/ 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 ḫ vs. ẖ is controversial, possibly a voiced vs. voiceless opposition.

Ꜣ, often identified as "Egyptian Aleph" (a glottal stop), or alternatively a remnant of an r or l phoneme.

Other consonants

	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value	orthographic	approximate phonetic value
Sonorants	m	[m]	n	[n], sometimes [l]	r	[ɾ], sometimes [l] in Middle Egyptian (always [l] in some dialects; rare in Old Egyptian)
Vocoids	w	[w] ~ [u]	y (ı͗ı͗)	[j] in Middle Egyptian; unattested in Old Egyptian	ı͗	initial or final vowel, sometimes [j] (other suggestions are [ʔ])

[l] is variously expressed in writing as n, r, j, nr, or ꜣ, or often as the lion-shaped biliteral rw.

Egyptological pronunciation

As a convention, Egyptologists make use of an "Egyptological pronunciation" in English, in which the consonants are given fixed values and vowels are inserted in accordance with essentially arbitrary rules. Two consonants, alef and the ayin, are generally pronounced /ɑː/. The yodh is pronounced /iː/, and w /uː/. Between other consonants, /ɛ/ is then inserted. Thus, for example, the Egyptian king whose name is most accurately transliterated as Rꜥ-ms-sw is transcribed as "Ramesses", meaning "Ra has Fashioned (lit., "Borne") Him".

Change into Coptic

(Middle) Egyptian consonant	Coptic (Sahidic) consonant
ꜣ	y, i
ṯ	t
ḏ	t, d
k	k, g
ḫ, ẖ, š	š, ḫ, h, ẖ

Grammar

Like most other Afroasiatic 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 Afroasiatic 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.	-ı͗	wı͗	ı͗nk
2nd s.m.	-k	tw	ntk
2nd s.f.	-t	tn	ntt
3rd s.m.	-f	sw	ntf
3rd s.f.	-s	sy	nts
1st p.	-n	n	ı͗nn
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)
pꜣ	tꜣ	nꜣ	"this, that, these, those" (colloquial [earlier] and Late Egyptian)

Finally there are interrogative pronouns (what, who, etc.)

mı͗	"who? what?"	(dependent)
ptr	"who? what?"	(independent)
iḫ	"what?"	(dependent)
ı͗šst	"what?"	(independent)
zı͗	"which?"	(independent and dependent)

Verbs

The verbal morphology 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 sḏm.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" (nṯr ꜥꜣ). However, when used independently as a predicate in an adjectival phrase, such "(the) god (is) great" (ꜥꜣ nṯr) (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"
ı͗n	"by"
ḥnꜥ	"with"
mı͗	"like"
ḥr	"on, upon"
ḥꜣ	"behind, around"
ẖr	"under"
tp	"atop"
ḏr	"since"

Adverbs

Adverbs are words such as "here" or "where?". In Egyptian, they come at the end of a sentence, e.g., zı͗.n nṯr ı͗m "the god went there", "there" (ı͗m) is the adverb.

Some common Egyptian adverbs:

ꜥꜣ	"here"
ı͗m	"there"
ṯnı͗	"where"
zy-nw	"when" (lit. "what moment")
mı͗-ı͗ḫ	"how" (lit. "like-what")
r-mı͗	"why" (lit. "for what")
ḫnt	"before"

Modern-day resources

Interest in the ancient Egyptian language continues, and it is taught in many universities around the world. Many resources are in French, German, Arabic, Italian, and Russian in addition to English so it can be useful to know one of these languages to learn Egyptian.

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 (source in French). Egyptian taunts and responses are also heard while playing the Egyptian campaign of Age of Mythology. Ancient Egyptian is also used for some dialogue in the French movie Immortel (Ad Vitam).

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 ḥbny, via Greek and then Latin), ivory (Egyptian abw / abu, literally 'ivory; elephant'), pharaoh (Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ, literally "great house"; transmitted through Hebrew), as well as the proper names Phineas (Egyptian, pꜣ-nḥsy, used as a generic term for Nubian foreigners) and Susan (Egyptian, sšn, literally "lily flower"; probably transmitted first from Egyptian into Hebrew Shoshanah).

See also

• Ancient Egyptian literature
• Coptic language
• Demotic
• Egyptian hieroglyphs
• Egyptian numerals
• Hieratic
• Transliteration of ancient Egyptian
• Egyptian Arabic

Literature

Overviews

• Loprieno, Antonio, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-44384-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-521-44849-2 (pbk)
• Peust, Carsten, Egyptian phonology : an introduction to the phonology of a dead language, Peust & Gutschmidt, 1999. ISBN 3-933043-02-6 PDF

Grammars

• Allen, James P., 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

• Faulkner, Raymond O., A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Griffith Institute, Oxford, 1962. ISBN 0-900416-32-7 (hardback)
• Lesko, Leonard H., A Dictionary of Late Egyptian, 2nd ed., 2 Vols., B.C. Scribe Publications, Providence, 2002 et 2004. ISBN 0-930548-14-0 (vol.1), ISBN 0-930548-15-9 (vol. 2).
• Shennum, *, English-Egyptian Index of Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, Undena Publications, 1977. ISBN 0-89003-054-5
• Bonnamy, Yvonne et Sadek, Ashraf-Alexandre, Dictionnaire des Hiérogriphes, Actes-sud:fr(www.actes-sud.fr), Arles, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7427-8922-1

Online dictionaries

• Online Translator - Translates English words, sentences, and phrases into ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic
• 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 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 Glyphs and Grammars

External links

• Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae: Dictionary of the Egyptian language
• The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian by Kelley L. Ross
• The Egyptian connection: Egyptian and the Semitic languages by Helmut Satzinger
• Ancient Egyptian Language Discussion List
• Site offering online courses in the Egyptian Language
• Site containing direct translations from English to Egyptian