Egyptian language


The Egyptian language, or ancient Egyptian, is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.
Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years. Its classical form, known as "Middle Egyptian," served as the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period.
By the time of classical antiquity, the spoken language had evolved into Demotic: its formation and development as a separate language from the Old Egyptian was strongly influenced by Aramaic and ancient Greek.
By the Roman and Byzantine eras, the language later further diversified into various Coptic dialects written in the Greek alphabet. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Arab conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.

Classification

The Egyptian language branch 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, a nominal feminine suffix *-at, a nominal prefix m-, an adjectival suffix -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 languages, particularly Arabic and Hebrew. However, other scholars have argued that the Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with northeastern African regions.
There are two theories that seek to establish the cognate sets between Egyptian and Afroasiatic, the traditional theory and the neuere Komparatistik, founded by Semiticist Otto Rössler.
According to the neuere Komparatistik, in Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants developed into pharyngeal : Egyptian 'portal', Semitic dalt 'door'. The traditional theory instead disputes the values given to those consonants by the neuere Komparatistik, instead connecting with Semitic and. Both schools agree that Afroasiatic merged with Egyptian,,, and in the dialect on which the written language was based, but it was preserved in other Egyptian varieties. They also agree that 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 languages in general, and Semitic languages in particular. There are multiple possibilities: perhaps Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before it was recorded; or the Afroasiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semitocentric approach; or, as G. W. Tsereteli suggests, Afroasiatic is a sprachbund, rather than a true genetic language family.

History

The Egyptian language can be grouped thus:
  • Egyptian
  • * Earlier Egyptian, Older Egyptian, or Classical Egyptian
  • ** Old Egyptian
  • *** Early Egyptian, Early Old Egyptian, Archaic Old Egyptian, Pre-Old Egyptian, or archaic Egyptian
  • *** standard Old Egyptian
  • ** Middle Egyptian
  • * Later Egyptian
  • ** Late Egyptian
  • ** Demotic Egyptian
  • ** Coptic
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 the 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.
File:Egyptian lects.svg|thumb|center|upright=4.1|Diagram showing the use of the various lects 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 fourth through the early third 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. An early example is the Diary of Merer. 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, during the Middle Kingdom and the subsequent Second Intermediate Period. 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. While 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.

Egyptien de tradition

Original Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian texts were still used after the 14th century BCE. And an emulation of predominately Middle Egyptian, but also with characteristics of Old Egyptian, Late Egyptian and Demotic, called "Égyptien de tradition" or "Neo-Middle Egyptian" by scholars, was used as a literary language for new texts since the later New Kingdom in official and religious hieroglyphic and hieratic texts in preference to Late Egyptian or Demotic. Égyptien de tradition as a religious language survived until the Christianisation of Roman Egypt in the 4th century.

Late Egyptian

Late Egyptian was spoken for about 650 years, beginning around 1350 BC, during the New Kingdom of Egypt. Late Egyptian succeeded but did not fully supplant Middle Egyptian as a literary language, and was also the language of the New Kingdom administration.
Texts written wholly in Late Egyptian date to the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt and later. Late Egyptian 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.
Late Egyptian is not completely distinct from Middle Egyptian, as many "classicisms" appear in historical and literary documents of this phase. However, the difference between Middle and Late Egyptian is greater than the difference between Middle and Old Egyptian. Originally a synthetic language, Egyptian by the Late Egyptian phase had become an analytic language. The relationship between Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian has been described as being similar to that between Latin and Italian.
  • Written Late Egyptian was seemingly a better representative than Middle Egyptian of the spoken language in the New Kingdom and beyond: weak consonants ꜣ, w, j, as well as the feminine ending were increasingly dropped, apparently because they stopped being pronounced.
  • The demonstrative pronouns , , and were used as definite articles.
  • The old form of the verb was replaced by which had both prospective and perfective aspects. The past tense was also formed using the auxiliary verb , as in .
  • Adjectives as attributes of nouns are often replaced by nouns.
The Late Egyptian stage is taken to have ended around the 8th century BC, giving rise to Demotic.