What is the history of the Egyptian language?
Egyptian first appeared in writing shortly before 3200 BC and remained in active use until the eleventh century AD. This lifespan of more than four thousand years makes it the longest continually attested language in the world. Beginning with the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 641, Arabic gradually replaced Egyptian as the dominant language in Egypt.
What type of writing is used in ancient Egypt?
Ancient Egyptian language was written in four different scripts: Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic. These scripts did not all appear simultaneously, but appeared consecutively over the long period that the ancient Egyptian language existed.
What is the Middle Egyptian language?
This is the ancient Egyptian language that was written from the end of the Old Kingdom, all the way through the Middle Kingdom and lasting until Rome invaded Egypt. It’s the language that was spoken from around 2240 to 1990 BC. The Grammatical System. There are 4 parts that are used to make up sentences in ancient Egyptian: Subjects; Verbs; Objects
What is the basic word order of the Egyptian language?
Demotic (600 BC – 400 AD) It is a name of the ancient Egyptian vernacular of the late and Ptolemaic periods. It was used for more than 1000 years. The word demotic is derived from the northern forms of hieratic ( writing system) used in the delta. It had three stages during its time:
What is the written language of ancient Egypt called?
HieroglyphsThe earliest texts written in Hieroglyphs, from around 3200 BCE to 2600 BCE, consisted of names, labels and short accounts without much grammar. The first stage of ancient Egyptian with recognizable grammar is Old Egyptian, which was primarily used during the Old Kingdom from around 2600 BCE to 2100 BCE.
When did Egypt develop a written language?
The earliest evidence of phonetic writing in Egypt dates to about 3250 BC; the earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BC.
When did Egypt start speaking Arabic?
Widespread use of the Arabic language in Egypt began with the Arabic conquest of the country in 640, during the early medieval period. Arabic did not become the official language of Egypt until the 17th century.
Did writing started in Egypt?
Full writing-systems appear to have been invented independently at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, and shortly afterwards in Egypt at around 3200 BC.
Overview
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian (Ancient Egyptian: 𓂋𓏺𓈖 𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖 r n km.t Middle Egyptian pron.: [ˈraʔ n̩ˈku.mat]; Coptic: ϯⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ di metremǹkēmi [di.mæt.ɾæm.ən.kɪ.mi]) is an Afro-Asiatic language which was spoken in ancient Egypt. Its attestation stretches over an extraordinarily long time, from the Old Egyptian stage (mid-4th millennium BC, Old Kingdom of Egypt). Its earliest known complete written sentence has been dated to about 2690 BC, which …
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 /a i u/, 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 affin…
History
The Egyptian language is conventionally grouped into six major chronological divisions:
• Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC), the reconstructed language of the Early Dynastic Period,
• Old Egyptian (c. 2600 – 2000 BC), the language of the Old Kingdom,
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 (dated c. 1200 BC), a scribe jokes that his colleague's writing is incoherent like “the speech of a Delta man with a man of Elephantine.”
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 ("writing of the gods' words"). In antiquity, most texts were written on perishable papyrus in hieratic and (later) demotic. 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 n…
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.
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(w) [riːʕa] "sun" (the [ʕ] is thought to have been something like a voiced pharyngeal fricative). 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, Hebr…
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" (wn s ꜥꜣ). The so-called construct statec…