The lexicon of known ancient Egyptian words is fairly meager, with some ten thousand separate words. Many of these have cognates in other Afroasiatic languages: for example, nfr ‘‘good,’’ related to Beja nafir; and ‘‘middle,’’ cognate with Akkadian, Hebrew, and Ugaritic qrh. A few original words with Semitic affinities seem to have been replaced before the Old Kingdom by other, non-cognate words: the Hieroglyphic sign of a hand, for instance, has the consonantal value d (cognate with Semitic yd ‘‘hand,’’ also reflected in Egyptian djw ‘‘five’’), but the Egyptian word for ‘‘hand’’ is Drt, related to the root ndr, meaning ‘‘grasp.’’ Similar changes in vocabulary occurred throughout the history of the language, either through alteration of a word’s meaning or through adoption of a new word: examples are ht ‘‘belly, body’’ ! Coptic he/he/hi/hie ‘‘manner’’ and mA ‘‘look’’ ! Late Egyptian nw! Coptic nau/neu/no.
The basic words of Egyptian belong to seven lexical categories: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, and particles. The last three are essentially immutable; words from the other categories undergo changes in form (morphology) when used in utterances. Egyptian shares a number of morphological features with both African and Asian languages. Common to all three branches are consonantal root structures; two genders, masculine and feminine, with the latter marked by a final t; plurals formed by the desinence - w (preceding the final t of feminine nouns); independent and suffix forms of personal pronouns; nouns of place or agency formed by the prefix m - (e. g., msDr ‘‘ear’’ from sDr ‘‘lie down’’); and causative stems of verbs formed by a root prefix (s - in Egyptian: e. g., shtp ‘‘content’’ from htp ‘‘become content’’). Non-African features of the language include a predominance of triliteral roots, duals formed by the endings - wj and - tj, the vocalization pattern of many nouns, and some vocabulary, all of which Egyptian shares in some manner with its Asiatic relatives. Unlike the latter, and in common with its African relatives, Egyptian also has roots of two or four to six radicals (some formed by reduplication: e. g., sn ‘‘kiss’’ and snsn ‘‘fraternize’’), passives with a geminated final radical, little evidence of lexical verb-stems other than basic and causative, and some vocabulary.
The morphology of Old and Middle Egyptian is primarily synthetic: change in meaning is signaled by change in the form of a word. Because of the opacity of the writing system, not all such alterations are always visible. Some verb classes, for example, distinguish two participial forms, perfective and imperfective, by gemination (repetition) of the second-last radical in the latter: for example, perfective mrt ‘‘she who wanted’’ versus imperfective mrrt ‘‘she who wants,’’ from mrj ‘‘want.’’ Other classes show only a single written form: perfective and imperfective sdmt ‘‘she who heard/hears,’’ from sdm ‘‘hear.’’ Such differences are commonly understood to reflect orthographic conventions, at least in part, rather than a lack of particular forms in particular classes. In later stages of the language, words became increasingly immutable and changes in meaning were signaled analytically, by compound constructions: for example, the synthetic plural drwt ‘‘hands’’ was replaced by a compound with the singular noun drt (Coptic tore) plus the definite or indefinite article: nA drt ‘‘the hands’’ and nhy n drt ‘‘hands’’ (Coptic ntore/hentore).
These characteristics make the grammar of Old and Middle Egyptian less readily perceptible, and therefore the subject of greater debate, than that of the language’s final three phases.
World History
