Egyptian Language
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The Egyptian language is a member of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic. Egyptian is one of the oldest recorded languages with examples dating as far back as 3400 B.C.[1] It survives today as Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic Church, but has otherwise been extinct since the 16th century.
Development
The development of Egyptian is broken into six stages.
- Pre 2600BC - Archaic Egyptian
- 2600-2000BC - Old Egyptian
- 2000-1300BC - Middle Egyptian
- 1300-700BC - Late Egyptian
- 700BC-500AD - Demotic
- 400-1500AD - Coptic
Middle Egyptian fell out of everyday use after 1300BC, but survived through the first few centuries AD as a formal written language, used in the same way as Latin was in Medieval Europe.
Structure
The structure of Egyptian is similar to many other Afro-Asiatic languages. Most words have a root of three consonants, although some have more or less.
Vowels are not written in Egyptian.
Egyptian, like many of its related languages, has single, dual, and plural forms of nouns, meaning a noun can be written three different ways signifying one thing, two things, and three or more things. Like the Romance languages and Irish Gaelic, Egyptian nouns are either masculine or feminine. Egyptian’s basic word order is ‘Subject, Noun, Object.” ‘The man opens the door’ would be ‘Opens the man the door’.
When most people think of the Egyptian Language, they think of hieroglyphs, but not all Egyptian is written with glyphs. While Archaic, Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian were written with hieroglyphs, Demotic was written with an alphabet similar to modern Arabic script, and Coptic was written with a modified form of the Greek alphabet.
References
- ↑ Earliest Egyptian Glyphs Archeology 52.2 (March/April 1999)
