Egyptian language

The Egyptian language is a member of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic. Egyptian has been spoken since 2600B.C. and still survives today as Egyptian Arabic. It has lasted nearly four millennia, and is one of the oldest recorded languages. The development of Egyptian is broken into six stages. Archaic Egyptian was used before 2600BC, Old Egyptian was spoken from 2600 to 2000BC, and Middle Egyptian was in use between 2000 and1300BC. 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. The Late Egyptian language was spoken from 1300 to 700 BC. Later, Demotic was spoken from 700BC to 500AD, and overlapped with Coptic, which came into use in 400AD and survived until the sixteenth century AD. 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. Although Egyptian is one of the oldest languages, it is certainly not obsolete. Egyptian has been spoken for more than four thousand years, outlasting the majority of languages. It is a piece of history, to be preserved for years to come.