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Concept
Egyptian language
Summary
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian (r n km.t) is an extinct Afro-Asiatic language 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 written languages, first being 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 is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period. By the time of classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, and by the Roman era it had diversified into the Coptic dialects. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.
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 affinities with Berber and Semitic languages, particularly Hebrew. However, other scholars have argued that the Ancient Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with north-eastern 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 */d z ð/ developed into pharyngeal /ʕ/: Egyptian ꜥr.
Official source
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