Egyptian Language Report. LIN1NLB (original) (raw)

Egyptian is an extinct Afroasiatic language which was spoken in pharaonic Egypt. The endangered Coptic language is considered to be the final phase of ancient Egyptian. Phonemic, syllabic and morphosyntactic changes divided the language into various phases including early Egyptian, late Egyptian and Coptic. Despite these historical changes and the omission of vowels from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is enough information available to show that it was an accusative, fusional, Verb-Subject-Object language. It had a prepositional construction and used nouns, verbs and adjectives, but not articles. Although its pronunciation has been lost, scholars have used Coptic as the basis for reconstructing the ancient tongue. Thanks to the work of Egyptologists and linguists around the world, this fascinating language can be appreciated today. According to the Ethnologue website (2009), Egyptian is an ancient language with no living mother-tongue speakers. The Linguist List website (2010) confirms that it is an extinct language of the Afroasiatic family, belonging to the subgroup Egyptian. Allen (2010, p. 1) argues that it belonged the Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) family, with links to both north African (Hamitic) language like Berber and Hausa, and Asiatic (Semitic) languages like Arabic, Ethiopic and Hebrew. Where the north African and Asiatic language connections differ, Egyptian tends to have closer links to the African languages. The important languages of the near east, bar Sumerian and Hittite, belong to the Afroasiatic family. The Egyptian language did not remain static throughout history. As Allen (2010, p. 1) argues, the language went through a number of major phases, linked to major political and religious changes. Old Egyptian was spoken during the Old Kingdom, from roughly 2600 BC until 2100 BC. The First Intermediate Period, where Egyptian rule was split between the north and the south, came between the Old and Middle Kingdom. Middle Egyptian emerged around 2100 BC, and survived as a spoken language for about five hundred years. The Second Intermediate