Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Major Chronological Divisions of Egyptian History
- 1 The language of Ancient Egypt
- 2 Egyptian graphemics
- 3 Egyptian phonology
- 4 Elements of historical morphology
- 5 Nominal syntax
- 6 Adverbial and pseudoverbal syntax
- 7 Verbal syntax
- Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index of passages
- Index of morphemes
- Index of lexemes
- Index of topics
4 - Elements of historical morphology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Major Chronological Divisions of Egyptian History
- 1 The language of Ancient Egypt
- 2 Egyptian graphemics
- 3 Egyptian phonology
- 4 Elements of historical morphology
- 5 Nominal syntax
- 6 Adverbial and pseudoverbal syntax
- 7 Verbal syntax
- Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index of passages
- Index of morphemes
- Index of lexemes
- Index of topics
Summary
Introduction
Ancient Egyptian is a language of the flectional or fusional type, with a diachronic tendency to replace VSO-synthetic structures by SVO-analytic constructions and to move toward the polysynthetic type which characterizes Coptic, its more recent phase. Egyptian morphemes are unsegmentable units combining grammatical functions. Morphological forms exhibit a number of correspondences with the patterns of word formation and of flection in other Afroasiatic languages. But although Egyptian is the oldest language of the phylum documented in written form (at least seven centuries before Akkadian), its morphological repertoire differs to a great extent from that of Semitic and of other Afroasiatic languages. This morphological variety can be accounted for in many ways: (a) by suggesting that, in spite of its archaic date, Egyptian had undergone already before its emergence as a written language a considerable number of changes which modified the genetic inventory inherited from Afroasiatic; (b) by considering Afroasiatic a relatively loose language continuum, whose individual branches came to share linguistic features through intensive contact, but were not necessarily derived from a common ancestor; (c) by rejecting the prevailing “semitocentric” approach to Afroasiatic linguistics, proposing that the regular patterns displayed by Semitic, and above all by Arabic, represent a typologically late result of a series of grammaticalizations which created its rich phonology and morphology, rather than the original situation inherited from the Ursprache.
In fact, all these approaches have their strong points and contribute to explaining in part the emergence of historical forms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient EgyptianA Linguistic Introduction, pp. 51 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995