_Old Egyptian._--This is properly the language of the Old Kingdom. In it
we have (a) the recently discovered inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty, too
brief and concise to throw much light on the language of that time; and
the great collections of spells and ritual texts found inscribed in the
Pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasties, which must even then have been
of high antiquity, though they contain later additions made in the same
style. (b) A few historical texts and an abundance of short inscriptions
representing the language of the IVth, Vth and VIth Dynasties. The
ordinary _literary language_ of the later monuments is modelled on Old
Egyptian. It is often much affected by contemporary speech, but
preserves in the main the characteristics of the language of the Old
Kingdom.
_Middle and Late Egyptian._--These represent the vulgar speech of the
Middle and New Kingdoms respectively. The former is found chiefly in
tales, letters, &c., written in hieratic on papyri of the XIIIth Dynasty
to the end of the Middle Kingdom; also in some inscriptions of the
XVIIIth Dynasty. Late Egyptian is seen in hieratic papyri of the XVIIIth
to the XXIst Dynasties. The spelling of Late Egyptian is very
extraordinary, full of false etymologies, otiose signs, &c., the old
orthography being quite unable to adapt itself neatly to the profoundly
modified language; nevertheless, this clumsy spelling is expressive, and
the very mistakes are instructive as to the pronunciation.
_Demotic._--Demotic Egyptian seems to represent approximately the vulgar
speech of the Saite period, and is written in the "demotic" character,
which may be traced back to the XXVIth Dynasty, if not to a still
earlier time. With progressive changes, this form of the language is
found in documents reaching down to the fall of Paganism in the 4th
century A.D.[12] Under the later Ptolemies and the Roman rule documents
in Greek are more abundant than in demotic, and the language of the
ruling classes must have begun to penetrate the masses deeply.
_Coptic._--This, in the main, represents the popular language of early
Christian Egypt from the 3rd to perhaps the 10th century A.D., when the
growth of Coptic as a literary language must have ceased. The Greek
alphabet, reinforced by a few signs borrowed from demotic, rendered the
spoken tongue so accurately that four distinct, though closely allied,
dialects are readily distinguishable in Coptic MSS.; ample remains are
found of renderings of the Scriptures into all these dialects. The
distinctions between the dialects consist largely in pronunciation, but
extend also to the vocabulary, word-formation and syntax. Such
interchanges are found as _l_ for _r_, [Coptic: qima] (_k_, _ch_) for
[Coptic: dandia] (_dj_), final _i_ for final _e_, _a_ for _e_, _a_ for
_o_. Early in the 2nd century A.D., pagan Egyptians, or perhaps
foreigners settled in Egypt, essayed, as yet unskilfully, to write the
native language in Greek letters. This _Old Coptic_, as it is termed,
was still almost entirely free from Greek loan-words, and its strong
archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the literary language, even in
its most "vulgar" forms, having moved more slowly than the speech of the
people. Christian Coptic, though probably at first contemporary with
some documents of Old Coptic, contrasts strongly with the latter. The
monks whose task it was to perfect the adaptation of the alphabet to the
dialects of Egypt and translate the Scriptures out of the Greek, flung
away all pagan traditions. It is clear that the basis which they chose
for the new literature was the simplest language of daily life in the
monasteries, charged as it was with expressions taken from Greek,
pre-eminently the language of patristic Christianity. There is evidence
that the amount of stress on syllables, and the consequent length of
vowels, varied greatly in spoken Coptic, and that the variation gave
much trouble to the scribes; the early Christian writers must have taken
as a model for each dialect the deliberate speech of grave elders or
preachers, and so secured a uniform system of accentuation. The remains
of Old Coptic, though very instructive in their marked peculiarities,
are as yet too few for definite classification. The main divisions of
Christian Coptic as recognized and named at present are: Sahidic
(formerly called Theban), spoken in the upper Thebais; Akhmimic, in the
neighbourhood of Akhmim, but driven out by Sahidic about the 5th
century; Fayumic, in the Fayum (formerly named wrongly "Bashmuric," from
a province of the Delta); Bohairic, the dialect of the "coast district"
(formerly named "Memphite"), spoken in the north-western Delta. Coptic,
much alloyed with Arabic, was spoken in Upper Egypt as late as the 15th
century, but it has long been a dead language.[13] Sahidic and Bohairic
are the most important dialects, each of these having left abundant
remains; the former spread over the whole of Upper Egypt, and the latter
since the 14th century has been the language of the sacred books of
Christianity throughout the country, owing to the hierarchical
importance of Alexandria and the influence of the ancient monasteries
established in the north-western desert.
The above stages of the Egyptian language are not defined with absolute
clearness. Progress is seen from dynasty to dynasty or from century to
century. New Egyptian shades off almost imperceptibly into demotic, and
it may be hoped that gaps which now exist in the development will be
filled by further discovery.
Coptic is the only stage of the language in which the spelling gives a
clear idea of the pronunciation. It is therefore the mainstay of the
scholar in investigating or restoring the word-forms of the ancient
language. Greek transcriptions of Egyptian names and words are valuable
as evidence for the vocalization of Egyptian. Such are found from the
6th century B.C. in the inscription of Abu Simbel, from the 5th in
Herodotus, &c., and abound in Ptolemaic and later documents from the
beginning of the 3rd century B.C. onwards. At first sight they may seem
inaccurate, but on closer examination the Graecizing is seen to follow
definite rules, especially in the Ptolemaic period. A few cuneiform
transcriptions, reaching as far back as the XVIIIth Dynasty, give
valuable hints as to how Egyptian was pronounced in the 15th century
B.C. Coptic itself is of course quite inadequate to enable us to restore
Old Egyptian. In it the Old Egyptian verbal forms are mostly replaced by
periphrases; though the strong roots are often preserved entire, the
weaker consonants and the [Hebrew: ts] have largely or entirely
disappeared, so that the language appears as one of biliteral rather
than triliteral roots. Coptic is strongly impregnated with Greek words
adopted late; moreover, a certain number of Semitic loan-words flowed
into Egyptian at all ages, and especially from the 16th century B.C.
onwards, displacing earlier words. It is only by the most careful
scrutiny, or the exercise of the most piercing insight, that the
imperfectly spelled Egyptian has been made to yield up one grammatical
secret after another in the light brought to bear upon it from Coptic.
Demotic grammar ought soon to be thoroughly comprehensible in its forms,
and the study of Late Egyptian should not stand far behind that of
demotic. On the other hand, Middle Egyptian, and still more Old
Egyptian, which is separated from Middle Egyptian by a wide gap, will
perhaps always be to us little more than consonantal skeletons, the
flesh and blood of their vocalization being for the most part
irretrievably lost.[14]
In common with the Semitic languages, the Berber languages of North
Africa, and the Cushite languages of North-East Africa, Egyptian of all
periods possesses grammatical gender, expressing masculine and feminine.
Singularly few language groups have this peculiarity; and our own great
Indo-European group, which possesses it, is distinguished from those
above mentioned by having the neuter gender in addition. The
characteristic triliteral roots of all the Semitic languages seemed to
separate them widely from others; but certain traits have caused the
Egyptian, Berber and Cushite groups to be classed together as three
subfamilies of a Hamitic group, remotely related to the Semitic. The
biliteral character of Coptic, and the biliteralism which was believed
to exist in Egyptian, led philologists to suspect that Egyptian might be
a surviving witness to that far-off stage of the Semitic languages when
triliteral roots had not yet been formed from presumed original
biliterals; Sethe's investigations, however, prove that the Coptic
biliterals are themselves derived from Old Egyptian triliterals, and
that the triliteral roots enormously preponderated in Egyptian of the
earliest known form; that view is, therefore, no longer tenable. Many
remarkable resemblances have been observed in the grammatical structure
of the Berber and Cushite groups with Semitic (cf. H. Zimmern,
_Vergleichende Grammatik d. semitischen Sprachen_, Berlin, 1898,
especially pronouns and verbs); but the relationship must be very
distant, and there are no ancient documents that can take back the
history of any one of those languages more than a few centuries. Their
connexion with Semitic and Egyptian, therefore, remains at present an
obscure though probable hypothesis. On the other hand, Egyptian is
certainly related to Semitic. Even before the triliterality of Old
Egyptian was recognized, Erman showed that the so-called
pseudo-participle had been really in meaning and in form a precise
analogue of the Semitic perfect, though its original employment was
almost obsolete in the time of the earliest known texts. Triliteralism
is considered the most essential and most peculiar feature of Semitic.
But there are, besides, many other resemblances in structure between the
Semitic languages and Egyptian, so that, although the two vocabularies
present few points of clear contact, there is reason to believe that
Egyptian was originally a characteristic member of the Semitic family of
languages. See Erman, "Das Verhaltnis d. agyptischen zu d. semitischen
Sprachen" (_Zeitschrift d. deutschen morgenl. Gesellschaft_, 1892);
Zimmern, _Vergl. Gram._, 1898; Erman, "Flexion d. agyptischen Verbums"
(_Sitzungsberichte d. Berl. Akad._, 1900). The Egyptians proper are not,
and so far as we can tell never were, Semitic in physical feature. As a
possible explanation of the facts, Erman supposes that a horde of
conquering Semites, like the Arabs of a later day, imposed their
language on the country, but disappeared, being weakened by the climate
or absorbed by the native population. The latter acquired the Semitic
language imperfectly from their conquerors; they expressed the verbal
conjugations by periphrases, mispronounced the consonants, and so
changed greatly the appearance of the vocabulary, which also would
certainly contain a large proportion of native non-Semitic roots. Strong
consonants gave place to weak consonants (as [Arabic: Qaaf] has done to
[Arabic sign], in the modern Arabic of Egypt), and then the weak
consonants disappearing altogether produced biliterals from the
triliterals. Much of this must have taken place, according to the
theory, in the prehistoric period; but the loss of weak consonants, of
[ayin] and of one of two repeated consonants, and the development of
periphrastic conjugations continued to the end. The typical Coptic root
thus became biliteral rather than triliteral, and the verb, by means of
periphrases, developed tenses of remarkable precision. Such verbal
resemblances as exist between Coptic and Semitic are largely due to late
exchanges with Semitic neighbours.
The following sketch of the Egyptian language, mainly in its earliest
form, which dates from some three or four thousand years B.C., is
founded upon Erman's works. It will serve to contrast with Coptic
grammar on the one hand and Semitic grammar on the other.