Talk:Egyptian language
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What do all these '5AD' and '2AD' mean ? Certainly not yearly dates. --Taw
- Finally, Coptic uses a modified version of the [Cyrillic Alphabet]? (Modern Greek, Russian and some Slavic languages still use this alphabet).
It seems like complete misunderstanding of what does term 'Cyrillic' mean. Cyrillic means Slavic alphabets based on Greek alphabets. Probably the sentence should be "Coptic uses a modified version of the Greek Alphabet", but I don't know any Coptic, so I won't change it. --Taw
http://www.stshenouda.com/coptlang/coptalfa.htm shows the alphabet, it really looks more Greek than Cyrillic to me --JeLuF
- "Cyrillic" is totally and utterly wrong. I've changed it. (Note that the date in "Arabic became the oficial Egyptian language after the Arabian invasions circa 2AD." is also totally and utterly wrong. If someone knows a correct date for that, please fix.) --Brion VIBBER
This article confuses "language" with "writing" and should be updated accordingly. --Nefertum17 11:00, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- upon further reflection, why is all the detail on the writing system (and only one of them at that) covered here and not in Egyptian hieroglyph and hieratic --Nefertum17 11:19, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Anyone who knows about the Egyptian language in general: please come to Talk:Rosetta Stone and help rewrite the article. -- ran (talk) 01:00, July 15, 2005 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Template?
Missing? Ksenon 05:25, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
- Well, it could look something like this:
| Egyptian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Ancient Egypt | |
| Language extinction: | developed into Demotic (until 5th century AD), and Coptic | |
| Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Egyptian |
|
| Writing system: | hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | egy | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | egy | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
- --Gareth Hughes 13:44, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Egyptian Wikipedia
Just wondering why there isn't an Egyptian Wikipedia. We have a Latin and Anglo Saxon one.--Fox Mccloud 23:18, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
- It's all about the users. I'd question whether we need these Wikipedias, and especially the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia (which can't seriously be claimed to be useful), but Anglo-Saxon has 600 articles and Latin over 4000. If you can get enough people who can write Ancient Egyptian together, it could be made. I question whether it will be as successful as Latin or AS, and whether it's really worth the time it would take.--Prosfilaes 04:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I'd imagine the reason why Anglo Saxon and Gothic Language wikipedias exist is because it's fun for the people to make it in those languages, so it would be worth the time to them. Also, in this very article it says people, even now learn Egyptian.--Fox Mccloud 23:42, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Would it have to be written in hieroglyphs, though?
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Wikipedia (Wikipidia) in Egyptian hieroglyphs. - Ghelaetalkcontribs 18:08, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
- It would be written in whatever script those who chose to write Egyptian would prefer.--Prosfilaes 20:20, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] egyptian languages
This link is self referential; it redirects to this page. Is it meant to link to a page about more general egyptian languages, or is it a mistake?
- I just made it into a redirect to the more general Languages of Egypt, which I think is more sensible. Thanks for noting! — mark ✎ 08:33, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Note, however, that some links referring to the Egyptian subfamily of the Afro-asiatic languages also redirect here. I do not know if such a page actually exists.
I've changed it back. Egyptian languages (pl.) (or Copto-Egyptian) refers to both the ancient Egyptian Language and Coptic and is a sub-family of Afro-Asiatic. However Egyptian language (sing.) refers to only the ancient language. —Klompje7 11:45, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Spoken language
Does anyone know how to translate words from English, French ... or any other language into Old or Middle Egyptian? Not in hieroglyphics, but the spoken language, like that at the beginning of the Stephen Sommers mummy films (although I am not entirely sure that the words spoken are correct)
- Unfortunately, most mummies do not speak (if only they could!). Egyptologists have a system of transliteration of ancient Egyptian, but we are unsure how closely the letters we write correspond to spoken Egyptian of any period. For example, many of the vowels were not written, so in popular writing we add the letter e wherever we could do with an extra vowel — the Egyptian word neb, meaning 'lord', is written with a sign representing the two consonants n and b, the e just makes it pronouncable. On the other hand, you could look at Coptic, the last variety of Egyptian to become extinct, as we know quite a lot about how that is pronounced. — Gareth Hughes 21:15, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
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- In practice, we think we have a decent idea of how Egyptian was spoken, by comparative linguistics with other related languages, including Coptic, and by how Egyptian names were recorded in Greek and other languages. I don't know of any good modern sources for this, though.--Prosfilaes 07:04, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Egyptian in Egyptian
Is it known what the Ancient Egyptians called their language? We know they called their land Kmt (Kemet, Kimit, whatever) but do we know what they called their language? If we do, then why couldn't I find it on this page? Is, on the Coptic language page, met rem en kēme the name of the language or similar? - Ghelaetalkcontribs 18:14, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
- The expression r n km.t is more common in earlier Egyptian. Literally, it translates as "language of Egypt". If written from left to right, it would look like this:
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- Coptic met rem en kēmə translates literally as "'thing' of the people of Egypt." It can be used as the noun 'Egyptian'. Crum's Coptic Dictionary also attests aspə em met rem en kēmə or "Egyptian language". The Coptic Church uses tenaspī en rem en kēmī based on liturgical Bohairic. — Zerida 23:45, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
It would make sense as
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means 'mouth'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 219.88.183.96 (talk • contribs).
[edit] Non sequitur
The sentence,
- However, we do not know what these vowels would have been, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian does not write vowels; hence "ankh" could represent either "life", "to live" or "living".
is a non sequitur as written. Probably information should be added about how the unwritten vowels marked the inflection or derivation of specific words from a root, but without that the sentence doesn't make sense. --Jim Henry 21:20, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
It's not possible to speak the Egyptian language, unfortunately. Without the vowels, we just have no idea how it was spoken.
That's not true. Coptic gives us this information thanks to a common linguistic process called internal reconstruction. There are books written on the topic of the reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian as well. We even know if the reconstructions are correct because of the many Egyptian names and words that were recorded in other languages of the time (like Assyrian for example) written in writing systems like cuneiform that *did* record vowels. Further, we know that Egyptian is closely related to the Semitic language family, so vowel reconstruction is even more secure thanks to comparisons with that language group.
The linguist consensus seems to be that Ancient Egyptian had three vowels, *a, *i and *u, with long counterparts, *ā, *ī and *ū, just like in Proto-Semitic. So when we see Coptic sašf meaning "seven", we know that the earlier Egyptian word was pronounced *sáfḫaw. In the case of ȝnḫ "life", the corresponding Coptic word is ōnḫ which tells us that the first vowel in the Ancient Egyptian word was probably *ā. --Glengordon01 04:40, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
By the way, Jim Henry is absolutely correct. A word like ȝnḫ had different vowels within the "consonant skeleton" depending on what it was used for, whether a noun "life" or a verb "to live", or whether it was conjugated in the present tense or the past, singular or plural. An example off the top of my head concerning vowel alternations in the language is *nāṯaraw "god" versus plural *naṯūraw "gods", which are both reflected in the writing with the skeleton nṯr. At least, this is according to Middle Egyptian by John B. Callender. Reconstructions may vary a little between authors. --Glengordon01 04:52, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Vocabulary
It would be nice if the article said something about vocabulary..size, number of roots, how many roots in common with Arabic, Hebrew etc.
[edit] Speaking it
I know how they found out what each word ment etc, but how did they know how the sounds should've sounded? Numbercattle 15:21, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
