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Cambridge Books Online

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Ancient Egyptian

A Linguistic Introduction

Antonio Loprieno

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611865

Online ISBN: 9780511611865

Hardback ISBN: 9780521443845

Paperback ISBN: 9780521448499

Chapter

Epilogue pp. 237-239

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611865.010

Cambridge University Press

EPILOGUE

Throughout this book, we have observed the extraordinary vitality of a deadlanguage. Although one of the latest languages to have been deciphered andanalyzed from a linguistic perspective, Ancient Egyptian proves to be an idealfield for linguistic investigation. Its visually most appealing feature, the hiero-glyphic script in which the language was mainly expressed, is a complex butflexible pictographic system suited to convey the phonological, morphological,and lexical oppositions of the language as perceived by its users. By the sametoken, the history of the system and of its manual varieties (Hieratic andDemotic) offers the opportunity to observe the various functional pressures towhich it was exposed: while preserving a certain degree of immutability duringthree millennia, the hieroglyphic script expanded or restricted its phonologicaland semantic potential depending both on the social composition of the scribalelite and on the cultural nature of the texts. Finally, the interface betweenchanges in the religious Weltanschauung from the emergence of Hellenism tothe rise of Christianity on the one hand and the "alphabetic revolution" whichcaused Egyptian to be rendered in a Greek-derived script (Coptic) provides acomprehensive basis for the study of the relationship between language, writingsystem, and cultural ideology: firstly, in Egypt and elsewhere, it is the script,rather than the language, that becomes a symbol of "heathendom," of the oldreligious order which a new revealed religion aims to overcome; secondly, thealphabetic system is not an inevitable outcome of a writing system whichprivileges the phonological level: although it possessed from the beginning a setof monoconsonantal signs, the hieroglyphic system never departed from itscomplex fusion of semagrams and phonograms, but on the contrary expandedin its final stages the number and the functional role of its iconic elements.

Egyptian phonology also proves to be a revealing area of linguistic research.In spite of certain limits, such as the lack of indication of vowels, some irregu-larities in the correspondences with other Afroasiatic languages, the ambiguitiesin the graphic rendition, which prevent a thorough assessment of the under-lying phonetic reality, one can nonetheless observe at work a broad spectrum ofphonological oppositions and evolutions from the Afroasiatic prehistory of thelanguage down to Coptic: the vocalic sound shifts, the fate of the emphaticseries, the tendency to move the point of articulation of velar and palatal

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238 Epilogue

consonants to the apical region, and the devoicing of voiced phonemes provoke,as we saw, wide-ranging effects of structural as well as comparative relevance.

On the morphological side, Ancient Egyptian exhibits a high number offeatures common to other Afroasiatic, and particularly Semitic languages, espe-cially in the domain of nominal morphology: feminine and plural patterns,pronouns, some numerals. But it also shows a substantial degree of autonomyin the area of verbal forms, which are not easily interpretable within a tradi-tional genealogical model. How should the language historian deal with thisvariety of forms and patterns? Is Egyptian more archaic or more innovative thanthe related languages? How related to each other are Afroasiatic languages afterall? It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptological linguists have rediscoveredmorphology, which had been somewhat neglected in the second part of thiscentury in the wake of the "Polotskyan revolution" that prompted an increasedattention to the structurally more promising domain of syntax.

To the modern linguist, syntax and its extensions, such as typology orpragmatics, still represent in fact the most challenging aspect of AncientEgyptian. On the one hand, the language displays a rigid sentence structurewith a rather limited number of basic nominal, adverbial, and verbal patterns;on the other hand, it also licenses, as we saw, an extremely wide array of syn-tactic conversion (or "transformation," depending on the linguistic obedience)or embedding (or "subordination") and a frequent recourse to pragmaticmovements of topicalization (or thematization) or focalization (or rhemati-zation). Even in the absence of a complete reconstruction of the morphologicalpatterns involved, this interplay between syntactic rigidity and pragmaticflexibility provides an ideal documentary basis for the student of Egyptianphilology and of general linguistics alike: the former will benefit from a morethorough understanding of the discourse structures of the language by applyingit to the textual diversity of more than 4000 years of written history—fromliterary to religious texts, from private to administrative corpora, from theregisters of the pyramid towns in the third millennium BCE to the liturgy ofthe mediaeval Christian church; the latter will observe the synchronic reality vs.the diachronic evolution of syntactic survivals and innovations drawn from the"spoken language" — an unknown entity, yet in constant dialectics with thecodified forms of written Egyptian - elementary verbless patterns vs. multi-tierembeddings of verbal predicates, the idiolect of a specific author vs. the impactof the linguistic policies enforced by the Egyptian state in a linguistic domainwhose historical and typological variety can be compared to Latin and theRomance languages or to Classical Arabic and its present-day dialects.



Epilogue 239

If after reading this book, therefore, linguists will decide to have frequentrecourse to Ancient Egyptian, and Egyptologists will discover that the study ofthe linguistic structures of their language of expertise provides useful insightsinto the overall understanding of Egypt as a cultural entity, the book will havefulfilled part of its original goal.



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