EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE. The documents for the his tory of the Egyptian language begin with the primitive inscrip tions of the 1st dynasty (not later than 3,30o B.c.) and end with the latest Coptic compositions of about the 14th century A.D. The bulk of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are written in a more or less artificial literary language; but in business documents, letters, popular tales, etc., the scribes often approached more closely to the living form of the tongue, and thus reveal its progressive changes. The stages of the language may be distinguished as follows : Old Egyptian.—In this, the language of the Old Kingdom, we have (a) inscriptions of the 1st 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 5th and 6th 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 abun dance of short inscriptions representing the language of the 4th, 5th and 6th dynasties. The ordinary literary language of the later monuments, sometimes termed classical or Middle Egyptian, is modelled on Old-Middle Egyptian, but often much affected by contemporary speech.
Middle and New Egyptian.—These represent the vulgar speech of the Middle and New Kingdoms respectively. The f or mer is found chiefly in tales, letters, etc., written in hieratic on papyri of the i3th dynasty to the end of the Middle Kingdom ; also in some inscriptions of the i8th dynasty. New Egyptian is seen in hieratic papyri from the end of the i8th to the 21 st dynasties. The spelling of New Egyptian is full of false etymol ogies, otiose signs, etc., the old orthography being quite unable to adapt itself neatly to the profoundly modified language; neverthe less, this clumsy spelling is expressive, and the very mistakes are instructive as to the pronunciation.
Demotic (q.v.).—Demotic Egyptian seems to represent ap proximately the vulgar speech of the Saite period during which the demotic writing was formed. 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. and a century longer at Philae.
Coptic was the vulgar speech of about the 3rd 5th centuries and was written in Greek characters; several dia lects being easily distinguished in it.
The above stages of the Egyptian language are not abruptly de fined. Progress is traceable from dynasty to dynasty or from century to century but the gap between Middle Egyptian and Old Egyptian is wide. New Egyptian shades off almost imperceptibly into demotic, and gaps which now exist in the development may be filled by further discovery. Coptic is the only stage of the language in which the spelling gives a clear idea of the pronuncia tion. It is therefore the mainstay of the scholar in investigating or restoring the word-forms of the ancient language. Greek tran scriptions 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, etc., 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 Graeciz ing is seen to follow definite rules, especially in the Ptolemaic pe riod. Aramaic transcriptions of the 4th and 5th centuries B.C., and earlier ones in biblical Hebrew, are very useful for revealing the true condition of the consonantal skeletons of words, but cunei form gives us valuable examples of vocalization as early as the 25th, i9th and i8th dynasties reaching to the 15th century B.C.
It must not be supposed that the pronunciation of Old Egyptian can be restored from Coptic. In the latter speech, Old Egyptian verbal forms are mostly replaced by periphrases ; though the strong roots are often preserved entire, the weaker consonants and the y 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 i6th century B.C. onwards, displacing earlier words. 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 per haps always be to us little more than consonantal skeletons, the flesh and blood of their vocalization being for the most part irre trievably lost.
In common with the Semitic languages, the Berber languages of North Africa, and the Cushite language of north-east Africa, Egyptian of all periods possesses grammatical gender, expressing masculine and feminine. Remarkable resemblances have been observed in the grammatical structure of the Berber and Cushite groups with Semitic (cf. H. Zimmern„ Vergleichende Grammatik d. seritischen Sprachen, Berlin, 1898, especially pronouns and verbs). Their connection with. Semitic and Egyptian remains at present an obscure though probable hypothesis. On the other hand, Egyptian in its oldest form is clearly related to Semitic. In it triliteral roots enormously preponderate ; the roots consist of consonants and semi-consonants only, inflexion being effected by internal vowel change and the addition of certain consonants or vowels at the beginning or end. In the verb there is a precise ana logue of the Semitic perfect. In nouns the feminine is formed by the addition of t, the adjective by the addition of y, instrumental nouns and some others (participial, etc.) by prefixing m, and both numerals and personal pronouns show obvious relationship. Al though the vocabularies in general are widely different, Egyptian either was originally a characteristic member of the Semitic fam ily of languages, greatly modified in its African surroundings or was the result of fusion between an African and a Semitic tongue or tongues.
The verb in the earliest known form of Egyptian had displaced the Semitic imperfect, and the perfect largely by new suffix-tenses derived from a participle with pronoun such as sdm-f "hearing he (is)," = "he hears," sdrn n-f "heard (is) to him" = he has heard. The few forms were past and present but with all the vagueness of the Semitic forms and more. Coptic presents a re markable contrast to Egyptian in the preciseness of its periphrastic conjugation. There are two present tenses, an imperfect, two per fects, a pluperfect; a present and three futures besides future per fect ; there are also conjunctive and optative forms. The negatives of some of these are expressed by special prefixes. The gradual growth of these new forms can be traced through all the stages of Egyptian. Throughout the history of the language we note an increasing tendency to periphrasis ; but there was no great ad vance towards precision before demotic. In demotic there are distinguishable a present tense, imperfect, perfect, frequentative, future, future perfect, conjunctive and optative; also present, past and future negative, etc. The passive was extinct before demotic ; demotic and Coptic express it by an impersonal "they" e.g., "they struck him" stands for "he was struck." In other departments besides the verb, the Egyptian language was far better adapted to practical ends during and after the period of the Deltaic dynasties (22nd-3oth) than before. It was both simplified and enriched. The inflections rapidly disappeared and little was left of the distinctions between masculine and feminine, singular, dual and plural—except in the pronouns. The dual num ber had been given up entirely at an earlier date. The pro nouns, both personal and demonstrative, retained their forms very fully. As prefixes, suffixes and articles, they, together with some auxiliary verbs, provided the principal mechanism of the renovated language. An abundant supply of useful adverbs was gradually accumulated, as well as conjunctions, so far as the functions of the latter were not already performed by the verbal prefixes. These improvements in the language correspond to the constant intercourse of all classes of Egyptians with foreigners from Europe and Asia. Probably the best stage of Egyptian speech was that which immediately preceded Coptic. Though Coptic is here and there more exactly expressive than the best demotic, it was spoilt by too much Greek, duplicating and too often expelling native expressions that were already adequate for its simple requirements; it is pleonastic. See HIEROGLYPHS.
For modern Egyptian literature see ARABIC LITERATURE.