Ancient Egyptian 2

Here we go with our second instalment on Middle Egyptian. As before, I am forced to say that I have nothing but a passing interest in this language. Therefore, mistakes are possible. Please make sure that you notify me of them, if you notice them.

In our previous discussion I gave some answers to some of the questions that are most often asked regarding this language. In this post we are going to get a little bit more dirty and discuss some of the technical details. While I am unable in a single post to describe every intricate detail, without making it more boring than it actually is, I will point some useful resources on the web.

First on our list is writing. We will only discuss hieroglyphic writing (no demotic or hieratic here). You already know the proper direction of reading hieroglyphics. When writing them, if you have no artistical talent you could use this wonderful resource by Jenny Carrington and I assure you that in no time you will get accustomed to the way hieroglyphs should be drawn. One thing to be noted here is that you should train both writing left to right and right to left. If you happen to get over some inscriptions and you would like to copy them, this will prove very useful. Most inscriptions are actually left to right written, or from top to bottom.

The resource above by Jenny Carrington, while it does show the proper way to draw hieroglyphs, it doesn't say what they actually represent. Never fear, we have this resource by Omniglot. Try to learn a few signs each day until you know all of the uniliteral, biliteral, triliteral and determinatives. Don't overdo it. While there are quite a few signs, nobody is actually hurrying you to do it, so just do it a little bit each day and in no time you will be able to understand a lot when looking at the inscriptions.

Also, it is very important when learning these hieroglyphs to also learn their transcriptions. There are quite a few dictionaries out there that only give the meaning by transcription only. It is also easier, when using the internet, to refer by transcription only, instead of using a lot of img tags.

At this point in time you are probably asking for an egyptian dictionary. I was amazed to see that there is actually such a resource, free of charge, online. You can find it here. Thank you Jim Loy.

So you know how to write/read and you have a source from where to get your words. What next? The grammar... I will give some first tastes of it. If you want more, you should probably buy Alain Gardiner's book called "Middle Egyptian Grammar". You can find it on Amazon.

1) In Egyptian there are two genders for nouns: masculine and feminine. The masculine nouns do not have a particular termination. The feminine nouns always finish in -t. Of course, we are speaking about the singular forms of this verbs.

2) To form the plural of a noun, you simply add -w for masculine nouns or change the ending -t in -wt for feminine nouns.

3) In Egyptian there is a third case, rarely used called the dual. It is used for things that are in pair. For example: "the eyes" == irty and not irwt if you are reffering to only two eyes (and not some monster with 1000 eyes). This dual is formed by attaching -wy at masculine and changing -t in -ty for feminine nouns.

4) The adjectives agree in gender and number to the noun that they qualify. They are placed AFTER the noun

5) Let us say you want to form a proposition:

NOUN is ADJ.

In egyptian this is done by omitting the is part and simply saying: ADJ. NOUN

6) There are two ways to say propositions of these type (i.e. the genitive):

"Noun1 belongs to Noun2."
"Noun2's Noun1 ..."

The first way is by simply writing:
noun1 noun2.

The second way is by inserting the adjective "n" between the two nouns.

7) The demonstrative adjectives are:
pn - this (for masculine nouns)
tn - this (for feminine nouns)
nn - these

As before the adjectives are placed AFTER the nouns (unlike English, but similar to Romanian).

For the moment, I will stop here. When I will have some more time, I will discuss a few more rules. The next article will probably be the last in this series. There is only so much you can write about a language in a blog.

See you next time!