THE LANGUAGE.]
EGYPTOLOGY
The ordinary literary language of the monuments of its later ages 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 Kingdom respectively. Thp former is found chiefly in tales, letters, &c., written in hieratic on papyri of the XHIth 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 XXVth Dynasty, if not to a still earlier time. With but moderate changes, this form of the language is found in documents reaching down to the fall of paganism in the 4th century A.D.1 In the earlier times the spelling is excessively concise; in later Ptolemaic and in the Roman period, it is comparatively full and expressive. Though documents from Egypt in Greek are more abundant than in demotic, the language of the ruling classes had not penetrated the masses deeply. Coptic. — This, in the main, represents the popular language of early Christian Egypt from the 3rd to perhaps the 8th 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 five 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, O' (&, ch) for x (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 loanwords, and its strong archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the literary language 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 1 In the temple of Philse, where the worship of Isis was permitted to continue till the reign of Justinian, Brugsch found demotic inscriptions with dates to the end of the 5th century.
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present are : Sahidic (formerly called Theban); spoken in the upper Thebais. Akhmimic; in the neighbourhood of Akhmim. Fayumic; in the Fayum (formerly named wrongly “Bashmuric,” from a province of the Delta). Memphite; in the neighbourhood of Memphis. 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 15 th century, but it has long been a dead language.2 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 15th 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. 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 are sometimes valuable as evidence for the vocalization of Egyptian, and they abound as far back as the 4th century b.c., but they seem very inaccurate. A few cuneiform transcriptions, reaching as far back as the XVIIIth Dynasty, also give valuable hints. 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 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 had flowed into Egyptian from the 16th century b.c. onwards, displacing earlier words. It is only by the most careful scrutiny and the exercise of the most piercing insight that the imperfectly spelled Egyptian is 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. Middle Egyptian and Old Egyptian, on the other hand, 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. 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 2 The Arabic dialects which gradually displaced Coptic as Mahommedauism supplanted Christanity adopted hut a few words of the old native stock.
