The Mouton Companions to Ancient Egyptian
-
Edited by:
The Mouton Companions to Ancient Egyptian series addresses the great need of comprehensive seminal publications on ancient Egyptian linguistics.
Ancient Egyptian, generally considered to be an Afroasiatic language, was written for over four thousand years. It is usually divided into five main stages: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Ancient Egyptian as a whole is unparalleled among documented languages in terms of continuous length of attestation, variation in registers and genres, and opportunities for historical linguistic research.
Ancient Egyptian has interested general linguists since Alexander von Humboldt. Recently, it has begun to attract the attention of typologists. However, idiosyncrasies of the modern grammatical tradition within Egyptology have prevented nonspecialist linguists from having access to accurate information about any phase of the language. Thus, the quality of data from Ancient Egyptian in general linguistics used to be poor, and most general linguists have understandably refrained from making reference to the language at all.
This gap can be addressed by providing a comprehensive description of the language in straight-forward, accessible terms. This prospect has recently become possible due to a growing interest on the part of linguists working on Ancient Egyptian in making their work transparent to non-Egyptologists.
- First book series on Ancient Egyptian linguistics
- Offers innovative and cutting edge research
- For the first time, linguistic aspects of Ancient Egyptian are treated in an accessible manner
- Of interest to egyptologists and general linguists
Author / Editor information
E. Grossman, Jerusalem, Israel; S. Polis and J. Winand, Liège, Belgium; M. Müller, Basel, Switzerland; S. Uljas, Uppsala, Sweden.
The Egyptian language, with its written documentation spreading from the Early Bronze Age (Ancient Egyptian) to Christian times (Coptic), has rarely been the object of typological studies, grammatical analysis mainly serving philological purposes.
This volume offers now a detailed analysis and a diachronic discussion of the non-verbal patterns of the Egyptian language, from the Pyramid Texts (Earlier Egyptian) to Coptic (Later Egyptian), based on an extensive use of data, especially for later phases. By providing a narrative contextualisation and a linguistic glossing of all examples, it addresses the needs not only of students of Egyptian and Coptic, but also of a linguistic readership. After an introduction into the basic typological features of Egyptian, the main book chapters address morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the three non-verbal sentence types documented throughout the history of this language: the adverbial sentence, the nominal sentence and the adjectival sentence. These patterns also appear in a variety of clausal environments and can be embedded in verbal constructions.
This book provides an ideal introduction into the study of Egyptian historical grammar and an indispensable companion for philological reading.
