Ancient Egyptian language

“ It seems unfair to judge of the capabilities of a language of which almost the entire literature has perished. How could we judge of the capabilities of the Greek language had all its poetry and oratory been lost, and nothing remained but its inscriptions? Yet enough remains to show what the structure of the Egyptian sentences must necessarily have been ”

“ It is difficult to conceive the Egyptians as otherwise than incapacitated by their language from profound philosophy. It is hardly possible to read a page written in an Indo-European language, from Sanskrit to Keltic, without coming across some kind of dialectic process of which I do not remember a single trace in an Egyptian text. ”

“ Besides all our acquisitions in the ancient Egyptian language we have made some not unimportant gains for the science of language in general. In the upper countries of the Nile I have obtained three African languages, the grammar and lexicon of which I have made out and noted down from the communications of the natives, with sufficient completeness to present a clear idea of them. ”

“ One of the chief differences between the Egyptian language on the one hand and the Indo-European and Semitic on the other, is, that the distinctions between roots, stems and words, can hardly be said to exist at all in the former. ”

“ No history can be learnt with certainty except from evidence contemporaneous with the events recorded; no religion can be studied with profit except in the very words of its own votaries. But the knowledge of the Egyptian language had not only actually perished, but the key to the decipherment of its writings was supposed to be irrecoverably lost. ”

“ Progress is seen from dynasty to dynasty or from century to century. New Egyptian shades off almost imperceptibly into demotic, and it may be hoped that gaps which now exist in the development will be filled by further discovery.
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 and words are valuable as evidence for the vocalization of Egyptian. ”

“ It is also clear that any system must reflect the culture of the people among whom it originates. The ancient Egyptians had no inns nor purses, but did have horned serpents and owls. Still more determining is the influence of the language itself, as soon as writing attempts to be phonetic. The words expressing pair and sieve are obviously something else in Egyptian than in English, so that if these signs were used, their sound value would be quite otherwise. Yet once a system has crystallized, there is nothing to prevent a new nationality from taking it over bodily. ”

“ The Egyptians had no traditions that at all connected them with Asia. Their language, indeed, in historic times was partially Semitic, and allied to the Hebrew, the Phœnician, and the Aramaic; but the relationship was remote, and may be partly accounted for by later intercourse, without involving original derivation. The fundamental character of the Egyptian in respect of physical type, language, and tone of thought, is Nigritic. The Egyptians were not negroes, but they bore a resemblance to the negro which is indisputable. ”

“ The notion expressed by an Egyptian word is only determined, as that of a verb in the strict sense (verbum finitum) , by the presence of a subject. When no subject (that is, noun or pronoun) is expressed, we may indeed have a "verbum infinitum," but this is grammatically a noun or an adjective. How can a language of this description be called Semitic in its grammar? ”

“ The Lectures on the Science of Language delivered nearly twenty years ago by Professor Max Müller, have, I trust, made us fully understand how, among the Indo-European races, the names of the sun, of sunrise and sunset, and of other such phenomena, came to be talked of and considered as personages of whom wondrous legends are told. Egyptian mythology not merely admits, but imperatively demands, the same explanation. ”

“ The decipherment of a language does not at once put us in possession of a language. The ancient Etruscan writings are read with ease, but they are as unintelligible as ever. The relationship between Coptic and old Egyptian happily enabled Champollion to find the meanings of many words and the general sense of entire inscriptions. But the old Egyptian vocabulary, besides representing an earlier stage of the language, is very much more extensive than the Coptic, and the greater part of the words which compose it had to be recovered, one after another, by an inductive process. ”

“ The attempts to show that ancient Egyptian religion was a sublime monotheism, or an enlightened pantheism which disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their origin in a confusion between the aspirations of individual thinkers and the actual religion of their time. There are indeed literary monuments rescued from the wreck of ancient Egyptian culture which embody the highest and most spiritual conceptions of the Godhead, and use the language of the purest monotheism. ”

“ The Egyptian verb is often accompanied by an auxiliary, and is grammatically subordinate to it; and the combinations formed by these auxiliary words with the verbal notion enable the language to express meanings equivalent to those expressed by our Indo-European tenses and moods. ”

“ Keltic, Roman, and Gothic invasions have successively swept over them and finally left the language of the country Romance, but the original speech also survives the vicissitudes of thousands of years and is still spoken in the western Pyrenees as Basque. Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Hyksos, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, but whatever the official speech of the ruling class, the people continued to speak Egyptian. Finally, the Arab came and brought with him a new religion, which entailed use of the Arabic language. ”

“ Thus, if there is any importance in the bearing of history upon politics, we have in Egypt a better chance of appreciating it than we have in the case of any other country.
It is true that the language has altered, but this is not a matter of first-rate importance. A Jew is not less typical because he speaks German, [29] French, or English; and the cracking of skulls in Ireland is introduced as easily in English as it was in Erse. The old language of the Egyptian hieroglyphs actually is not yet quite dead ”

“ The languages belonging to this stage have generally been called agglutinative. Now the Egyptian language has indeed reached this stage as regards the pronominal and one or two other suffixes. But in all other respects it most nearly resembles the languages of the first or Radical stage, in which there is no formal distinction between a root and a word. The agglutination between an Egyptian word and its pronominal suffix is of the lightest possible kind; a particle may, and often does, intervene between them. ”

“ The chronology of Egyptian history is still a subject of not a little controversy; but it cannot be reasonably doubted that the very earliest written monuments of human thought are found in the valley of the Nile, as well as the most ancient and most gigantic works of human art. ”

“ Joseph has undoubtedly written the word in the English characters that best represented the actual sound of the word in ancient Egyptian. Scientists know nothing positive of those sounds; they knew that certain hieroglyphics form certain words with certain supposed meaning, but for the sounds they have to rely on the language of the modern Copts, basing their theory on the slender foundation that the sounds of words in Egypt are the same to-day as they were 4000 years ago. ”

“ The spirit and progressive character of their art offers the strongest contrast to the stiff, lifeless, and unchanging conventionalism of the dwellers on the Nile. Their language and alphabet are confessedly in advance of the Egyptian. Their religion is more earnest and less degraded. In courage and military genius their superiority is very striking; for the Egyptians are essentially an unwarlike people. The one point of advantage to which Egypt may fairly lay claim is the grandeur and durability of her architecture. ”

“ It also seems to me a worthy and useful task to draw the Egyptian people within the circle of those great groups of nations, whose most ancient history has in modern times acquired an altogether different aspect by means of the comparison of languages. I propose to preface my Coptic grammar with a special chapter on the relation of the Egyptian to the Semitic and Indo-Germanic primitive languages. ”

“ The only remedy which can bring about a real improvement in the mental development of the Egyptian nation is the adoption of the spoken language as the language of writing, and the creation of a vernacular literature. Such a change would be unfavourably received by the learned, the sheikhs, lawyers, and professional letter-writers, to whom the existence of the present written language is, or rather appears to be, an advantage. The arguments advanced against any such innovation are of the most various kinds. ”

“ An abundance of popular literature has familiarised the public with the outer aspect of ancient Egypt, but the world is still far from recognising the message she sent to mankind. We must go back to ‘the Wonderland on the banks of the mighty Nile’ for the origin of all things which most interest us. It is the very cradle-land of language. Her tongue contains all the elements of the so-called ‘Aryan,’ [464] Semitic, and Allophyllian or Turanian families, and dates long before the days of the present distribution. ”

“ In leaving the soil of Asia the language of Egypt took upon it an African dress.
Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come from a region where the language was Semitic. ”

“ Besides this a wealth of material has been gathered, especially by means of the numerous paper impressions of the most important inscriptions, the gradual interpretation of which must lead to substantial progress in the science. According to the great age established for the earliest written monuments the history of the Egyptian language now embraces a period of nearly five and a half thousand years, and thus acquires an entirely new significance in relation to the universal history of human language and writing. ”

“ It is only where a conquering caste brings no women with it that it is likely to lose its language.
When, therefore, we find that Old Egyptian is an Africanized Semitic language, we have every right to infer that it is because invaders brought it with them from Asia who were Semites either by race or by language. In other words, Egypt must have been occupied in prehistoric days by a people who came from the Semitic area in Asia. ”

“ But, even if spoken Egyptian becomes the language of writing, what is to prevent your keeping up the Arabic of the Koran? In the village schools the children can still learn it by heart. In the other schools you can continue to teach it, as we teach classics in England. It has long been considered part of the accomplishments of an English gentleman to write verse and prose in correct Latin and Greek. You have much stronger reasons for making a sound knowledge of classical Arabic a necessary accomplishment of every educated Egyptian. ”

“ In general it may be said of Egyptian literary compositions that apart from their interest as anthropological documents they possess no merit which would entitle them to survive. They are more or less touched by artificiality, but so far as we are able to appreciate them at present they very seldom attain to any degree of literary beauty. Most of the compositions in the literary language, whether old or archaistic, are in a stilted style and often with parallelisms of phrase like those of Hebrew poetry. ”

“ It seems therefore not improbable that the principle of forming a written language by [Pg 58] means of characters representing the sounds of which the words of the spoken language are composed, was of Egyptian origin; and that it was carried in very early times to the countries on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea, and there improved upon by the adoption of a class of characters more simple than the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and of a form more convenient for a regular linear arrangement in writing. ”

“ Later this race was modified by the introduction of a Semitic element, partly from Syria, partly from the Phœnician conquerors who founded dynastic rule in Egypt under Menes, between 5000 and 4000 B.C. Their later history is written on their imperishable monuments, and need not be summarised here. In later times the Egyptian racial type was modified by Greek and Roman influence. The ancient Egyptians were highly skilled in agriculture and engineering, warlike but not aggressive, and with a highly developed literature and religion. ”

“ A highly classical style and an archaic diction, which remove the work from the comprehension of the vulgar, are regarded as merits in an Egyptian writer. The possession of a “fine style” is too often synonymous with being unintelligible to all except the most educated readers. Language and not matter becomes the all- important. Egyptian literature, in short, is intended for the few, and its use as a means for spreading knowledge among the people is ignored. Not a book, not a newspaper article is published which is not an effort for all, excepting an educated minority to understand. ”