Relationship to other languages

Situated in the north-eastern corner of the African continent, on the border with the Asia, the Egyptian language evolved between two important linguistic families: the Semitic languages of the Near-East (Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, ...) and the Hamitic languages of Central- and North-Africa (Somali, Galla, Berber, ...). 
It is thus not surprising that the Egyptian language shows some similarities with both the Semitic and, to a lesser degree, the Hamitic languages. 

In general semantics, it shares with the Semitic languages the peculiarity that its word-stems are combinations of consonants, as a rule three, which are theoretically unchangeable. 
Grammatical inflection and minor changes of meaning were either contrived by changing the internal, unwritten vowels. 
More important differences of meaning are created by whole or partial duplication of the word-stem, or by placing a special consonant before or after the word-stem: 

• words beginning with s often denote a causative verb; for instance, the verb mn means "be established" and its derived form smn means "cause to be established", hence "establish"; qb means "to be cool", sqb means "to refresh", ...
• words beginning with m often denote a place; thus sDr means "to lie down" and msDr means "the place of lying down" hence "the ear"... This, however, does not imply that all words beginning with an m denote a place.
• the ending t is used for feminine and abstract words in Egyptian, Arabic and many other Semitic languages.

There are also many similarities in the vocabulary itself. The following is a list of some similarities between Ancient Egyptian words and words in several Semitic languages. Please note, however, that the representation of the Ancient Egyptian words is but a consonantal skeleton of the words. The Ancient Egyptians didn't write any vowels. Any character in the list below that is a vowel in our language, is either added by the modern-day Egyptologist to facilitate reading of Egyptian texts, or a representation of a consonant unknown in western languages, but common in Semitic languages. 

Sometimes such semantic similarities are obscured by unobvious consonantal changes or by a changing in the order of the consonants. Thus the Ancient Egyptian word snb "be healthy" is related to the Arabic word salima where the Egyptian n has been transformed into the Arabic l and the b into m. 

This, however, does not mean that the language of the Ancient Egyptians was a mere combination of linguistic and semantic elements of the Semitic and Hamitic languages! It shows many of its own peculiarities that belong to neither of the two linguistic families, that can only be explained if it were part of yet another linguistic family: the Hamo-Semitic languages.  

Different stages and grammatical evolution

Through its more than 3.000 year long history, it is but natural that the language of the Ancient Egyptians changed and evolved grammatically and semantically. Considering grammatical evolution, the following linguistic stages can be distinguished: 

• Old Egyptian is the language of the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom. This may include the language of the so-called Pyramid Texts, which displays some peculiarities of its own. Most texts of this period are official or religious, with funerary inscriptions and some biographical texts.
• Middle Egyptian is a more evolved form of Old Egyptian. This language became the classical language of the Egyptian texts and it was used from the 1st Intermediate Period to the Greek-Roman Period. After the Middle Kingdom, however, it was only used in monumental and religious texts, contaminated with some popular elements.
• Late Egyptian (or New Egyptian) was the vernacular used from the 18th Dynasty on, which found its way in writing, mainly in business documents and letters. From the 19th Dynasty on, however, it is also used in monumental inscriptions, literary texts, ... The difference between Late Egyptian and Middle Egyptian is far greater than the difference between Old and Middle Egyptian. This is possibly due to the fact that Late Egyptian is closer to the spoken language than Old and Middle Egyptian ever were.
• Demotic is an ambiguous word that refers to the language of the Late Dynastic Period as found in several documents and books as well as to the writing used for many texts from the 25th Dynasty on. Texts using the demotic grammar are not always written in demotic writing, and texts written in demotic writing do not always use the demotic grammar.
• Coptic is the last stage of the Ancient Egyptian language. It was written using the Greek alphabet, with some additional characters for sounds unknown to Greek, and was mainly used by the Egyptian Christians. Next to the writing, Coptic was also influenced by Greek in its vocabulary. It was gradually replaced as a spoken language by Arabic from the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 AD on and is now only used as a liturgical language (such as Latin in Europe was during the Middle-Ages).

Language: Aspects of writing | Linguistic Features | Hieroglyphs etc.Gods

Gods: Isis | Ra | Set | Osiris | Qebhsennef | Maat

Pyramids: Building stones | Egypt Land of the pyramids | Canstruction of Pyramids | Huni's Pyramid | Zoser's step Pyramid | Sneferu's Pyramid | The solar Boat | The grest pyeamid of cheops | Chephren's pyramid | Senusert I's pyramid | Sphinx

Paint: Introduction | Subjects of paint scenes 

sports: Introduction | Chariots-training horses | Running | Combating sports | Aquatic sports | Competition | Games and toys | Acrobtics

jewellery: Introduction | Gold | Silver | The precious & semi-precious Stones | The substitutes of precious stones | Same kinds of jewellery | Discoveries of jewellery

Sculpture: Introduction | Old kingdom statues | Middle kingdom statues | New kingdom statues

Mummification

Geography

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