Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics

The following has been written to gather feedback, in preparation for an article to be written and submitted to peer review. . . . The initial portion of the Egyptian negative transliterated bn has long struck scholars as strange. For example, it was recently remarked that this orthography began being used “[f]or reasons that are still unclear” (Oréal 2022: 200). A proposal to solve this mystery: With the negative transliterated bn , the foot sign of Gardiner D58 is actually a new orthographic convention where that hieroglyph was interpreted as a beginning-of-unit marker before a hieroglyph marking the actual sound itself, having developed through reinterpretation of the abstract noun morphology visible in bw - ( > -OY- ) and the later bw nb ( > OYON NIM).   Three steps.   Step #1 – Identifying a Coptic continuation of recognized abstract noun morphology. The sequence bw deriving from “place” has been properly identified as abstract noun morpholo...

The following is an expansion of a years-long research project on Greek poetry and magic as likely sources of inspiration for Coptic vowel orthography (Mihalyfy 2025) , to gather further feedback in preparation for an article to be submitted for peer review.   . . . Especially when positing sound changes and reconstructing vocalism, scholarship on Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics must take a position on the Coptic double vowel convention found in words like Ⲛ︦ⲦⲞⲞⲦ︦Ϥ ‘from him’:  What is represented by sequences like that repeated omicron? Two major positions are represented in scholarship (e.g. Peust 1999: 205-210): 1) The repetition signals a vowel followed by a glottal stop; and 2) The repetition signals a long vowel. Coptic orthography was in use for somewhere around a millennium, while Egyptian was still a living language (Richter 2009). Thus, the sheer amount of texts and their often-staggering diversity can make it hard to put forward a simple and all-illuminatin...

The following is a consolidation of years-long research findings, to gather further feedback in preparation for an article to be submitted for peer review. Major portions of this thinking were previously circulated at a 2021 Egyptological Symposium of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, and in unsuccessful proposals considered for conferences in 2023 and 2024 and for a 2024/2025 visiting researcher position. . . . Despite disagreement over particular scenario details, scholarship already appropriately envisions that much of Coptic orthography arose and was first consolidated among people educated in Greek but also somehow associated with Egyptian temples (e.g. Frankfurter 1998: 250-253 and 257-264; Bagnall 2017: 20-21, 24; Quack 2017: 76-79; Love 2021: 169-172). Within this type of social context, Greek poetry and magic should also be highlighted, because they are the likeliest sources of inspiration for two underappreciated aspects of Coptic vowel orthogra...