Twelve Theses Redescribing Ancient Egyptian for Auxiliary Verbs

As part of an intensive ongoing research project, I am pleased to publicly announce the broadest outlines of a new paradigm, wherein a significant portion of Ancient Egyptian is redescribed as auxiliary verbs:

1) Since Champollion, linguistic analysis of Ancient Egyptian has been misled about a major portion of the verbal system, which now travels under the name “suffix conjugation” (i.e. what are transliterated as sDm-Xr-f, sDm-k3-f, and sDm-n-f / sDm-in-f): such constructions are not one conglomerate word (i.e. sDm-Xr-f), but rather two, in the order lexical verb + auxiliary verb (i.e. sDm + Xr-f).

2) The first form (i.e. what is transliterated as sDm-Xr-f) can be identified as a “can” auxiliary verb (< rX “know”), evincing a 3,500+ year grammaticalization chain extending into permission and commands and through the habitual and future usage found in Coptic-script forms.

3) The etymologically-misleading transliteration sDm-Xr-f reflects a “soundalike” application of an unrelated preposition to the phonetically-reduced auxiliary verb “can” (< rX “know”).

4) The second form (i.e. what is transliterated as sDm-k3-f) can be identified as a “will” auxiliary verb (< k3 “plan, intend”), with perhaps a future-turned-modal token left in a Coptic-script subordinate clause conjunction [ϪⲈ]ⲔⲀⲀⲤ (“in order that…” < “that it might be [that]…”).

5) The third form (i.e. the sometimes-separated form transliterated as sDm-n-f / sDm-in-f) can be identified as a perfect/past auxiliary verb from a verb of motion.

6) With the perfect/past auxiliary verb, the general orthographic variance should be explained as something like the presence or absence of contraction.

7) The perfect/past auxiliary verb figures into multiple more-complex structures (e.g. with several dependent lexical verbs), and often presents the agent preposition-resembling uncontracted form (e.g. with a preceding lexical verb + direct object like in the famed Dd md.w in… formula, or when appearing with a following lexical verb).

8) The beneficiary and agent prepositions that are currently and correctly identified as historically related to the perfect/past auxiliary verb are actually a divergence phenomenon rooted in a second set of cross-linguistically known grammaticalizations: the auxiliary verb-producing verb of motion also became reinterpreted as a beneficiary preposition (and then the beneficiary preposition as an agent preposition, with the later agent preposition nevertheless preserving a fuller historic shape due to stress-and-word-order-connected phonetic reduction in the more-original beneficiary preposition).

9) As a small but important point regarding the interrelated beneficiary and agent prepositions, the frequent “lookalike” question particle often written as in has a historically-separate origin as a vestigial “is it (that)…?” structure related to the .imperfect auxiliary verb (cf. Coptic [Ⲉ]ⲚⲈ and ⲚⲈϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦), in a telling distribution indicating forms stranded by the origination of a new progressive construction from locatives.

10) The “mother verb” of both the perfect/past auxiliary verb and the related prepositions can be identified at a minimum with the motion verb known from under Coptic script as ⲚⲀ (variant Ⲛ︦ⲚⲀ), the exact counterpart from under hieroglyphic scripts being somewhat unclear but perhaps constituting a root related to what is transliterated as ‘nn.

11) The perfect/past auxiliary verb transliterated as sDm-n-f / sDm-in-f is related to the Coptic form ⲀϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦ through the phenomenon of auxiliary verb replacement – specifically, amidst the two broader changes of aspect-to-tense and the movement of the lexical verb from preceding to following the auxiliary verb, there also occurred the origination of a phonetically-close imperfect auxiliary verb known under Coptic script as ⲚⲈϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦ (< the verb transliterated wn “exist”), and this motivated experiments in perfect/past auxiliary verb replacement and eventually resulted in general substitution by what is known under Coptic script as ⲀϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦ (vs. *ⲚⲀϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦).

12) For purposes of Afroasiatic reconstruction, these auxiliary verbs should take their place alongside N-stems and stray forms like [ⲠⲈ]ϪⲀϤ and possibly [ϪⲈ]ⲔⲀⲀⲤ as historically-deep, potentially informative forms that have survived through Coptic script, and in toto again highlight the need for a better theory of what the literature calls the sDm-t-f and the sDm-ty-fy (ideas include an infinitive-derived converb that developed into a self-standing aspect mostly surviving in subordinate clauses and negation).

Of course, intersecting issues and complications are many, and include Egyptian’s relentless fronting impulse vis-à-vis a rare trend in linguistic typology; impersonal verbs; clausal linking via juxtaposition; the development of the demonstrative pronoun-turned-copula/existential into a particle triggering stress and fuller phonetic shapes of things like personal pronouns and lexical verbs; the underappreciated importance of existentials (extending all the way through negative existentials used with infinitives as in what became Ⲙ︦ⲠⲀⲦϤ︦ⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦, not to mention the separate involvement of Ⲙ︦ⲠⲈ in Croft’s Cycle); the reanalysis of either the existential or the related particle with the following verb in order to produce the form known under Coptic script as ⲠⲈϪⲀϤ; formation strategies for and striking characteristics of relative clauses (including the possibility of hieroglyphic side-marking of vowels on the lexical verb, like has been observed elsewhere in the later phenomenon of syllabic writing); the shape of the lexical verb and its relation to other forms (e.g. the participles, possible participle-related nominals, the root-and-pattern morphology visible in what were historically periphrastic causatives, evidence from cuneiform, etc.); the orthographic function of several signs (e.g. Gardiner Z4); and analogical contamination around the Coptic-script future forms ⲚⲎⲨ and ⲚⲀ.

Over the coming year, I look forward to writing lengthier blogposts further laying out and defending these twelve theses and of course treating intersecting issues and attendant complications, all in preparation for submission of peer-reviewed research.

 

David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages.

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. Several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian were recently published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.