Transformed Afroasiatic N-stems Characterize Egyptian through Coptic: Seven Takeaways from the New Paradigm

The following is adapted from a longer article draft that has been undergoing peer review since August 2023, and which is available by request.

Research beginning to think through this new paradigm was presented at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen and at a Symposium of the American Research Center in Egypt - Missouri Chapter. Some related research can also be found in the most recent issue of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities (Mihalyfy 2022-2023a and Mihalyfy 2022-2023b).

 . . .

The standard scholarly narrative (e.g. Loprieno 1995: 54, 72-73) says that Afroasiatic N-stems were hardly if ever productive in Egyptian and pretty much died off, after some minor prominence on the earlier side of the language

Resembling forms in other Afroasiatic languages and thus presumably derived from some common inheritance (e.g. Lieberman 1986, 592-604), the most famous Egyptian examples strikingly combine an N-stem prefix with reduplication in “detransitives” (e.g. Vernus 2009). For illustration’s sake, think of the underived verb transliterated p3i “to (purposefully) fly” vis-à-vis the derived verb transliterated np3p3 “to (aimlessly) flutter” (Derchain-Urtel 1973: 52). In comparison to the base meaning p3i “to (purposefully) fly,” np3p3 “to (aimlessly) flutter” derivationally signals two concepts: repeated movement via reduplication of the sequence transliterated p3, and loss of actor control via the less-voluntary action indicated by the N-stem prefix transliterated n.

True, the standard scholarly continues, there may be some fossilized remnant forms found under Coptic script – for instance, ⲚⲀϪϨⲈ načhe “tooth,” likely a metathesized derivation from the root transliterated ḥd̠ “be white/bright” (Loprieno 1995: 54, 251n15, interpreting Osing 1976: 211), and thus likely once meaning “whiter” or “shiner” like the English dental slang “pearly whites” (cf. Cooper 2024: 69-69, 70). But, it has been assumed, N-stems were never a major component of Egyptian, and are more a trivia fact about the language than something unquestionably demanding careful attention as well as judicious integration into basic language instruction (e.g. note these forms’ relatively explicit omission in Allen 2014: 166, in a section devoted to “[r]oots and stems”: “There were other kinds of stems… but they are much less common and are generally considered as separate roots rather than stems”).

However, despite what current mainstream research teaches, these Egyptian N-stem verbs did **NOT** actually die off.

Instead, Egyptian N-stem verbs survived and productively transformed and became a significant and tenacious and wholly unavoidable group within the language, even as they somewhat dwindled during the course of its long history (cf. Peust 2024: 126). Most prominently, they turned into the nasal-prefixed adjectival verbs like the 7-8 ones still commonly found under Coptic script, including the core vocabulary ⲚⲀⲚⲞⲨ= nanu= “be good,”  ⲚⲀϢⲰ= našō= “be many,” ⲚⲈⲤⲂⲰⲰ= nesbōō= “be educated/wise,” ⲚⲈⲤⲰ= nesō= “be beautiful,” and ⲚⲀϨⲖⲰϬ= nahlōc= “be pleasant” (Layton 2007: 109; 2011: 299-301; Allen 2020, 41).

Afroasiatic N-stems hiding in Allen 2020

Here are the 7 biggest takeaways from this major new diachronic connection that more tightly and more intelligibly unites the development of the Egyptian language across time:

 

#1 - Egyptian displays a “rump group” of adjective-indicating Afroasiatic N-stems lasting through language death and continuing use of Coptic as a sacred language.

Languages can have these strange little pockets of material that viscerally bear witness to deep connections to distantly-related tongues. To take one Afroasiatic example, some Cushitic languages possess “[s]mall numbers (from 1 to 12) of prefix-conjugated verbs” that strongly resemble Semitic and Berber paradigms (Gragg 2019: 34, 36).

In this light, the Later Egyptian adjectival verbs are another funny little group like those in some Cushitic languages, but in regards to a different inheritance from deeper within Afroasiatic, that of N-stems.

Thus, in their vestigial weirdness, Egyptian’s adjectival verbs can be set alongside much more vital N-stems like the Stem VII of Arabic and the nip̄‘al of Hebrew. In relation to the former, an Arabic-speaking Copt thus encounters deep, historically-linked counterparts to their own Stem VII whenever they attend a Christian liturgy in Coptic and hear about the “Good” Shepherd through an adjective like …ⲚⲀⲚⲈϤ nanef “good.” With Hebrew, a comparable N-stem surfaces annually in a famous greeting known from contemporary Jewish practice, the “May you be inscribed for a good year!” of Rosh Hashanah (i.e., a form kātaḇ “he writes” can inflect as an N-stem form like niḵtaḇ “he is written” as part of the wish that someone be favorably written down in the heavenly book of fate) (p.c., Benjamin Suchard). With regards to both of these Semitic examples, too, it should be noted that the Coptic-script token ⲚⲀϨⲖⲰϬ= nahlōc=  “be pleasant” displays the same nV-CCVC structure that is visible in the Hebrew form ni-KtaB (cf. Peust 2024: 128) and which has been reconstructed to at least one place in proto-Semitic (Huehnergard 2019: 62, 64-65).

Yet, that surprising root-pattern morphology correspondence aside, the adjective-like destination of the N-stems of the Egyptian “rump group” isn’t best paralleled by Arabic or Hebrew, but rather by the Berber language of Tuareg. There, it appears a portion of vocabulary reached a similar adjectival place – for instance, the N-stem näġri “be wise” emerged from the simplex əġru “judge” or “decide,” probably via an intermediate meaning of “doing something for one’s self” and thus “acting thoroughly” (Prasse 1973: 62; as important subsequent perspective on N-stems in Berber and their general collapse and intermixture with M-stems, especially note Bedar 2022 and Bedar, Bendjaballah, and Haiden, forthcoming).

In other words, Tuareg had already been showing us that Afroasiatic N-stems can occupy an adjective-like space. And, Egyptian has even been teaching us that very same lesson, too, but we just didn’t notice it.

 

#2 - The core Egyptian N-stem transformation was a “passive-to-state” extension-and-reanalysis change that shoved the stative out of the way and set up “state vs. process” verb pairs (cf. Mihalyfy 2022-2023b: 118-119).

Across languages, it is well-known that words in the slippery passive/reflexive/detransitivizing space can slide around with meanings (Campbell 2020: 290). Perhaps the best known example involves the Latin reflexive se (e.g. pro se legal representation “on behalf of one’s self”). This Latin reflexive left comparable reflexive usage in Romance languages (e.g. the Romanian el se dezbracă “he undresses himself” or the French il se rase “he shaves himself”). But, it also produced a historically newer passive usage that can be seen in those same languages (e.g. the Romanian ingheţata se topeşte la soare “the ice-cream melts in the sun” or the French le poisson ne se mange pas ici “fish is not eaten here”). Crucially for this development, ambiguous reflexive phrasings like the Spanish el rico se entierra “the rich man has himself buried” were understood through reanalysis in a passive sense as “the rich man gets buried,” then new passive-only senses were created through extension (Campbell 2020: 282-283).

A somewhat similar reanalysis-and-extension process is also visible within the Egyptian, via what has already been described as a passive subset of the Later Egyptian adjectival verbs (Quack 1991: 96; forthcoming). Within the 7-8 Coptic-script tokens, there’s just one clearcut example of this passive subset that remains – namely, the word ⲚⲈⲤⲂⲰⲰ= nesbōō= “be educated/wise” – although other passive examples can be found in a slightly larger group known from under Demotic script (e.g. Johnson 2000: 47; for the longest current list of Later Egyptian adjectival verbs known from under Demotic script, see Quack, forthcoming). To think with this lone but incredibly significant Coptic-script example, this ⲚⲈⲤⲂⲰⲰ= nesbōō= “be educated/wise” is related to the historic root transliterated sb3 “educate.” Thus, it can be analyzed as a historic N-stem passive (‘be educated”), in line with an already-acknowledged but more-marginal “passive” sense that has been identified in older Egyptian N-stems (e.g. Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 328). Presumably, what occurred is a reanalysis wherein N-stem passives like “be educated” started being interpreted less as a transitive action and more as the action’s resulting state (cf. Peust 2024: 127) – that is, “be educated” became reinterpreted as something more like “be wise.” Then, on the basis of this reinterpretation, there presumably occurred an extension wherein native speakers created a newer set of state-indicating N-stems that did not always index to transitive verbs (e.g. ⲚⲀϢⲰ= našō= “be many”).

Perhaps the most important Afroasiatic N-stem hiding in Allen 2020?

Logically, this change probably occurred in main-clause statements, where the single N-stem could swoop in and compete with and replace a multi-word phrasing that indicated state through using a stative (e.g. the periphrastic construction treated in Hoch 1997: 109-110). Accordingly, this use of the N-stem thus forced the existing, underived form of the verb into indicating a contrasting sense of process. It also would have left any surviving statives as decentered words prone to take on a more-specialized sense, in a common pattern known from historical linguistics (Kuryłowicz 1945: 30-31; note also the fundamentally correct distributional observation of Polotsky 1960: 412, that these statives are “extremely rare or altogether non-existent”).

Cumulatively, although it has been said that Egyptian never displayed any regular semantic use of derived stems like in Arabic or Hebrew (Loprieno 1995: 54), this discernible “state vs. process” functional opposition involving Egyptian N-stems nevertheless modifies that bedrock macro-linguistic description, at least a little bit.

In fact, literary play on such a functional opposition with the same verbal root even appears in the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul, in a line that has been relatively correctly translated but mildly misparsed due to non-recognition of a crucial N-stem (lines 5-6, as read by Mihalyfy 2022-2023b: 119-120). 

 

#3 - At the edges of this core Egyptian N-stem transformation, there can be identified sporadically-attested N + S-stems, which combinations layer N-stem morphology onto causative S-stem morphology in a strikingly innovative ordering.

As an offshoot of this larger Egyptian N-stem transformation, N + S-stem combinations involving the causative S-stem morphology also sporadically surface. Previous research has traditionally recognized S + N-stem combinations in tokens like snfh̬fh̬ “unravel” from fh̬ “become loose” (e.g. Erman 1911: 144-145; Derchain-Urtel 1973: 49-50; Reintges 1994: 234; Vernus 2009: 292; Stauder 2014: 218-219; Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 335), but only in that specific order (Reintges 1994: 234-235; Stauder 2014: 219).

However, as soon as you start thinking through the Coptic adjectival verbs as formations historically involving the Egyptian N-stem’s more-marginal passive sense, you immediately recognize an N + S-stem in ⲚⲈⲤⲰ= nesō=  “be beautiful.” At its heart is the word Ⲱ ō “great” like can be found in the rendering of divine titles in Coptic (Crum 1939: 253). Then, layered on top of that is the causative S-stem, in order to create the further sense “make great” or “magnify.” Then, layered on top of that yet again is an N-stem passive sense like that visible in ⲚⲈⲤⲂⲰⲰ= nesbōō=  “be educated/wise,” in order to create an ultimate sense of “be made great” or “be magnified,” now understood as “be beautiful” (cf. Vycichl 1983: 144, 154, 182, and 248 and its correct recognition of the root, S-stem morphology, and semantics, but not the N-stem morphology; note also the openness to much of this position by Peust 2024: 127, despite the overall verdict of “[e]tymologisch nicht gesichert”).                                                                                                                       

An N + S-stem hiding in Allen 2020

On this basis, other N + S-stems can be identified across different eras of the Egyptian language. For example, three examples surface among linguistically tantalizing magical words in the London-Leiden Magical Papyrus (Quack 2004: 453-454, 491) – namely, what we would render in standard Coptic script as ⲚⲀⲤⲐⲰⲘ nasthōm, ⲚⲀⲤϪⲰⲦ nasčōt, and ⲚⲀⲤϨⲰⲦⲂ nashōtb (line 14.7 in Griffith and Thompson 1905). Strikingly, they all sit within a single larger phrase that can be translated as “I am one-made-to-pursue, one-made-to-pierce, one-made-to-kill,” in a threat against a god that also makes use of the “I am” formula of Egyptian magical tradition (Sauneron 1951; Versnel 1990: 43; Ritner 1995: 3362, 3370). To go back even further, too, another such N + S-stem may be hiding in the second parable of the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul, in another misparsed section there that also makes a play-on-words with verbal derivation of a single root (line 84, as read by Mihalyfy 2022-2023b: 123-124).

N + S-stems hiding in Griffith and Thompson 1905

#4 - The core Egyptian N-stem transformation resulted in a common “lack of actor control” semantic cluster known from cross-linguistic research  – which semantic cluster also included motion verbs.

To think beyond the Coptic adjectival verbs, one can also perceive in Later Egyptian a broader cluster of semantically-similar items that are united in “lack of actor control,” including, believe it or not, a few motion verbs.

As has been generally recognized within linguistics for over 45 years (Perlmutter 1978: 162-163), different languages can create rough semantic groups around something that’s more or less like the degree of control an agent has over an action (Klaiman 1991: 121) .

Thus, a language can group together stuff like:

~ Passives (or rather “Patients” – in any case, when you suffer an action rather than cause it);

~ Words that are adjectives in English (since you can’t really help being “tall” or “beautiful” or “red”);

~ Sensory-impinging phenomena (since your environment imposes on you things that are “sweet” or “flashing” or “loud”);

~ Involuntary bodily processes (since to “yawn” or to “sneeze” or to “have a stomach-rumble” isn’t really your choice); and

~ Verbs of existence and appearance (since something like a cloud that has “appeared” or has “passed” is much like a cloud that is “grey,” in that it is simply a happenstance attribute rather than a willed movement).

Beyond variance in establishing subcategories in this messy space, placement under various proposed subcategories is also possible due to conceptual overlap. Nevertheless, within such a pattern, one can immediately and viscerally make sense of all of the nasal-prefixed adjectival verbs currently known, including rather peculiar-seeming tokens like “be cut” and “be sick” known from under Demotic script and transliterated n3-š‘ṯ and n3-mr, respectively (Johnson 2000: 47).

More importantly, one can also perceive how nasal-prefixed verbs of motion that have occasionally surfaced in Egyptian are quite possibly N-stems – for example, the Demotic-script token transliterated as in-sni and translated as “passing” (Johnson 1976, 19n81; Quack, forthcoming). In fact, some of these forms even orthographically group together with a bodily process verb “sleep” that is not only written under Demotic script as the sequence transliterated in-qty (Johnson 2000: 35), but is also sometimes identified as an N-stem (e.g. Erman 1911: 144-145; Derchain-Urtel 1973: 51). Interestingly, the initial strangeness of this minor grouping within Egyptian has caused some scholarly bewilderment (e.g. Johnson 1976: 19n81: “‘To sleep’ hardly seems to be a verb of motion”). But, this strangeness is now wholly explicable when this odd pairing is set alongside the adjectival verbs, since all can be viewed as yet another cross-linguistic semantic cluster created around lack of actor control.

Furthermore, the slightly uncommon Coptic-script word ⲚⲞⲨ nu can also probably be interpreted as an N-stem – historically, it would be the state-indicating N-stem of the historic verb root transliterated iwi “to come,” versus the process-indicating underived form that has come down as ⲈⲒ ei.

An N-stem of a verb of motion hiding in the online resource https://coptic-dictionary.org/?

However, these motion verb N-stems seem to have broken off from the main development as they mildly shifted their aspect towards a mellic or perhaps an inchoative sense and then possibly further, a development that has resulted in their common translation value as “ongoing” motion such as the interpretation “passing” for the Demotic-script token transliterated as in-sni (Mihalyfy 2022-2023a).

 

#5 - The core Egyptian N-stem transformation helps explain the strange nasal seen in ⲈⲒ ei’s stative (qualitative) ⲚⲎⲨ nēu, and thus ultimately the future ⲚⲀ na.

A great problem for Egyptian historical linguistics has been a convincing origin story for the “morphologically irregular” nasal on the stative (qualitative) ⲚⲎⲨ nēu corresponding to ⲈⲒ ei “come” (Allen 2020: 47). From where could this form have emerged, given how this verb groups with and shows a vowel pattern reminiscent of otherwise unremarkable statives (qualitatives) like ⲠⲎⲦ pēt for ⲠⲰⲦ pōt “run” (e.g. Layton 2007: 92; 2011: 130)?

Within this new paradigm, this nasal becomes more easily explicable. When the Egyptian language saw the formation of an N-stem from the verb of motion that is transliterated as iwi, it created a pair that has come down into Coptic as ⲚⲞⲨ nou and ⲈⲒ ei, and the N-stem shoved the similar-meaning stative out of the way. But, this stative (qualitative) wasn’t ⲚⲎⲨ nēu; it was something more-typical that would have probably come down into Coptic as something written like ⲎⲨ ēu. In fact, this type of form did stick around in the system, as we know from its onomastic attestations like Αριευς Arieus Ḥr-iw “Hor has come” and Θοτευς Θoteus D̲ḥwty-iw “Thoth has come” (Preisigke 1922: 46, 141-142; Winand 1991: 366n41, 373-374), not to mention its occasional textual usage like in a Ptolemaic trilingual decree (Simpson 1996, 3, 134, 148-149, 250-251, translating the Raphia decree 25/10 iw-f iw r bl as “he came away”; see also Johnson 1976, 17n64). But, probably because this stative (qualitative) was felt to be too short and vowel-y, some speakers felt that it needed to become phonetically heftier -- an inclination a bit like how many Romance languages replaced vowel-y forms for the Latin verb ire “go” (Alkire and Rosen 2010: 121-122, 242; Campbell 2020: 115-116), or how the discomfiting encounter of the prefix-final vowel with the initial stem vowel in the German gessen “eaten” led to reapplication of the prefix and the creation of the German gegessen (Deutsches Wörterbuch 2023, s.v. “Essen, vb.”). So, to make this stative (qualitative) weightier, Egyptian speakers began adding an initial nasal in imitation of the N-stem prefix on the similar-meaning N-stem form that had decentered the stative (qualitative). Then, believe it or not, just like the German gegessen, this analogically-adjusted monstrosity won out over time against the more-original form, eventually becoming standard.

And, in the common cross-linguistic development wherein decentered forms remain with a specialized meaning, this form ⲚⲎⲨ nēu “come” then became grammaticalized and phonetically reduced and developed into the future form known from under Coptic script as ⲚⲀ na. (Grossman, Lescuyer, and Polis 2014: 105, 120, 120n95).

 

#6 - The core Egyptian N-stem transformation can help explain the weird, best-known-from-Demotic orthographic convention behind the nasal prefix misleadingly transliterated in, if we reconstruct the 1^st person plural suffix pronoun as /nu/.

Thinking of the Coptic ⲚⲞⲨ nou as an N-stem of a verb of motion also may shed light on the origin of the odd Demotic-script convention of rendering the N-stem prefix as the sequence transliterated in-, such as in the verb “sleep” transliterated in-qty or the motion verb “pass” transliterated in-sni (Johnson 1976: 19n81; Johnson 2000: 35; Quack, forthcoming).

Although the Egyptological transliteration convention reflects the similar Demotic sign that appears in the word “bring,” it should be noted that that this same sign can also appear as the 1^st person plural suffix pronoun “our” (Johnson 2000: 22, 24, 35). And, believe it or not, this *other* sign for “our” may actually be the ultimate origin of the way that the N-stem prefix was written in Demotic.

To similarly re-group two separate phrases written in Hieratic in the Shipwrecked Sailor (7, 10-11), an “our” that has been traditionally interpreted as attached to a preceding word may actually group with the immediately following verb “come” – that is, that word “come” may actually be an N-stem, like the Coptic ⲚⲞⲨ nou.

If this is so, that use of the first plural suffix pronoun as a prefix is probably a “sound-alike” reading aide for an innovative verb form where no solid representation traditions exist. For, if we reconstruct the 1^st person plural suffix pronoun as /nu/, it makes perfect sense to add that to the beginning of the newly-emergent form of the motion verb that was also pronounced as /nu/.

This Hieratic orthographic convention would then underlie the Demotic way of writing that same form of the motion verb. Then presumably at some point – and as also happened elsewhere, like with the Late Egyptian negative particle? – there occurred a final vowel loss that allowed for the reinterpretation of the sign as a simple /n/ and thus its broader application to other N-stems, perhaps in conversation with the development of syllabics and graphic contamination with the similarly-written word “bring” (cf. Quack 2014: 222; forthcoming).

 

It is true that positing a vowel at the end of the 1^st person plural suffix pronoun may seem odd at first, especially given our expectations created by its continual transliteration as a simple n. Yet, it should nevertheless be remembered that there exists Coptic relic imperatives like ⲀⲘⲰⲒⲚⲈ amōine, which may derive from “let us go” and which may thus preserve first person plural morphology (Černý 1976: 6; Vycichl 1983: 9). Could an earlier vowel appearing at the end of the 1^st person plural suffix pronoun explain the trace vowel left at the end of this Coptic-script form?

Evidence for the 1st person plural suffix pronoun, hiding in Bennett 2018?

 

#7 - Inherited categorizations and relatively implausible etymologies have helped obscure and conceal the core transformation of Egyptian N-stems.

In its major outlines, this reconstruction of the evolution of Egyptian N-stems is fairly easy to communicate.

But, previous thinking can be a surprisingly deeply-embedded source of ultimately unproductive conceptualizations.

For example, the not-inaccurate focus on the specifically adjectival nature of the Coptic adjectival verbs is a long-standing Coptological tradition glimpsed in the Arabic-language grammar of Athanasius of Qus (Bauer 1972, 192B-192S, 272-273) and the work of Athanasius Kircher (1636: 291-292). Yet, this not wholly suitable categorization has nonetheless hindered perception of the forms in question as the N-stems that they are, and how they group with other forms that do not neatly count as “adjectival.”

Indeed, current resources frequently break up Egyptian N-stems into three purportedly different things, when really it’s just one thing evolving over time. Beyond the older recognized N-stems like the reduplicated detransitives and the more-marginal passive sense that is so incredibly important for the language’s evolution, studies can present as a separate group the adjectival verbs, sometimes derived from the same form as the imperfect (e.g. Steindorff 1904: 129-130; Sethe 1929, 64; Vycichl 1983, 136-137, 144); and then they can present as yet another separate group the motion verb forms, where the nasal is often derived from a preposition (e.g. Wente 1959, 28n4; Vycichl 1983, 138; Simpson 1996, 148; Grossman, Lescuyer, and Polis 2014, 118-122; Quack, forthcoming; cf. Peust 2024: 129-130 for a similar derivation but of the adjectival verbs). However, these two types of etymologies are relatively implausible, not least because of the current lack of closely-tracking, straightforward parallels in other languages (pace Peust 2024: 130).

These other, non-N-stem etymologies also can create very strange analytic implications. For example, such etymologies can imply that Egyptian somehow witnessed over the course of its history the *successive* development of two completely different nasal-prefixed passive-indicating forms – namely, the more-marginal passive sense in acknowledged N-stems (e.g. Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 328), and then the passive subset of the adjectival verbs (Quack 1991: 96; forthcoming). They also imply that differently-derived forms that both just happen to begin with a nasal prefix somehow all began grouping together – for example, the occasionally-acknowledged N-stem for “sleep” (e.g. Erman 1911: 144-145; Derchain-Urtel 1973: 51), vis-a-vis the motion verbs with the prefix written under Demotic script as the sequence transliterated in- (Johnson 1976: 19n81).

In total, this N-stem finding should be a strong reminder that the Egyptian language may still have a good amount of surprises left for us, even with incredibly “big picture” issues that weren’t really on anybody’s radar. For, although the etymological origin of the adjectival verbs has been a subject of continuing discussion (e.g. Peust 2024), likely very few if any could have anticipated that such a major inheritance from deeper within Afroasiatic had stealthily survived for so long in Egyptian, and in such a strikingly characteristic way.

Accordingly, we should not lose track of the larger pedagogical issue of how and when such findings and any offshoots deemed plausible should be integrated into basic language teaching for all stages of Egyptian (Mihalyfy 2023).

. . .

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.

. . .

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