Workshop for Egyptian Historical Linguistics

This blogpost is part of an ongoing research project reanalyzing Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs. It expands on ideas presented at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (21 September 2024), including contemplation of possible links to other Afroasiatic verb forms (a line of questioning by Signe Cohen).   . . . A prehistoric scenario that bleeds a bit into historic times and begins to overlap with the dawn of Egyptian writing: Against a backdrop of hunter-gatherers and then herders wandering in a more-verdant climate, the 5 th millennium BCE aridification forced the linguistic ancestor of Ancient Egyptian into arriving from the West and setting up as what became the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, a fateful development that would result in expansion into Lower Egypt, absorption of Cushitic-speaking peoples there, and a misleading geographical cleavage in a Berber-Semitic-Cushitic sub-branch of Afroasiatic, what with the remaining Cushitic peoples being strande...

This blogpost is part of an ongoing research project reanalyzing Ancient Egyptian for auxiliary verbs. It expands on ideas presented at the Sixth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (21 September 2024), including further clarification around conditions of simplification and provision of other examples thereof (issues raised by Julia Troche). Also contemplated are possible links to other Afroasiatic verb forms (a line of questioning by Signe Cohen). . . . Should we adopt a default working hypothesis, that Ancient Egyptian underwent intense simplification due to early state formation, alongside assuming that this reordering quickly submerged historically important linguistic features and created a deceptive appearance of chronological depth? Both of these theories presume but are of course strictly separate from the underappreciated point that the timeframes at play in Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics are often the same as or are not dissimilar to better-researched language...