Egyptian Auxiliary Verbs as an Effect of Early State Formation?: Some Incipient Speculations on “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian” and “Shallower Egyptian, Shallower Afroasiatic” Hypotheses
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).
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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 families, an indisputable fact that importantly does not exclude the possibility of identifying simpler, more-memorable, and above all more accurate diachronic narratives than have been previously presented in scholarship (Mihalyfy 2023b). Yes, it is true that Egyptian has been deemed the single language with the longest-attested continuous history (Gragg 2019: 24), and yes, it is true that the time from the earliest known Egyptian texts through language death spans more than four millennia (Loprieno 1995: 5; Loprieno and Müller 2012: 102; Gragg 2019: 24). However, it is also true that linguistic analysis does not usually take place across the far ends of this timespan. Admittedly, linguistic analysis of Egyptian usually skates lightly over the increasingly severe orthographic inertia that can render Late Egyptian and especially Demotic-script evidence a difficult starting-point or that can exclude it as a relatively self-standing source of persuasion (cf. the methodological observations of Davis 1973: 168-169, although in practice note rare exceptions like Quack 2022). However, that said, rather than sharply splaying around that mess and looking far out to the uttermost chronological boundaries, analysis instead usually tends to hinge on the earlier end of what’s called Middle Egyptian (< ~2100 BCE) and on earlier sources written in Coptic script (> ~300 CE) (Loprieno 1995: 5-7; Allen 2014: 1-2), thus entailing timespans of just over two millennia. This interval of course closely matches that of the written evidence available to trace the earlier side of Latin through today, since it’s approximately 2,500 or 2,200 years from an admittedly rare inscription (ca. 500 BCE) or from the plays of Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) to present-day Romance, respectively. Accordingly, although one should be scrupulous to not prejudge whether any given language will prove more conservative or more innovative across any given timespan (p.c. Benjamin W. Fortson IV; p.c. Michael Weiss), this Romance comparison necessitates acknowledgment that there can and do exist fairly pat multi-millennia narratives around major linguistic developments in languages at large (e.g. the continuity of a verb form found in the clearer parts of the much-discussed Duenos inscription [e.g. Weiss 2021] with the passato remoto of modern Italian [Alkire and Rosen 2010: 144-146, 150-153], or how a negative polarity item glimpsed in Plautus gives insight into the origins of the modern-day French negative particle pas [Alkire and Rosen 2010: 37, 304; Hansen 2013: 54-56]).
And, in fact, it seems that Egyptian has had its fair amount of similarly tight major narratives that have not been recognized until recently – for example, that a Thirteenth Dynasty manuscript tradition of the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant dovetails with previously-unrecognized Coptic-script evidence and reveals the source of Later Egyptian’s discontinuous negative particle (Mihalyfy 2024b; 2024c), or that the archaic-looking Coptic adjectival verbs are an incredibly important “rump group” of Afroasiatic N-stems with cousins in places like Hebrew and Arabic and Tuareg (Mihalyfy 2023a; 2024d), or that some misparsed auxiliary verbs of Ancient Egyptian’s so-called “suffix conjugation” are in wholesale continuity with Coptic auxiliary verbs (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024e). These issues of course quickly branch out into larger issues of curriculum and training and even what can be a (partial) crisis of epistemological authority, insofar as philologists are often automatically and mistakenly deemed the default “apex experts” on Egyptian language and any intersecting linguistic probabilities; for, after all, the era- and genre-focused philological specialization necessary for cultural elucidation and production of critical editions does not always include possession of or comfort with attaining all necessary linguistic knowledge – a matter sometimes distinct from the predominant philological method of assembling numerous parallels (Love 2021: 340) – nor does this specialization always align with the era-spanning reading best suited for unearthing solutions to some linguistic problems (per Frandsen 1986: 145, “In September 1983, in Copenhagen, Polotsky ended a lecture of his with the declaration that all Egyptologists ought to spend a few hours each day reading Coptic, ‘because in Coptic there are no guesses’”). Yet, at a minimum, even as different scholars bring different talents and different perspectives to the table, ideally in a spirit of open and respectful discussion and collaboration, it is clear that Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics and Egyptology at large must admit that disciplinary quirks from field-youth and unasked questions through undue philological atomization have led to a situation where for any given issue, a more-plausible as well as a more viscerally intelligible millennia-spanning diachronic narrative may yet be lying out there for someone to discover, even with apparently settled issues. For, despite the accumulation of a large number of functionally-sound translation values, it cannot be emphasized enough that knowledge of the linguistic fundamentals of Egyptian-Coptic is not nearly as developed or as nearly as sure as with Greek or Latin (Winand 2011: 176; see also Allen 2014: x, 455, 462); accordingly, it cannot be assumed to nearly the same degree that the best answers must have already been discovered and are lying out there somewhere in some old books or on JSTOR, even with the most basic “big picture” aspects of the linguistic system.
All that said, the following incipient speculations on the nature of Egyptian vis-à-vis Afroasiatic are based on recent work reanalyzing a portion of Ancient Egyptian’s so-called “suffix conjugation” – namely, what’s called the sDm xr=f, the sDm kA=f, and the sDm n=f and sDm in=f – as misparsed auxiliary verbs (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024e).
In short – and as would be helpful to more fully explicate in future blogposts – there has existed a deeply-embedded but incorrect mainstream of analysis existing from Champollion through Sethe and Erman and then to Gardiner and all the way through to the present day, where it is more or less thought that 3-4 verb Ancient Egyptian verb forms synchronically consist of suffixes between a root and the inflection for person and number (e.g. Champollion 1836: 406; Sethe 1899: 160; Erman 1911: 161-162; Gardiner 1957: 344; Allen 2014: 245-247, 289). Although prominently questioned by František Lexa (e.g. Lexa 1923) – who, it must be noted, recognized the correct structural division and provided one dependable etymology (Lexa 1923: 45, 48) – this redescription as auxiliary verbs never fully congealed, nor did it find numerous advocates. Rather, Lexa’s work foundered in part on a lack of assemblage of a critical mass of proof, including with all necessary etymologies (Gardiner 1937: 100n6), not to mention a persistently puzzling matter of several prepositions that orthographically resemble the so-called suffixes (e.g. the discussion mentioned in Gardiner 1937: 84-90 and Gardiner 1957: 327-328, 344). At best, this preferable direction of thinking became vitiatingly absorbed into the mainstream of analysis and reduced to an occasional and negligible minor flourish on it, through positing auxiliary verbs not as a synchronic phenomenon, but rather as the distant diachronic origins of these 3-4 verb forms (e.g. Gardiner 1937: 90-92; 1957: 344; Vernus 1990: 61, 66-68, 85-86).
However, thanks in part to recent advances in linguistics, especially around grammaticalization (Kuteva et al. 2019: 1), we can “walk across two bridges” and establish that this synchronic auxiliary verb interpretation of Ancient Egyptian is not only more probable than but is also clearly preferable to the long-established mainstream of analysis (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024e).
First, we can “walk up the bridge” of the 3,500+ years of evolving usages of the so-called sDm xr=f form, which quite amazingly reaches back from language death all the way to at least the Pyramid texts (i.e. the proper assumption made in Green 1987: 38-39 and Depuydt 1993: 208, 221). Here, we can perceive in a Coptic-script form like ϢⲀϤ- šaf- a “know” word from the root transliterated rx (Sethe 1902: 24), for which a “soundalike” preposition was used for the hieroglyphic representation of the phonetically-reduced auxiliary (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024e). More importantly, this etymology and the 3,500+ years of information allow us to see telling grammaticalization chains, because as a “can”-like auxiliary this verb form bears numerous related usages that are cross-linguistically paralleled (Bybee et al. 1994: 266; Kuteva et al. 2019: 248-250, 343-346) and that have already been identified in or can easily be gleaned from examples adduced in existing scholarship (i.e. Green 1987, Vernus 1990: 61-84, and Depuydt 1993: 208-233 reveal usages like permission and command in the Pyramids and Heqanakht letters, possibility and recurrence in medical texts, recurrence in mathematical texts, and recurrence and incipient future usage in Coptic-script texts).
Second, having now “arrived back” at the justifiably-connected Ancient Egyptian group of 3-4 verb forms and henceforth working with the correct assumption that something so “evidently parallel” must share a similar explanation (Gardiner 1937: 91; see also 100n6), we can proceed to “walk across” the other forms and see them all in turn as auxiliaries. Of course, one form – namely, what is called the sDm kA=f – was already properly identified by Lexa as a a “will” auxiliary deriving from a “want”-type word (Lexa 1923: 48), something amply known cross-linguistically (Kuteva et al. 2019: 453-454). As for the 1-2 remaining forms of what are called the sDm n=f and the sDm in=f, they can both be seen as stemming from a motion verb to be identified with the Coptic ⲚⲀ var. Ⲛ︦ⲚⲀ (Crum 1939: 217-218; here, per Mihalyfy 2023a and 2024d, note that the future-indicating ⲚⲀ has a different etymology). Eventually suffering auxiliary replacement due to pressure from a similar-sounding auxiliary birthed by the verb transliterated wn (> ⲚⲈ) (Černý 1976: 105; Loprieno 1995: 176), this motion verb-derived auxiliary existed in its time in contracted and uncontracted forms (i.e. the positions and forms discussed in Stauder 2014: 95-97, 101). Furthermore, these contracted and uncontracted forms were present in a divergence situation alongside a preposition that had also grammaticalized from the same mother verb and that had begun signaling a benefactive (cf. Kuteva et al. 2019: 100-101) and then eventually an agent (e.g. a transformation like Kuteva et al. 2019: 76-77 and 358-359, perhaps in environments like those highlighted by Gardiner 1957: 296) (here too, note that the frequently written-alike question-starting particle often identified as potentially related [e.g. Meltzer 1990: 75-76; Stauder 2014: 97] is a misleading “red herring” with a different etymology; its [Ⲉ]ⲚⲈ vocalism known from Coptic script is evidence of a French-like est-ce que… “is it that…?” derivation [cf. Kuteva et al. 293n56] from the existential verb transliterated wn, which survives in a fossilized present-tense possessive construction ⲞⲨⲚ︦[ⲦⲈ]- [Gardiner 1937: 88; Černý 1976: 212-213] and of course as the Coptic imperfect ⲚⲈ [cf. the observation of Bybee et al. 1994: 147-148, that development of a new progressive tense can begin absorbing usages and leave previously-existing forms with a stranded distribution]).
In total, then, although branching out into many other issues, some very subtle and some still with no obvious answers, this strength of proof nevertheless appears already sufficient to require a change in disciplinary consensus so that these forms are recognized as auxiliary verbs.
What is most interesting, however, is not the many parallels from well-known languages that show the cross-linguistic possibility of this analysis – for example, English “can” and “will” from “know” and “want” words, respectively, or the Romanian future vor (3rd pl., related to the Latin root vol- “want”) and Catalan past va (3rd sg., related to the Latin vad- ‘go’) (Kuteva et al. 2019: 249-250, 453-454; Detges 2004).
Rather, what is most astonishing is the potential further explanatory level that a similar sociolinguistic milieu lies behind the development of auxiliary verbs in English, Romance, and Ancient Egyptian – namely, an influx of adult language learners large enough to actually lead to language simplification over the course of generations (Mihalyfy 2024e).
To take the recent formulations of Peter Trudgill as the major dialogue partner (Trudgill 2010; 2011), a spectrum of simplification to complexification exists among languages (Trudgill 2010: 17-23; 2011: 15-16). For example, there can vary the degree of regular and transparent morphology and lexical structure (e.g. the proportion of forms like “jump “ and “jumped” versus “swim” and “swum,” or “cat and “cats” versus “child” and “children,” or “one time” versus “once,” or “make white” versus “bleach”) (Trudgill 2011: 21). As part of a number of interconnected factors that would push a language towards simplification or complexification, one important issue is whether language learners are something more like children in stable and close-knit communities (whose younger brains readily absorb and handle things like opaque forms and morphological irregularity), or something more like large numbers of adults amid a turmoil of glancing contacts (since more-mature brains are closed off to easy language acquisition and so deal better with transparent and regular forms, especially when no consistent learning environment exists) (Trudgill 2010: 23; 2011: 20-43). Auxiliary verbs would of course be a method of simplification, inasmuch as speakers opt for or create a more easily-understood analytic construction (Trudgill 2011: 17); all things being equal, it is relatively easy for adult learners to recognize and manipulate a single tense-marking auxiliary verb hand-in-hand with memorizing the more-static lexical verbs (versus them inflecting all of the individual lexical verbs, which may involve multiple paradigm irregularities that developed through the influence of sound changes, for example). From this perspective, it is thus no coincidence that the diachronic simplification of auxiliary verbs has come to characterize English what with its inferred absorption of Celts during its expansion into the Highland area of the west of England (Trudgill 2010: 1-35; 2011: 50-55), or the various Romance languages as the products of second-language learners across the Roman empire (Trudgill 2011: 17).
With Ancient Egyptian as the similar possessor of auxiliary verbs, then, an extremely important question thus presents itself: when is the earliest evidence for this simplification attested, and could it index to historic events that could have plausibly brought in a large influx of adult speakers?
For the major group of 3-4 Ancient Egyptian auxiliary verbs, previous scholarship has already identified a very early attestation for that most prevalent form of the perfect-then-past of the sDm n=f, in the pre-Pyramid Texts Peribsen seal impression of ~2700 BCE (line 368d in Table 95 of Kaplony 1963, as recognized by Stauder 2014: 100n71 and with the dates of Shaw 2000: 482). Here, of course, one must not take that attestation as the starting point, but rather as the delayed manifestation of a process already well under way, since it would take some time for any linguistic development to penetrate elite scribal circles and there become perceived as permissible for use in writing (cf. Trudgill 2010: 33-34 and Trudgill 2011: 51-52 on the diglossia of Old English vis-à-vis Middle English and Latin vis-à-vis Romance; also consider, however, Stauder 2014: 100n71, that “[t]he form is documented as fully grammaticalized no later than the first verbal clauses themselves, in the late Second Dynasty…”).
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| Peribsen seal impression (courtesy Kaplony 1963) |
As for historical events taking place in the centuries preceding ~2700 BCE that might have suddenly created a large number of adult language speakers, there is one major candidate – and, quite wonderfully, that event is referenced in the very Peribsen seal impression’s own reference to how “he united the two lands for his son…”! Namely, that crucial event would have been the early state formation identified with the first unification of Upper and Lower Egypt (Bard 2000; 2017). This early state formation has been said to have proceeded via political unification of several elite centers in Upper Egypt (Bard 2000: 59; 2017: 6, 12-13), then an expansion into Lower Egypt marked by replacement of existing material culture (Bard 2000: 59, 61; 2017: 17-18, 21-23) and depictions of victorious warfare like on the famed Narmer Palette (Bard 2000: 60-61; 2017: 18), not to mention activity up into southern Palestine and down into Lower Nubia (Bard 2000: 61-62, 63, 73-74; Bard 2017: 25-26). The exact nature of all this expansion is not entirely clear, but it is eminently plausible that these newly-absorbed areas featured large numbers of adults who suddenly had to start trying to speak the language used by that early state (as Bard 2000: 64 remarks, “What is truly unique about the early state in Egypt is the integration of rule over an extensive geographic region, in contrast to contemporaneous polities…”; here, one wonders not only about language and dialect distance for the numerous second-language learners [cf. Bard 2000: 64], but also about the specific issue of critical mass in terms of speaker-numbers and the abruptness of contact, especially in comparison to the chronologically-later but also state-identified Afroasiatic mainstay of Akkadian, versus what appears to have been a more-similar situation with Old Chinese [DeLancey 2011; van Driem 2022]).
The consequences of language contact for Ancient Egyptian have of course been widely contemplated (e.g. the recent literature review of Oréal 2023: 165-169), and this particular scenario has already been largely surmised by others (e.g. the self-described “entirely speculative… scenario” of Stauder 2023: 118, wherein “[t]he language spoken by the southern elites could thus have been brought… north, encountering whatever other languages or varieties were spoken locally, in a situation of contact with previously existing local elites”). However, unlike the restricted focus on “elites” and the evidentiary pessimism pervading that most recent formulation (per Stauder 2023: 118, “The relation of these southern and northern varieties or languages to what is seen in the earliest written record remains unknown, as these varieties themselves are”), this present analysis ventures that we have at least a little indirect evidence for what was happening outside of and then within elite scribal circles during early state formation – namely, that second-language speakers and their descendants had begun relying on auxiliary verbs, since over the centuries auxiliary verbs begin to percolate up into the written record around the time that you might expect that to occur. Here, one might also mention other evidence like the seemingly pretty contemporaneous emergence of the periphrastic causal construction that began to compete with the fossilizing Afroasiatic S-stem (Štubňová 2019: 208), another simplifying phenomenon wherein it became the norm to substitute more-transparent phrasings like “make white” for relatively more-opaque words like “bleach.” In this regard, enumerating and then contemplating many such features is of course an eminently worthwhile research goal (e.g. Kammerzell 2005: 225-227 and Oréal 2023: 166-167), although it must be remembered that our linguistic knowledge of Egyptian has been somewhat overestimated and thus survey efforts should be more firmly viewed as tentative and even as liable to the most unexpected revision (e.g. Kammerzell 2005: 226 lists “tense/aspect/modality marked internally or/ and [sic] by means of suffixes” as counterevidence to a simplification hypothesis, whereas reanalysis of these very forms as auxiliary verbs turns them into evidence *for* a simplification hypothesis).
Furthermore, if we begin working with this hypothesis of “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian,” we can begin to think through what type of simplification scenario seems most likely. An Afrikaans-like “creolid” scenario (Trudgill 2010: 32; 2011: 55, 68) seems most linguistically analogous (cf. Kammerzell 2005: 225-227, especially 225-226n181), insofar as there existed unbroken continuity of native speakers of Ancient Egyptian (i.e., the state elites and those from their home areas, read: “Dutch imperialists”), but there also occurred an extension of their language out into masses of non-native speakers (i.e., many people of newly-integrated areas, read: “the colonized”); over generations, this latter population began using and began passing on a simplified form of Egyptian, which then exerted simplifying pressure back onto the unbroken transmission of the language, including high up into the social hierarchy. For, despite complications like a move of the administrative center northwards (Bard 2000: 64-65, 72-73; 2017: 23-24), written sources nevertheless render it plausible to posit substantial bureaucratic and linguistic continuity for the bulk of the territory (cf. Stauder 2023: 118, on how “Egyptian as it presents itself in the record [was] a written language with no simple geographical correlates, committed to writing in the context of the rise of royal power, and serving as a group index for the new central elite at a time when linguistic diversity must have been very substantial over the territory porously controlled by the newly established monarchy”). Such a continuing stability of Egyptian social structure via the state would thus exclude a more-severe linguistic scenario (e.g. extreme upheaval and population-mixing among peoples with different languages, leading to a complete break in native language transmission and development of an Egyptian-based pidgin and then an ensuing creole that was no longer mutually intelligible with Egyptian), let alone any dependent trajectory based on this more-severe initial scenario (e.g. re-integration of such a geographically-separated and separately-developed creole with the standard language) (Trudgill 2011: 67-68). Accordingly, while one can thus see the development of Ancient Egyptian auxiliary verbs as a sudden, long-lasting shock to the linguistic system – the major perfect-then-past form of the so-called sDm n=f, after all, pretty much survives all the way through language death, despite adjustments like the shift from aspect to tense and the replacement of the auxiliary verb to produce forms like ⲀϤⲤⲰⲦⲘ︦ afsōtm (Mihalyfy 2024a; 2024e) – it is also true that competitor forms did not wholly impede the rather faithful transmission of some rather complex morphology like the N + S-stems that are found in elite literary wordplay (Mihalyfy 2022-23) and then still later among magical texts of Greco-Roman Egypt (Mihalyfy 2023a; 2024d) (here, note the appropriate research direction recommendation of Oréal 2023: 180, “to assess to what extent Afroasiatic morphology is productive or frozen in Ancient Egyptian”). However one might factor in the effect of other language contact at other points in time (e.g. scenarios like the one proposed by Oréal 2023: 180-181) – something that can be difficult to sufficiently evaluate right now, given the state of Egyptian-Coptic historical linguistics – one is nevertheless left with the impression that early state formation is perhaps **the** single most important event for the Egyptian language as we have it, even though there are massive and rather ironic source difficulties due to how the crucial early simplification co-occurs with and quietly underlies the early roll-out of all that spottily-preserved writing used by the expansionist state (note here, too, how early Egyptian state formation would thus push such wide-scale language simplification back into the very dawn of human writing in this part of the world, nuancing the emphasis of Trudgill 2011: 169 and 187 on this phenomenon as a trend typical of “the last 2,000 years,” not to mention raising questions about the seemingly fairly parallel situation with writing, state-nature, and the creolid characteristics attributed to Old Chinese [DeLancey 2011; van Driem 2022]). Although much in this scenario is uncertain and possibly never able to be resolved with any desirable degree of probability – did dialects or languages unite in Upper Egypt? how many different dialects or different languages were in the areas of expansion? – it is also quite possible that some answers of decent likelihood will be established in time, as knowledge of Egyptian and other Afroasiatic branches and the like is deepened. For example, although an answer could perhaps be found in Egyptian’s tendency to front for emphasis, one is also forced to wonder whether its typologically-unusual lexical verb then auxiliary verb word order in a typically VO language (Dryer 1992: 100-101, 128; 2009: 205-206) is a successful calquing carryover from some old Cushitic languages present in areas of expansion (Lower Nubia? Lower Egypt?), if circulating there at that time were structures like those that are thought to have birthed the Cushitic suffix conjugations (i.e. the Colizza-Reinisch-Praetorius position as discussed in but questioned by Banti 2001: 21-43).
As a logically separate but potentially linked matter – call it a hunch! – there is also the issue of whether this “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian” hypothesis meshes with a “Shallower Egyptian, Shallower Afroasiatic” hypothesis – namely, that even as various research “chronologically collapses” older stages of Egyptian into Coptic and makes it look a lot more intelligibly uniform over the course of its life, Egyptian as a whole may also prove to be a lot more like other Afroasiatic branches than is currently appreciated. The task of course is to carefully sift the Egyptian evidence and think back in Egyptian, and then to put that thinking into conversation with other branches (i.e. the approach endorsed by Almansa-Villatoro and Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 14, which approach leads back to long-standing questions like the verbal identity of the earliest layers of Egyptian [e.g. Gardiner 1957: 326, or Banti 2001: 6-21 and its thought-provoking comparison of the sDm=f with an East Cushitic suffix conjugation]). Of course, even if you do have “Anciently Simplifying Egyptian,” that says nothing about what fed into the rapid simplification process and whether it was chronologically close to or chronologically very distant from other branches (cf. Stauder 2023: 107). And yet, one should note that this current auxiliary verb reanalysis has removed one deceptive appearance of age from a very early stage of the historic language – namely, it is no longer quite tenable in the same way to posit that the long course of time produced those 3-4 forms of the so-called “suffix conjugation,” which then saw their archaic creakiness cede to analytic forms (e.g. Hodge 1970: 4-5 and Loprieno 1995: 5, 51, 72, 90-91; Loprieno and Müller 2012: 102, 119-120, 126-129). For, those 3-4 verbs are also analytic, and thus that grinding “linguistic cycle” of eons suddenly vanishes! In a similar vein, one should also note how the apparently moribund Afroasiatic N-stem didn’t die out, but actually survived and transformed and became a prominent part of Later Egyptian thanks to the adjectival verbs (Mihalyfy 2023a; 2024d). Again, the old perception of a doddering Egyptian branch with a non-productive layer already in its earliest historic eras (e.g. Štubňová Nigrelli 2023: 336) does not seem quite correct. Instead, Egyptian had this relatively straightforward Afroasiatic inheritance and it got a bit sidelined, but it did prove quite robust and it even thrived for a time in one small corner of the language, taking over and holding onto a chunk of core vocabulary through language death. At the end of the day, we have to see what solidifies from even more analyses and reanalyses than these on a good many other portions of the language, but it cannot be excluded that the time-depth of Egyptian may have been generally misappraised and it’s more like other Afroasiatic languages than is currently known or appreciated.
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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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