On Resystematizing Major Aspects of the Egyptian Verb: A Dialogue with the Recent Work of Marwan Kilani
The following consolidates interrelated aspects of both past work and some ongoing research that will be submitted for peer review.
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As can happen in scholarship, research projects can converge and produce similar ideas.
To some extent, this has occurred with recent work attempting to resystematize major aspects of the Egyptian verb, in particular heightened recognition of a verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 (e.g. ⲞⲨⲂⲀϢ “white” or ⲔⲘⲞⲘ “black”).
On the one hand, there stands the work of Marwan Kilani (2025; 2026b; 2026c; 2026d), which arose from a “four-year… project on Egyptian-Coptic linguistics” that “[i]nitially focused on dialectal variation in Late Egyptian” but ended up producing “a new model of Proto-Coptic” (2026a).
On the other hand, there stands my own work (Mihalyfy 2025a-b). There, what began as recognition of more-widespread survival of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian than previously thought (Mihalyfy 2022a-b; 2022-23; 2024b; 2024-25; 2025a-b; n.p.) led to a reanalysis of much of the so-called “suffix conjugation” as auxiliary verbs (Mihalyfy 2024a, c-f; 2025a), all as part of a holistic re-examination of the Egyptian verb.
Each body of work makes clear that they originated separately (e.g. Kilani 2025: 135, 146n23, and 159 is not aware of Mihalyfy 2022-23: 117-119, nor does the September 27th conference presentation of Mihalyfy 2025a and its December 15th follow-up blogpost of Mihalyfy 2025b know Kilani 2025, which was announced in the December 18th email of Widmaier 2025).
In order to continue to push forward these exciting and very appealing ideas, then, a number of aspects of the two research projects are worth enumerating in more detail, including some points of tension and disagreement.
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Missystematization of the Egyptian verb runs very deep (but neither should it be overstated).
In their work recognizing the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2, both research projects recognize deep-seated missystematization reaching back to at least the foundational late 19th c. work of Kurt Sethe (Kilani 2025: 121; Mihalyfy 2025b).
To the extent that an auxiliary verb reanalysis of much of the so-called “suffix conjugation” is correct, other significant missystematization has **also** existed in the mainstream of Egyptology since Champollion (Mihalyfy 2024a, c; 2025a), despite a significant undercurrent of dissent in the 20th century (i.e., Lexa 1923 and its followers).
That said, previous scholarship has discussed many crucial aspects of the verbs in question. For example, the kinship of the forms constituting the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 has been crucially recognized or can be glimpsed in multiple places, even if this kinship has been deemphasized (e.g. Sethe 1899: 229-230 and 248 and Allen 2020: 44) or figures into larger frameworks possessing disputable details and positions (e.g. the discussion of Brose 2024: 257).
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Some more-dependable working hypotheses and macro-narratives have already been emerging.
After a provocative comparison with Ethiopic Semitic, Kilani 2025: 160 makes some very valid diachronic and comparative observations:
“[V]erbal classes are a dynamic reality and have certainly evolved over time rather than constituting a fixed or absolute system. This means that although the types and number of verbal classes implied by a given morphosemantic model likely reflect those that were functionally present when the model itself was productive, the verbal system itself may have differed in earlier, more ancient stages of the language… While Egyptian and Coptic may still preserve some clues to explore these questions, the best way to approach them would be through comparison with other Afroasiatic languages.”
In fact, if they are correct, the N-stem and auxiliary verb reanalyses of Egyptian have already helped sketch out some more-dependable working hypotheses and macro-narratives, including through comparison with Afroasiatic (Mihalyfy 2022a-b; 2022-23: 117-119; 2024b, e-f; 2025a; n.p.):
*** - Prior to Egyptian’s lastingly settling in by the Nile Valley, it and East Cushitic may have been made into relic areas by the rise of the prefix conjugation in Berber-Semitic-Cushitic. Egyptian did not participate in this development because it was somewhere off to the west of its historic home. East Cushitic did participate in this development, but incompletely. The result is how both seem to possess the same strange shared verb form (the Egyptian suffix conjugation and the East Cushitic second suffix conjugation, per the underappreciated thinking of Banti 2001: 14-21).
*** - After its move into the Nile Vally and the first unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, Egyptian became a creolid (per an often-discussed idea, e.g. Oréal 2023: 165-169). Its auxiliary verb structure is a major sign of the language’s creolid nature. Another major sign is Egyptian’s typologically unusual word order of lexical verb then auxiliary verb, perhaps an indication of the sudden, large-scale absorption of Cushitic speakers during unification; presumably, these speakers calqued the then-living structure perceptible behind the so-called Cushitic “suffix conjugation” (probably a lexical verb followed by a prefix conjugation auxiliary verb, historically). Within the resulting auxiliary verb structures in Egyptian, the lexical verbs constituted a mixed paradigm of verbal nouns, including at least infinitives, participles, and the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 (cf. the evolving thought of Kilani, moving from more-programmatic use of “infinitive” like at Kilani 2025: 158 to a more-appropriate recognition of “infinitive” as a syntactic slot as in Kilani 2026b).
*** - Since at least the time of the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul, Afroasiatic N-stems enjoyed a striking revival in historic Egyptian, shifting usage and entering into state-process pairs in the semantic area of the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 (cf. the vocabulary of “quality” and “dynamic” in Kilani 2025: 140), although this opposition somewhat fell apart as the N-stems of motion verbs drifted into an inchoative or mellic sense.
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Going back to at least the Pyramid Texts, the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 occupied an unaccusative area and displayed a cross-linguistically known reinterpretation of partial reduplication, and it perhaps should be historically identified with the Berbero-Semitic adjective.
With this shared hypothesis of a verbal noun form found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 , the forms can be immediately dated back to at least the Pyramid Texts via any number of easily-found tokens (e.g. wrr.t “great [crown], h33 “descended” etc.). It is true that the distinctive vocalism is effaced in some forms under hieroglyphic scripts. As has been observed perhaps a bit too programmatically, “Pre-Coptic forms of Egyptian were written using only consonants [and a]s a result, the vocalization of Egyptian verbs, along with any morphological patterns or oppositions that may have characterized them, can only be investigated through its later stage, Coptic, where these features were at least partially preserved” (Kilani 2025: 135; italics added). For, as a rebuttal, it must be emphasized that partial reduplication does surface at least sometimes under hieroglyphic scripts, and these readily evident tokens can be used as a proxy for dating the larger phenomenon of the shared semantic field of the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2.
Within the shared recognition that the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 occupies a semantic space of low agentivity (Kilani 2025: 137-140; Mihalyfy 2025a vis-à-vis Mihalyfy 2022-23: 119; 2024b; n.p.), this space is best categorized as unaccusative, in larger linguistic terminology (Mihalyfy 2022-23: 119).
To think in terms of the three options set out in laudably broad thinking about interpretative possibilities (Kilani 2025: 144-145), the best way of understanding this form’s historical development seems like a version of the second option: partial reduplication (aka “gemination”) was reinterpreted in cross-linguistically known ways, to create state-indicating adjectival forms from biliteral roots (Mihalyfy 2025a-b).
Much like the auxiliary verb might have a relative in East Cushitic and the other lexical verbs of the infinitive and the participle seem to have relatives in Semitic (Mihalyfy 2025a), the verbal noun found in Coptic as C1C2VC3 / C1C2VC2 perhaps should also be identified with the Berbero-Semitic adjective (Mihalyfy 2025a-b, developing van Putten 2024). This connection admittedly raises new problems. For example, why would the vocalization of the C1C2VC3 adjective forms resemble that of the partial reduplication associated with repeated action that presumably produced the C1C2VC2 forms? But, this is potentially explicable through vowel collapse or analogy, and in any case these are very fine details of hazily distant reconstructions for which other, surer, and chronologically-nearer building blocks are currently lacking (cf. the resonant judgment of Kilani 2025: 160 about present-day field capabilities).
If all of the above is true, these positions raise further questions like whether the hypothesized *a vs. *E morphological property (Kilani 2025: 137; Kilani 2026a-c) really did exist in Egyptian. If so, it exited rather early on and must have become shoehorned into the unaccusative area. It also may have left traces elsewhere in the Berbero-Semitic adjective.
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A sign of valid resystematization is unexpected explanatory power.
During my own work, an Indo-Europeanist observed to me that a sign of solid work in historical linguistics is when an analysis formed for one reason suddenly turns out to have unexpected explanatory power in another area; for, language is a system, and these sorts of connections should not be surprising, however surprising the emergence of such a connection might seem in the moment (p.c., Yaroslav Gorbachev).
In this regard, the N-stems project was exceptionally productive. During the course of unifying three previously-separate bodies of verbs (Mihalyfy 2022a-b; 2022-23; 2024; n.p.), it clarified the analogical origins of the Coptic future form ⲚⲀ and the orthographic origins of the Demotic motion verb prefix transliterated in-, not to mention turned up indirect evidence that the Egyptian 1st plural suffix pronoun transliterated n actually was /nu/ through historic times (cf. the similar East Cushitic reconstruction of Banti 2001: 14, which reconstruction was discovered well after the Egyptian reconstruction had been formed on Egyptian-internal grounds). On the level of textual interpretation, it also ended up producing new readings in some notoriously mysterious and garbled areas of at least 2 major texts – namely, the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul (Mihalyfy 2022-23) and the London-Leiden magical papyrus (Mihalyfy 2024-25). More recently, it has undergirded the interpretation of the NSW of the NSW-BITY as an N + S-stem form from ‘3 “be great” that is translatable as “exalted” (Mihalyfy 2025a-b).
The current research around verbal nouns already seems to hold this promise, at least a bit. For example, it seems to hold the key to proper interpretation of the BITY of the NSW-BITY as such an adjectival form *b33 “mighty ” (Mihalyfy 2025a-b). That move in turn unexpectedly clarifies the minor orthographic mystery of why the sequence b3 can be represented by a stork, a ram, and a leopard (Janák 2016: 1) – namely, b3 was a different adjectival form “mighty” applied to various animals (i.e. “mighty [bird],” “mighty [hoofed quadruped],” “mighty [cat]”). In turn yet again, it provides an etymology of the Egyptian “soul”-word b3 as a substantive adjective “might.” Better textual interpretations probably include recognition of both the word “bee” and the supposed denominal verb from “bee” as simple substantivized adjectives “mighty” (e.g. PT824a). These lines of thinking could also help shed further light on Egyptian animal naming practices (e.g. the insights of Meeks 2010 or Quack 2017: 74-75 on ϤⲀⲒ “[tail-]lifter” etc., which should be put into conversation with things like PT891b ꜥḥꜥw “stander” for “heron”).
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Resystematization’s greatest effects are with Afroasiatic linguistics and pedagogy, not translation.
Despite the magnitude of the linguistic reorganization of these verbal forms, the effects on translation are surprisingly small. This linguistic reorganization preserves most existing translation values, with only very occasional disputes of negligible value (e.g. Mihalyfy 2024-25: 62-65) or clarifications of textual areas already known to be mysterious or garbled (e.g. Mihalyfy 2022-23: 123-124; 2024-25: 65-70).
Thus, it seems correct to primarily emphasize the linguistic implications of this line of research (Kilani 2025: 121, 127, 159-160).
Nevertheless, to this it should be added that this research will also have pedagogical effects for non-linguists who studies multiple phases and scripts of Egyptian, something conceivable as the identification of “simplifying connections” (Mihalyfy 2024c; 2025a) or the creation of “greater internal coherence” out of currently “chaotic” categorizations (Kilani 2025: 121, 127).
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With resystematization, an underdiscussed idea is the “hieroglyphic side-marking of vowels.”
In various ways with various forms, different scholars have raised the question of whether there was something like the “hieroglyphic side-marking of vowels” (e.g. Stauder 2014: 43 and Kilani 2019: 16-17, in the vocabulary of Mihalyfy 2025a).
The underlying logic has been most concisely stated in relation to a proposal for group (syllabic) writing (Kilani 2019: 16-17):
“[T]he fact that many hieroglyphic signs simultaneously encoded for more than one consonant, made it often practically impossible to indicate the presence of a vowel there where it was supposed to be pronounced.”
When thinking about resystematizing the Egyptian verb, a major underdiscussed idea is whether this was occurring and if so, how far back. For example, one could envision that what is transliterated as -y was actually a marker of long vowels and diphthongs (e.g. ky “other” for vocalism like that in the dialectal ⲔⲀⲒ- form seen in Crum 1939: 90). Thus, a word like ḥmsy could possibly have ***already*** represented a form corresponding in major regards to the Coptic ϨⲘⲞⲞⲤ (Mihalyfy 2025a-b).
Reconstructions of vocalism in Egyptian are already very often murky and debatable, but this question has to be asked.
If this line of thinking is correct to some degree, it would have effects on not only the reconstruction of vocalism, but possibly even the identification of some verbal suffixes (e.g. the efforts of Kilani 2025: 148-155).
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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 at the North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics and remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. A series of several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian have been appearing in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. An article clarifying the origin of the Later Egyptian discontinuous negative particle is forthcoming in Prague Egyptological Studies.
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