Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ (“nothing”) as a Transformation of iry (“any” < “doing”), with Implications Including Possible Semitic-like Vocalization and Demotic-like /l/-Representation
The following has been written to gather feedback, in preparation for a fuller scholarly article. Part of this thinking was previewed at the 48th North Atlantic Conference for Afroasiatic Linguistics (Mihalyfy 2025b).
. . .
A simple thesis: Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ “nothing” is a cross-linguistically expected descendant of the sequence transliterated iry – typically translated “thereof,” but actually an “any” word grammaticalized from a participle “doing.”
Quite interestingly, this etymology may indicate historic Egyptian vocalization matching the first long vowel in the reconstructed Proto-Semitic active participle C1a:C2iC3 (Huehnergard 2019: 57). It may also support reinterpreting the Demotic script’s representation of /l/ as a ligature of I + R (vs. other traditional derivations like that found in Johnson 2000: 3 and Richter 2023: 10, for example).
Some steps of argumentation, and then some “lagniappe” raising other possible connections across different eras of Egyptian.
Some cross-linguistic perspective to sort through Egyptian usage.
Close reading of established, undisputed usage for Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ “nothing” suggests ultimate derivation from something like a participle, in line with the etymology of Spanish nada “nothing” (< Lat. natus, -a, -um “born”).
Why?
Cross-linguistically, “nothing” words tend to come from either “thing” words or a minimizer (see Mihalyfy 2026b: 52 for a discussion of these phenomena, as a preliminary to identifying an etymology for the Later Egyptian discontinuous negative particle).
For “thing” words, think something like the English “nothing” (< “thing”) or Italian niente (< Lat. ens, entis “being”), while for minimizer words, think something like the Romanian nimic (< Lat. mica “crumb”). The respective logics are that “nothing” equals no individual instance in a universe of possible individual instances (“no thing,” “no entity”), or no unit whatsoever, no matter how small (“no crumb”).
Although often conjoined with explicit negation – like the previous examples of English “nothing,” Italian niente, and the Romanian nimic – “nothing” words can also come from originally positive words that absorbed negation and became negative from regularly appearing in negative contexts.
A classic example of this development is the French rien “nothing” (< Lat. rem “thing” [acc. sg.]) (Willis, Lucas, and Breitbarth 2013: 27, 36). Effectively, historic sentences structured like je ne regrette rien “I don’t regret [a] thing” permitted perception of rien as inherently negative, and thus its eventual shift into a meaning “nothing.”
As a further nuance on all of this preceding material – and as something that is very important for thinking through the Egyptian, it turns out – polarity items used to hyperbolically exaggerate negation can feed into these patterns.
Here, a classic example is the Spanish nada (< Lat. natus, -a, -um “born”) (Alkire and Rosen 2010: 304, 351n23; Willis, Lucas, and Breitbarth 2013: 37). As can be seen in the Old Spanish nado “nobody” (Alkire and Rosen 2010: 351n23), it was used to heighten negation with people – that is, in replying to “Who did you see?”, someone could replace “I didn’t see a person!” with the slightly stronger “I didn’t see a born [person]!”, in phrasings somewhat comparable to the English phrase “I didn’t see a soul!” and its more forceful expansion “I didn’t see a living soul!”. Additionally, the modifier itself seems to have functioned as or to have become a catch-all detached from its original sense most applicable to persons and other living beings, lexicalizing as “nothing” in the feminine singular form (from “not a born [thing],” with the unstated “thing” in the feminine singular).
With all of this in mind, what do we find in consulting the entry for ⲖⲀⲀⲨ in the classic resource of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary?
A relatively uncommon usage as “thing” (e.g. ϨⲀⲚⲈⲔⲖⲀⲀⲨ “for your things” and ⲖⲀⲀⲨ ⲚⲒⲘ “every thing”), appended to its negative usages as “nothing” and “not any” and positive usages as “anything” and “any” (Crum 1939: 146-147; see also Missael 2025: 168 for appropriate recognition of underdiscussed translation values like “anything”).
Thus, in light of relevant cross-linguistic patterns, these usages attested for ⲖⲀⲀⲨ suggest that we should probably imagine a “thing” word that shifted from positive to negative, and that that “thing” word arose through some modifier form like the Spanish nada from the Latin past participle natus, -a, -um, given the Egyptian word’s ability to function as an “any”-like adjectival modifier in addition to its better-known usage as a standalone, substantivized noun like that meaning “nothing.”
Framing a hypothesis for the underlying verb.
If we look for an ultimate etymology of ⲖⲀⲀⲨ as a modifier – potentially a participle, like in the case of Spanish nada from the Latin past participle natus, -a, -um – identifying a plausible verbal root becomes very important.
In the two consonantal bits – those written with the Ⲗ and the Ⲩ – we should probably see a more-original root sequence rw. The second and latter part of the /w/ is relatively straightforward, whereas the recognition of an /r/ behind the first part of the /l/ goes back to a well-known peculiarity of the so-called “Fayumic” dialect (Allen 2020: 7), actually probably located slightly to the east around Herakleopolis (Peust 2017).
If we poke around more in Coptic forms, this hypothesized root rw can probably be identified with the verb transliterated as iri and coming down into Coptic as ⲈⲒⲢⲈ “do, make, act.” Metathesis can occur with verbs, and the root structure ⲁⲢⲓⲞⲨⲓ visible in obscure imperative forms such as ⲀⲢⲒⲞⲨⲒ “do!” (Crum 1939: 83; Allen 2020: 48) indicate an rw order, as well as suggest some correspondence between a root consonant /w/ and the root consonant /i/ that appears in other forms like ⲈⲒⲢⲈ. In fact, despite the many uncertainties plaguing reconstructions of Egyptian sound-sequences, it seems relatively evident that an original /w/ can change to /i/ in initial position – think how the sequence transliterated wpt “message, task” produces Coptic ⲈⲒⲞⲠⲈ “craft, art, occupation” (Černý 1976: 47). It would also not be unusual for Egyptian to form a similar-looking cluster of frequently-occurring verbs through some degree of analogical leveling that perhaps included metathesis – e.g., ⲈⲒⲢⲈ “do,” ⲈⲒⲚⲈ “bring,” ⲈⲒⲘⲈ “understand” – much like Italian produced a cluster of similar forms visible in the third person plurals hanno “they have,” sanno “they know,” fanno “they make,” vanno “they go” (per Alkire and Rosen 2010: 121, these constitute “a small, closed club of high-frequency verbs united by mutual analogical influences”).
Thus, although one could muse more deeply on Egyptian’s linguistic history and hypothesize that an initial rw root visible in the archaic-seeming imperative ⲀⲢⲒⲞⲨⲒ “do!” was more original and underwent metathesis and some sort of change to one of its radicals, that additional step is unnecessary for this present argument. For, it is only necessary to show that a sequence rw is a likely historic appearance of the root for the verb “do, act, make” at some point in time, even if it is not the more-original form.
In any case, all of this Coptic evidence suggests that some participle form with a biliteral root structure rw related to the Coptic ⲈⲒⲢⲈ “do, make” is probably the best etymological candidate for the “nothing”-word ⲖⲀⲀⲨ.
A telling usage among Eloquent Peasant manuscript variants.
With an rw form of the root seen in the later ⲈⲒⲢⲈ “do, make, act” in mind as a likely source for what became Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ “nothing,” manuscript variants of the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant leap out as telling evidence for this suspected etymology (see Mihalyfy 2026b: 66-68 for another important manuscript variant from this text, namely a historic example of the pre-grammaticalized etymon “piece” that became Egyptian’s discontinuous negative particle).
In one version of the Eloquent Peasant, one version of a sentence appears using nb “all” (B1 48-49; text and translation adapted from Parkinson 2012: 50-51 vis-à-vis Parkinson 1991: 12):
ntf grt ḫsf ꜥwꜣ nb m tꜣ pn r ḏr-f
“Now, he punishes every robber in this entire land”
In fragments from the other surviving version, however, that same sentence appears in a slightly different version that uses the participle “doing, acting” (R 10.4-5; text and translation adapted from Parkinson 2012: 50-51 vis-à-vis Parkinson 1991: 12):
ntf g[rt] ḫsf [ꜥwꜣ] irw m tꜣ r ḏr-f
“Now, he punishes (any) robber acting in the entire land”
As can be seen from its rough equivalency to nb “all,” this word “doing, acting” (perhaps better translated as “active”?) could quickly be understood as something like the “any” that feels so necessary to insert in the English translation. The first version of the sentence indicates totality of action by explicitly referencing totality of the action’s domain (nb “all”) while the second version of the sentence indicates totality of action by suggesting that the action applies to any given applicable instance that can be conceived (irw “acting”).
Thus, the Eloquent Peasant provides a clear example of historic usage that would be productive of grammaticalization, with the verb predictable from the Coptic evidence.
Has the ancestor of the Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ been hiding in iry “thereof”?
A question:
If we can deduce grammaticalization-producing contexts for the participle-derived “any” word that became the Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ as far back as the Eloquent Peasant, why aren’t we seeing more of this “any” word in the Egyptian texts that we’ve all been reading?
An idea:
We have been seeing this word, but it’s been hiding behind the word transliterated iry and translated “thereof.”
Graphically, what is transliterated as ir would be a digraph representing /l/ like could be occurring with the later Demotic method of representing /l/, if one understands its two strokes as a ligature for I + R (has anyone ever suggested this before? – presumably, there was a logic behind this digraph, where the i represented lateral tongue-position and the r represented the liquid nature of the sound). Then, what is transliterated as y could be a hieroglyphic method of representing long vowels, inclusive of diphthongs and sequences including glides (Mihalyfy 2025b; Mihalyfy 2026a: 13n31).
The fragmentary manuscript R of the Eloquent Peasant with the usage indicative of grammaticalization does not contain any instances of iry, but the other, more-important manuscript B1 does contain four (B1 208, 213, 262, and 307, per Parkinson 2012: 320). Moreover, every single one can be translated using “any” – for example, this bit of dialogue where the peasant metaphorically describes exploitation (B1 207-208; text and translation adapted from Parkinson 2012: 173-174 vis-à-vis Parkinson 1991: 30):
mk tw <m> wdpw rš-f pw rḫs nn iꜣtiw iry r-f
“Look, you are <like> a butcher. His joy is slaughter. There is not any slaughter beyond him.”
Here, it should be noted that the typical translation of iry as “thereof” could more or less contain the sense of “any” in the sentence – “There is no slaughter thereof beyond him” – and thus this more-typical translation may be serving as a deceptive, semantically hypercapacious filler word hindering proper analysis.
In any case, under this hypothesis, this regionally grammaticalized “any”-word’s popularization probably took place right after 2000 BCE, during the start of the Twelfth Dynasty when Amenemhat I transferred the capital to Itjtawy. Although this city’s location is “undiscovered,” it is presumed to be located near the Fayum (Shaw 2000: 146, further specifying “probably near the Lisht necropolis”). Thus, there is a distinct chance that the capital would have been in the region of the distinctive united /r/-/l/ phenomenon characterizing the so-called “Fayumic” dialect, even if its distribution is not currently thought to have extended quite as far north as Lisht (Peust 2017: 314). If the capital was located in the region of this dialectal feature, this of course would have given the /l/-containing “any”-word continuous with the Coptic ⲖⲀⲀⲨ the social prestige to be widely used and eventually adopted throughout Egyptian in order to become standard within Coptic.
In this regard, it should be pointed out that the Twelfth Dynasty is consistent with the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, which “is now generally accepted to have been composed in the early to mid 12th Dynasty,” and that this work’s iry-containing manuscript B1 has also been dated to the Twelfth Dynasty (Parkinson 2012: 1, 2).
A search for this lemma in the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (Thesauraus Linguae Aegyptiae 2026) also shows a Twelfth Dynasty upsurge in usage of words placed under the lemma iry “thereof,” as well as the tantalizing fact that that corpus’s first appearance of iry as it is written in the Eloquent Peasant is also dated to the Twelfth Dynasty.
Re-reading all previous translations of sentences identified as having iry “thereof” should be done cautiously, however, and is a much larger project that may not be fully possible right now. The “any”-word may have been subjected to misuse by bureaucrats of different dialects when they were trying to approximate official speech from the capital, and it may have had expanded usage like the positive “anymore” of English. Even more than that, some of the examples for this lemma appearing in TLA may actually be other things – for example, other forms of the verb transliterated iri “do, make, act,” or some use of the preposition r, or some use of the polarity phrase r-ꜥ that comes down into Coptic as ⲢⲰ “at all” (Mihalyfy 2026b: 68-71), or some version of the particles transliterated as things like rꜣ-ꜥ (Pantalacci 1985), which particles may have some relation to the former. Thus, while evidence may support positing an “any” word iry that has been (slightly) misinterpreted in some places like that one manuscript of the Eloquent Peasant, programmatic re-readings of all the different variant writings thought to contain iry does not seem currently possible, because of the number of intersecting issues that are unresolved and are topics for extensive research in their own right.
Some “Lagniappe.”
Some implications and points of interest from the previous material:
1) If we understand the doubled alpha of ⲖⲀⲀⲨ as a long vowel represented by a Coptic convention likely creatively adapted from Greek poetry and magic (Mihalyfy 2025a; n.p.), this ⲀⲀ may be a preservation of the same long vowel that has been reconstructed in the Proto-Semitic active participle C1a:C2iC3 (Huehnergard 2019: 57). That is, this word ⲖⲀⲀⲨ could show the characteristic vowel that is present in reduced form in the Coptic conjunct participles (Loprieno 1995: 99), if it does not have some other explanation (e.g. lengthening before a resonant). However, because of the uneven state of research on the Egyptian verb let alone Egyptian vocalism, this possibility cannot currently be evaluated with any significant degree of confidence.
2) In terms of orthographic conventions...
a) The digraph I + R could be where Demotic got its method of representing /l/ through a ligature of the two preceding letters – has anyone thought of this, previously? – and this digraph could perhaps be present in other long-standing Egyptian words (e.g. irṯ.t “milk,” suspected by Kammerzell 2005: 200, 212-213, 216 to be a borrowing from an Indo-European language, even without identification of ir as a possible writing of /l/).
b) What is transliterated as y would be a further reason to view this sign as a marker of long vowels, at least sometimes at some point in Egyptian’s history, and perhaps in conjunction with what might be termed “hieroglyphic side-marking of vowels” (Mihalyfy 2025b; Mihalyfy 2026a: 13n31).
3) In terms of possible participles elsewhere…
a) Rather than involving a complicated preposition-derived grammatical form like “at the door,” phrasings like ir-ꜥꜣ (Faulkner 1962: 25) could perhaps simply consist of a participle “acting” (like “actor”) + “door.” Here, the ir sequence could be a digraph for /l/, but it could also be (and more likely is?) the verbal root ir, which could be in some sort of metathesis relationship with rw.
b) The Coptic ⲤⲈⲢⲀ “they do” form of ⲈⲒⲢⲈ (Crum 1939: 83) could hold a participle, illustrating the long-standing hunch that some independent pronoun + verb phrasings in Egyptian contain participial inflection (e.g. Gardiner 1957: 288-289, §373).
c) Words like ⲢⲀⲔⲞⲦⲈ “Alexandria” ( < “construction,” actually a nominalizer + “build,” cf. Pantalacci 1985: 15-16n31) contain that same participle, likely interpreted as a “thing” word in the manner of “doing” or “proceeding” and then grammaticalized as a nominalizer in a cross-linguistically known development of “thing” words (Kuteva et al. 2019: 433-434; see also Mihalyfy 2026a for a larger presence of the nominalizer bw in Egyptian than has been previously thought). This thinking provides a longer-term etymology for many instances of Coptic ⲢⲀ “state, condition” (Crum 1939: 287), which has been connected to an earlier prefix transliterated rꜣ-ꜥ with the same meaning but was otherwise given no deeper explanation (Černý 1976: 134).
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Overall, these ideas occur once again within the broader recognition that the evolution of the Egyptian language takes place within a tighter timeframe with more points of connection between phases than has been previously appreciated (e.g. Mihalyfy 2026a; 2026b).
If the point about participle vocalization proves true, it also makes Egyptian look more like at least one other branch of Afroasiatic.
Together, these ideas once again make Coptic collapse into older phases of Egyptian and Egyptian collapse into Afroasiatic, much like an accordion folding together (Mihalyfy 2025b). Everything just might be shallower and look a lot more alike than we currently think.
. . .
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 has been appearing in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. He has also recently published two #OpenAccess articles on negation in Egyptian in Bibliothèque ouverte d'égyptologie and Prague Egyptological Studies.
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---, “Egyptian’s N-Stems and Auxiliary Verbs as Further Evidence for Its Creolid Origins?: A Summary of Recent Research Findings, with Implications for Afroasiatic Prehistory” (27 September 2025 presentation in Columbus, Ohio, at the 48th North Atlantic Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics), available at https://www.academia.edu/144579622/Egyptians_N_Stems_and_Auxiliary_Verbs_as_Further_Evidence_for_Its_Creolid_Origins_A_Summary_of_Recent_Research_Findings_with_Implications_for_Afroasiatic_Prehistory.
---, “Explaining the Odd Foot Sign of Gardiner D58 in the Egyptian Negator Transliterated bn: A Case for Innovative Orthographic Reuse Based on the Phonetic Reduction of the Nominalizer bw (> -ⲞⲨ-) and the Non-Etymological Writing bw nb for wn nb (> ⲞⲨⲞⲚ ⲚⲒⲘ),” Bibliothèque ouverte d'égyptologie 2026(2): 1-27, available at https://zenodo.org/records/20841508.
---, “The origin of the Later Egyptian discontinuous negative particle iwnA ~ in ~ AN as a reanalyzed lexical reinforcer ‘piece,’” Prague Egyptological Studies 36 (2026): 50-82, available at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/212322.
---, “How Homer and Magic Gave Egypt Its Vowels: Greek Poetry and Spells as Likely Influences on Coptic Orthography” (paper prepared for publication and submitted for peer review as of 27 September 2026).
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--- (ed.), The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 1991).
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David Willis, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth, “Comparing diachronies of negation,” in David Willis, Christopher Lucas, Anne Breitbarth (eds.), The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Volume I: Case Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-50.
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