Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BCE,[1] making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century CE in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Coptic is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. It reportedly has a handful of native speakers today
Egyptian is a fairly typical Afro-Asiatic language. At the heart of Egyptian vocabulary is a root of three consonants. Sometimes there were only two, for example
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic. It also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afro-Asiatic languages, although exactly how the emphatic consonants were realized is not precisely known. In transcription, , , and all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen (1341 BCE – 1323 BCE) was written in Egyptian twt-ʕnḫ-ỉmn. Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience, but this artificial pronunciation should not be mistaken for how Egyptian was actually pronounced at any point in time. For example, twt-ʕnḫ-ỉmn is commonly pronounced something like /tuːtənˈkɑːmən/ in modern English, but in his time was likely realized as something like *[tVwaːt ʕaːnix ʔaˈmaːn], where V is a vowel of undetermined quality.
Classical Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; the equivalent to "the man opens the door", would be a sentence corresponding to "opens the man the door" (wn s ˁ3). It uses the so-called status constructus to combine two or more nouns to express the genitive, similar to Semitic and Berber languages. The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words p3, t3 and n3 for this purpose. Like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to Arabic and Tamasheq. It also uses three grammatical numbers, contrasting singular, dual, and plural forms, although there is a tendency for the loss of the dual as a productive form in later Egyptian.
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