All things concerning Ancient Egyptian archaeological developments, art, culture, history, or appreciation.
Why are most learning and reference material on the Egyptian language focused on the Middle period of the language?
Always been interested in learning Egyptian both because of being a fan of Egyptology and as a linguistics nerd. So after browsing a lot of the recommended material it seems to be so focused on middle Egyptian with one or two books on later Egyptian. Is there really no extant or useable material on Egyptian as used by the old kingdom. Has the language not changed that much with some effort would a learned of middle Egyptian be able to make a guess about older Egyptian?
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Antonio Loprieno's Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction has a chunk of material about older Egyptian. Examples from just the section on verb morphology:
p. 78: "The development from Old Egyptian past forms to the Middle Egyptian paradigm is marked by ..."
p. 80: "Periphrastic constructions for the expression of the imperfective and prospective aspect emerge in the late Old Kingdom ..."
p. 81: "In Old Egyptian, the weak [verb] classes display a j-prefix."
p. 82: "In Old Egyptian, the perfect passive sḏm(.w)=f is used as independent VP with dynamic verbs ..."
My understanding of why so much focuses on Middle Egyptian is that basically, it was Shakespeare or King James for the New Kingdom. I quote Wikipedia:
oh wow thanks for the title of book as I did not see it when looking for books. This something I will definitely check out later later in my self-study. Just trying to find out what book to begin with...
You're most welcome. I assume you've already encountered Sir Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, which I think (I'm just a layperson Egyptologist, not an actually academically accredited one!) is considered somewhat dated but still respectable; even he has a bunch of stuff about Old Kingdom Egyptian.
Yes I have indeed came across Egyptian Grammar but from what I gather it should be used in conjunction with a more err modern approach. I heard that Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs by James P. Allen is a good general introduction and enough content to last a while.
Many of the differences between Old and Middle Egyptian are orthographic; for example, z and s are distinguished in Old Egyptian, spellings are more regularized in Middle Egyptian, phonetic complements in Old Egyptian often precede biliteral/triliteral signs rather than only follow them, and Old Egyptian rarely uses the 1st person singular suffix (Egyptian =i). The other differences are grammatical. For example, there is a different passive form (sDm.ti.f rather than sDm.tw.f), the pseudoverbal construction was not used until the end of the Old Kingdom, Middle Egyptian differentiates between the negations nn and n, and dual forms are used more often in Old Egyptian.
Overall, however, Old and Middle Egyptian are fundamentally similar, and someone who knows Middle Egyptian can learn Old Egyptian quite quickly and easily. The differences are much less noticeable than those between Middle and Late Egyptian. When I took Old Egyptian, we went through the grammatical differences between OE and ME in about a day and then jumped right into reading texts.
The standard grammar for Old Egyptian is Edel's Altägyptische Grammatik. Allen is producing a new series of Old Egyptian grammar books (A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts), but I haven't had a chance to look through the first volume yet.
What I've read so far is that Middle Egyptian is studied so much because it became the standard version used for religious purposes. It's a bit like Latin in the Catholic Church in that respect.