Negation in Ancient Egyptian

The Mouton Companions to Ancient Egyptian series addresses the great need of comprehensive seminal publications on ancient Egyptian linguistics.

Ancient Egyptian, generally considered to be an Afroasiatic language, was written for over four thousand years. It is usually divided into five main stages: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Ancient Egyptian as a whole is unparalleled among documented languages in terms of continuous length of attestation, variation in registers and genres, and opportunities for historical linguistic research.

Ancient Egyptian has interested general linguists since Alexander von Humboldt. Recently, it has begun to attract the attention of typologists. However, idiosyncrasies of the modern grammatical tradition within Egyptology have prevented nonspecialist linguists from having access to accurate information about any phase of the language. Thus, the quality of data from Ancient Egyptian in general linguistics used to be poor, and most general linguists have understandably refrained from making reference to the language at all.

This gap can be addressed by providing a comprehensive description of the language in straight-forward, accessible terms. This prospect has recently become possible due to a growing interest on the part of linguists working on Ancient Egyptian in making their work transparent to non-Egyptologists.

Elsa Oréal, CNRS, Paris; Jean Winand, Université de Liège.