A work in progress!
This subsite is an introduction to Egyptian grammar. These lessons are intended to be helpful for beginners as well as those more familiar with the language. If you’re serious about learning Egyptian, I hope these pages will get you started, but they are no substitute for a real textbook by a real Egyptologist. Please see the Bibliography page for my sources and recommendations.
Remember my disclaimer: I am not an Egyptologist, just someone interested in ancient Egypt for nearly my entire life.
Before you get started, we recommend you visit the browser test page to see how your browser handles arranging hieroglyphs and showing transliteration symbols.
- Introduction: How to use these lessons
- Middle Egyptian and Hieroglyphs • Exercises
Middle Egyptian? • Hieroglyphs and their uses • Gardiner codes
Sidebar: The other Egyptian scripts - The Basics of Writing • Exercises
Direction • Quadrats • Cartouches • Columns - The Alphabet • Exercises
Transliteration • Missing vowels • Pronunciation • Articles
Sidebar: Reconstructing Egyptian pronunciation - Determinatives, gender, and sentences • Exercises (exercises under construction)
Determinatives • Gender of nouns • Adverbial and verbal sentences
Sidebar: Hints for learning alphabetic order - Biliterals, ideograms, and roots • Exercises (exercises under construction)
Biliterals • Phonetic complements • Ideograms • Noun roots • Punctuation - Triliterals, weakness, and jw • Exercises (exercises under construction)
Triliterals • Weak consonants and verbs • jw • Tense and Mood • “To be” - Strange spellings • Exercises (under const)
Honorific • nswt • Aesthetic • Pronunciation issues • “Two consonants” rule - Adjectives and suffix pronouns • Exercises (exercises under construction)
Adjectives • Suffix pronouns • Uses of suffix pronouns • Gender of pronouns - Adjectival sentences and dependents • Exercises (all under construction)
t/ṯ, s/z • Adjectival sentences • Dependent pronouns • Dative • Evil sparrows
Sidebar: Leiden Unified Transliteration - Objects, order, selves • Exercises (exercises under construction)
Object of a verb • Word order in verbal clauses • Reflexives and emphatics
Sidebar: Logic of verbal word order - Plurals and duals • Exercises (both under construction)
Plurals • Duals • Adjective plural/dual • j/y question • d/ḏ • Disappearing feminine endings
Sidebar: More on the j/y question and LUT - The good, the bad, and the verb • Exercises (both under construction)
Nominalized adjectives • Swallow and sparrow • Verb paradigm • Apparent adjectives - Noun phrases • Exercises (both under construction)
Apposition • Conjunction • Direct genitive • Indirect genitive • Disambiguation
Sidebar: The non-breaking direct genitive rule - More about adjectives • Exercises (both under const.)
Types of adjectives • Derived adjectives (Nisbes) • Feminine roots • False duals • Comparison • nfr ḥr - Independents and demonstratives • Exercises (both under const.)
Independent pronouns • Demonstratives • Vocatives • Archaic demonstratives - Nominal sentences with pw • Exercises (both under const.)
A pw sentences • pw position • A pw B sentences • Exceptions • Subject and predicate - “A B” sentences • Exercises (both under const.)
A & B nouns • Independent pronoun A • Demonstrative pronoun B - Nominal sentences with nj • Exercises (both under const.)
Noun A • Pronoun A • Pronoun B • Contractions • Invisible nj • Deities
Sidebar: Invisible nj - More on adjectival sentences • Exercises (b.u.c.)
“Doubly” • “Very” • Null subjects • Apposition - Prepositions I • Exercises (b.u.c.)
m • mj • n • r • ḥr • ẖr - Prepositions II • Exercises (b.u.c.)
Compound prepositions • Pronominal objects • Other primary prepositions - Nisbes • Exercises (b.u.c.)
Inflection • Prepositionals • ẖrj • Reverse • As modifiers
Sidebar: How the genitival adjective may have worked - Verb stems • Exercises (b.u.c.)
… - Verb classes • Exercises (b.u.c.)
…
below this line is all being rewritten; you click on these at your own risk
- Numbers
Learning numbers • Cardinals • Ordinals • Using cardinals • Using ordinals - Adverbs
Primary • Derived • Prepositional • Word Order • Comparison - Adverbial Sentences I
Simple form • jw • m.k • nn • nḥmn • ḥꜣ - Adverbial Sentences II
Compound pronouns • Adverbials with m, n, r - Introduction to Verbs
- Pseudo-Verbal Construction
- Verbal sentences (Introduction)
All of the following require verbs 101:
- The Offering Formula
- need the most basic verbal sentences like “he gives”
- need to cope with a relative clause to understand “dj nswt” (maybe not the full treatment yet, but a bit)
- need prepositions
- Infinitives
- need verbs obvs
- Pseudo-Verbal Construction
- needs verbs
- needs adverbial sentences
- needs prepositions
- does it need verbal sentences? how complex is it with subject, object, etc.
- Imperative
- Particles
- this is in Allen’s chapter on the imperative, see where it makes sense, standalone or elsewhere
- Stative
- sḏm.n.f
- sḏm.f
- Passive sḏm.f
- Biliteral Suffix forms
- sḏmt.f
- Parenthetics
- Adverb Clauses (may include here a sidebar about how the compound pronouns developed)
- Noun Clauses
- Relative Clauses
- Active Participle
- Passive Participle
- Emphatic Sentences
- more?
Quick reference pages:
- Noun and adjective declension
- Pronoun declensions
- Prepositions
- Names of gods
- Frequent titles
- more?
Appendices (all to be written)
- The Royal Titulary
- The Egyptian Calendars
- Intro to Egyptian Mathematics
- …?
temporarily holding: gggffffffff
Nisbes are an extremely useful part of Egyptian; in fact, it is supposed that the genitival adjective n/nt/nw itself began as a nisbe n.j from the preposition n meaning “for”. So if a zj njwtj is a “local man”, then a zj nj is a “man who is for” or “man who belongs”, and thus zj n(j) pr becomes “man who is for the house”, “man who belongs to the house”, “man of the house”.
It is believed that the -j suffix on nisbes really definitely was pronounced with the long “ee” sound; if njwt was pronounced like the English phrase “knee wet”, then njwtj was probably pronounced like “knee wet E”. Words like this are well known in the modern Semitic languages, and in English loan-words from them, for describing where someone is from: Saudi, Yemeni, Bahraini, Israeli, Iraqi, Pakistani, etc.
We might even, speaking very informally (and for a bit of silliness), make up similar adjectives in English with our “-y” ending. Imagine if I had two shovels, and I wanted the one behind the house, I could say “Get me the behind-y one.” Or if someone asked you for something under a big pile of heavy objects, you could reply “Sorry, I can’t get it; it’s very under-y.”