Adjectival Sentences

• Adjectival sentence structure
• Exclamatory sentences
• Pronouns as subjects
• Nouns as subjects
• Additional modifications

Adjectival sentences are descriptive sentences where the subject (a noun or pronoun) is described by an adjective.

Adjectival sentence structure

The adjectival sentence structure is adjective-subject. Begin the sentence with the masculine singular form of the adjective (even if the subject is feminine and/or plural), and follow it with the subject:

dšr jrwt.f “His eyes are red.”

Note that the primary adjective nb “each, every, all” can only be used to modify a noun and cannot stand as a predicate itself. If you wanted to say something like “She is everything”, you would have to make a nominal sentence “She is all things”, with “things” as the predicate and “all” as its modifier.

Exclamatory sentences

If you use the masculine dual form of the adjective instead of the singular, the sentence becomes exclamatory; it changes in literal meaning from “X is Y” to “X is doubly Y!”

dšrwj jrwt.f “How red his eyes are!”, “His eyes are so red!”
(lit. “His eyes are doubly red.”)

Pronouns as subjects

If a sentence with an adjectival predicate is in first person, the sentence is not structured as an adjectival sentence at all; it is structured as an A-B nominal sentence instead, with the independent pronoun followed by the correctly declined adjective:

jnk jqr.t “I am excellent” (if speaker is feminine).

If the sentence is in second or third person, then it is structured as an adjectival sentence, but the pronoun must be the dependent pronoun.

nfr sj “She is beautiful”
nfrwj sj “How beautiful she is!”

Nouns as subjects

Anything that acts like a noun can be the subject of an adjectival sentence, including other adjectives functioning as nouns, or noun phrases, including where the noun is described by additional adjectives or pronouns.

jqr dšr.wt “the red ones are excellent”
nfrwj zꜣt snn.wt n nswt “the king’s second daughter is so beautiful!”

When the subject is a noun, the sentence is often said with the appropriate personal pronoun as the subject instead, and then the noun in apposition to the pronoun:

nfr sj ḥjmt.j “She is beautiful, my wife.”

Additional modifications

The word wrt “very” can go after the adjective, before the subject:

nfr wrt ḥjmt.j “My wife is very beautiful.”

A comparative phrase beginning with r, like when forming a comparative with a modifier adjective, can be used, but here it goes after the subject:

nfr ḥjmt.j r zwt nbt
“My wife is more beautiful than all (other) women.”