Böcker av Antonio Loprieno

The language of Ancient Egypt has been the object of careful investigation since its decipherment in the nineteenth century, but this is the first accessible account which uses the insights of modern linguistics. Antonio Loprieno traces Ancient Egyptian's historical development from Old Egyptian to Coptic, and, combining diachronic and synchronic viewpoints wherever possible, he looks at the hieroglyphic system and its cursive varieties (Hieratic and Demotic), the phonology of Classical Egyptian and Coptic, the phonology and syntax of the literary languages, and semantic and pragmatic constraints on syntax. He also looks at the genetic connections of Egyptian within the Afroasiatic family, especially with Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Arabic, and Hebrew. This book will be essential reading for linguists and Egyptologists alike.

The Egyptian language, with its written documentation spreading from the Early Bronze Age (Ancient Egyptian) to Christian times (Coptic), has rarely been the object of typological studies, grammatical analysis mainly serving philological purposes. This volume offers now a detailed analysis and a diachronic discussion of the non-verbal patterns of the Egyptian language, from the Pyramid Texts (Earlier Egyptian) to Coptic (Later Egyptian), based on an extensive use of data, especially for later phases. By providing a narrative contextualisation and a linguistic glossing of all examples, it addresses the needs not only of students of Egyptian and Coptic, but also of a linguistic readership. After an introduction into the basic typological features of Egyptian, the main book chapters address morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the three non-verbal sentence types documented throughout the history of this language: the adverbial sentence, the nominal sentence and the adjectival sentence. These patterns also appear in a variety of clausal environments and can be embedded in verbal constructions. This book provides an ideal introduction into the study of Egyptian historical grammar and an indispensable companion for philological reading.