EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE
The Egyptian language is the language spoken in ancient Egypt. Its daughter language, Coptic, died out in the 17th century AD. It thus has one of the longest histories of any language. There is a vast literature, both secular and religious. From 650 BC the classicizing tendencies of the scribes gave way to Demotic Egyptian, and Demotic inscriptions are found until the mid- 5th century AD. Coptic became dominant in the 4th century AD, but started to decline after the introduction of Arabic in the 7th century. Egyptian inscriptions were written in hieroglyphs. There were also two cursive scripts based on the hieroglyphs: Hieratic, used for religious documents; and Demotic, for ordinary documents. Coptic was written in the Greek alphabet, with seven extra letters taken from Demotic. Egyptian is part of the Afro-asiatic group of languages, a larger group which includes Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and the Semitic languages. The language is: Egyptian Language | ||||
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Egyptian language Definition from Encyclopedia Dictionaries & Glossaries
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Egyptian language
Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language most closely related to Berber, Semitic, and Beja. The language survived until the 5th century AD in the form of Demotic and until the late 17th century AD in the form of Coptic. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3200 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. The national language of modern day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic Egyptian as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Coptic is still used as a liturgical language by the Coptic Church, and reportedly has a handful of native speakers today.
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