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We all know ancient Egyptians spoke ancient Egyptian, but is there any evidence of other languages having been spoken in this area? I know that there are a few Semitic loanwords found in Ancient Egyptian, particulary after it became an empire. What other loanwords have been found and has any substratum been found? Also, what was the geographical limit of the language? Obviously mainly along the Nile and conquered territories in Palestine, but how far south and West have Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs been found?
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quote:Originally posted by Yom: We all know ancient Egyptians spoke ancient Egyptian, but is there any evidence of other languages having been spoken in this area? I know that there are a few Semitic loanwords found in Ancient Egyptian, particulary after it became an empire. What other loanwords have been found and has any substratum been found? Also, what was the geographical limit of the language? Obviously mainly along the Nile and conquered territories in Palestine, but how far south and West have Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs been found?
This is an interesting question maybe Wally can answer.
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We all know ancient Egyptians spoke ancient Egyptian, but is there any evidence of other languages having been spoken in this area?
Goes hand in hand with questions raised in the opening notes of this topic: Egyptic: Regional lingua franca?, and take note of the Keita-Boyce piece which naturally communicates the diversity of people who came to make up the Nile Valley population, and hence, goes without saying, that different sub-language speakers were involved. Note is made of Semitic and Nilo-Saharan languages.
Apparently there were Nilo-Saharan speaking groups within the Egyptian region of the Nile Valley from the very start of the structured [including hierarchical] socio-cultural complexes there. Pictographs of people who resemble contemporary Bedawi suggests that ancestors of the Beja groups were there as well, not to mention the arrival of "Berber" speaking groups at some point in time.
On another note, Steven Brandt makes note of late Old Kingdom hieroglyphs which suggest the following groups were known, perhaps in portions of the Eastern desert of the Nile Valley:
"MD3 and BK / BKK / B3KT" - probably Cushitic speakers.
It is in this backdrop of diverse 'indigenous' folks who moved down the Nile from east African, the Saharan and east Sahelian regions, that I've come to the conclusion that it is quite likely that Egyptic became a regional lingua franca.
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