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Egypt and Arabic
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Message 1.Β
Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Thursday, 3rd February 2011
Was the language of Ancient Egypt related to modern day Arabic or the Coptic language of Coptic Christians? So Shen did Arabic become the dominant language? At the time of the Muslim conquest? So were there not a significant Arab population before then? When I visited Egypt to see the pyramids 5 years ago, the Arabs there said the pharoshs were their ancestors so how come theydont share the language? Also some of the statues had African /Sudanese/ ethiopian features
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Message 2
Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Thursday, 3rd February 2011
If I may add to My own post, Egypt has always been home of intellectuals and academics in the Arab world, no doubt drawing on it's ancient past and the great library in Alexandra. Since it has had many conquests and invasions since the home of the pharoahs, each subsequent invading/settlers claim the ancients has their own as well
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Message 3
Posted by Mr_Edwards (U3815709) on Friday, 4th February 2011
Coptic is a liturgical language based on Ancient Egyptian and used by the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church. The word "coptic" derives from a hellenicised version of the Coptic word for "Egypt".
Coptic Christians tend to speak Amharic or Arabic (or sometimes English) depending on whether they are Egyptian, Sudanese or Ethiopian. This was a gradual change over the centuries and "Coptic-Egyptian" was still a living language at least as late as the seventeenth century albeit heavily influenced by Greek and Arabic.
Egyptian was an Afrasian (or Afro-asiatic) language and thus related to Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Babylonian but not itself Semitic. Certainly many Egyptians are descendants of people who were there long before Islam. -
Message 4
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Tuesday, 8th February 2011
You might find the passages on Coptic etc of interest here -
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Message 5
Posted by Mr_Edwards (U3815709) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
Turkish has a similar story. The oldest inscriptions in Turkish are in the Scandinavian "Runic" script then in use in Russia (this was before Cyril and Methodius invented the Cyrillic script). There are a few in the Greek alphabet, but quickly after contact with Islam, Turkish began to be written in classical Arabic Script, until the twentieth century when Kemil Attaturk decreed that Turkish should henceforth be written using Roman script (although some Turkic languages such as Bashkir began to use the Cyrillic script).
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the decision of which script to use in various languages of the former Soviet Central Asia became highly politicised. Arabic script favoured Iran, Roman Script favoured Turkey, Cyrillic favoured Russia (and of course local scripts such as Georgian also sent out a political message. -
Message 6
Posted by Stoggler (U14387762) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
Note spelling - Kemal AtatΓΌrk
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the decision of which script to use in various languages of the former Soviet Central Asia became highly politicised. Arabic script favoured Iran, Roman Script favoured Turkey, Cyrillic favoured Russia (and of course local scripts such as Georgian also sent out a political message.Β
Just to add to that, Azeri adopted a revised Latin alphabet after having used the Cyrillic alphabet since 1938. Prior to that, a Latin alphabet was used in North Azeri and a Perso-Arabic one prior to that.
The new Latin alphabet was inspired by Turkish, although it has one letter not used in Turkish or other national languages (it is in fact the letter used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the schwa sound).
Like Georgian, Armenian has its own alphabet (been in use since the 5th century). -
Message 7
Posted by Stoggler (U14387762) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
Oops, forgot to add that the new Latin-based Azeri alphabet was adopted in 1991, not long after independence.
Azeri (or Azerbaijani) is a Turkic language, closely related to Turkish (hence their desire of adopting an alphabet similar to Turkish) -
Message 8
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the French guy who deciphered the Rosetta Stone use the Coptic language as his base language?
The understanding was that the language of the Copts was perceived, even at that time, to be close to the language spoken by the ancient Egyptians.... -
Message 9
Posted by Mr_Edwards (U3815709) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
It seems he began using Greek and learned Coptic as he was translating the Egyptian portion.
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Message 10
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Wednesday, 9th February 2011
Champollion worked from the Greek text, certainly, but had already studied Coptic before starting work on the stone (or, more accurately, on the French transcription of the stone).
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