Egyptian Language - Classification

Classification

Egyptian belongs to the Afroasiatic language family, formerly known as Hamito-Semitic. Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afroasiatic are: fusional morphology, consonantal lexical roots, a series of emphatic consonants, a three-vowel system /a i u/, nominal feminine suffix *-at, nominal m-, adjectival *-ī, and characteristic personal verbal affixes. Of the other Afroasiatic branches, Egyptian shows its greatest affinities with Semitic, Berber, and to a lesser extent Cushitic.

In Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants */d z ð/ developed into pharyngeal <ꜥ> /ʕ/, e.g. Eg. ꜥr.t ‘portal’, Sem. *dalt ‘door’. Afroasiatic */l/ merged with Egyptian , , <ꜣ>, and in the dialect on which the written language was based, while being preserved in other Egyptian varieties. Original */k g ḳ/ palatalize to <ṯ j ḏ> in some environments and are preserved as in others.

Egyptian has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots, in contrast to the Semitic preference for triradical roots. Egyptian probably is more archaic in this regard, whereas Semitic likely underwent later regularizations converting roots into the triradical pattern.

Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is greatly different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic in general and Semitic in particular. This suggests that Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before being recorded, that the Afroasiatic phylum has as of yet been studied with an excessively Semito-centric approach, or that Afroasiatic is a typological rather than genetic grouping of languages. (The general consensus is that Afroasiatic is indeed a genetic grouping, and that Egyptian did in fact diverge greatly in its prerecorded history, although there is almost certainly a Semitic bias in Afroasiatic reconstruction.)