Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Young's
Demotic
Dictionary.
Alphabetic
arrangement
of the
Dictionary.
Vlll Introduction.
The great value and importance of Young's application of the
phonetic principle to Egyptian hieroglyphs has been summed up
with characteristic French terseness and
the distinguished Egyptologist, who wrote,
accuracy by Chabas,
" Cette idee fut, dans
la realite, le FIAT LUX de la science." 1
Curiously enough Young did not follow up his discovery by
a continued application of his phonetic principle to Egyptian
inscriptions other than those on the Rosetta Stone, but seems to
have been content to leave its further application and development
to Champollion le Jeune. 2 And for some reason he made no attempt
to add to the Egyptian Vocabulary containing 218 words which he
published in his article EGYPT in the Encyclopedia Britannica,
or if he did. his additions were never printed. On the other hand,
he devoted himself to the preparation of a Demotic Dictionary and
this work occupied the last ten years of his life. The " Advertisement
" is of considerable interest, for it shows that it was only his
inability to decide upon the system of arrangement that ought to
be employed in an Egyptian Dictionary, that prevented him from
publishing the work during his lifetime. His difficulty is described
by
him thus :
" From the mixed nature of the characters employed in the
written language or rather languages of the Egyptians, it is diffi-
cult to determine what would be the best arrangement for a
dictionary, even if they were all perfectly clear in their forms,
and perfectly well understood :
at
present, however, so many of
them remain unknown, and those which are better known assume
so diversified an appearance, that the original difficulty is greatly
increased. Every methodical arrangement, however arbitrary,
has the advantage of bringing together such words as nearly
resemble each other : and
it appears most likely to be subservient
to the purposes of future investigation, to employ an imitation
of an alphabetical order, or an artificial alphabet, founded upon
the resemblance of the characters to those of which the phonetic
value was clearly and correctly determined by the late Mr.
Akerblad; and to arrange the words that are to be interpreted
according to their places in this artificial order ; choosing, however,
in each instance, not always the first character that enters into
the composition of the word, but that which appears to be
the most radical, or the most essential in its signification, or
1
Inscription de Rosette, p. 5.
B See Advertisement to Dr. Young's Egyptian Dictionary printed in Rudiments
of an Egyptian Dictionary, which formed an Appendix to Tattam's Coptic Grammar.
London, 1830, 8vo, and was reprinted by Leitch, op. cit., p. 472 ff.