Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Levi's
Egyptian-
Italian
Dictionary.
Levi holds
Egyptian to
be a Semitic
language.
His Egyptian-
Hebrew
alphabet.
xliv Introduction.
collected by one scholar at least who was dissatisfied with the
existing Egyptian Dictionaries, and was determined to publish a
new one. This was Simeone Levi, an Italian Egyptologist, who
was well known for the very useful list of hieratic characters which
he published 1
in 1880. Under the title of Pa Uatch-ur en Metchut
/wwv'
T^L
/^l^ ^"IK^I^ A ~")^'' i- e -> The Great Sea of Words,
he began to publish a Coptic-Hebrew Hieroglyphic Vocabulary
with translations of the hieroglyphic words in Italian and numerous
quotations of Coptic and Hebrew words which he held to be
words. 8
cognate to the ancient Egyptian
The Vocabolario proper consists of six parts folio, which were
published in 1887-88 and contain 1,705 lithographed doublecolumned
pages ; the Supplement consists of two parts, and
contains 696 pages ; Part I was published in 1889, and Part II
in 1894. In a very closely written Preface, which fills 30 pages,
Signor Levi discusses the grammar and the structure of the ancient
that is
Egyptian language, which he treats as though the speech
revealed to us by the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic texts
belonged to the Semitic family of languages. It was a mistake
on his part to do this, for he assumed to be a fact that which has
never been proved ; to him Egyptian, Coptic and Hebrew are
substantially forms of one and the same language. He adopted
an unusual arrangement of the alphabet, placing h rO and h y.
after tch ~Y and t , or |, and t ^^> after sh rm, and kh (x)
and T at the end of the alphabet, etc. Thus the arrangement
and the values of the letters of his alphabet are as follows :
-
or o
(|a-M or|.
2,T- rah = n- j(h
I 1
x " n>3 '
or
sh = a?, o, |,
a - \\ u
or ua ur
r,l
s= t = n, D-
= n- /i, Uq-p.
d = i. ^ z
k - 3. S g - a-
1 Raccolta dei Segni leratici Egizi nelle diverse Epoche, con i correspondent
Geroglifici ed i loro differenti valori fonctici. Turin, 1880. 410.
2 Vocabolario Geroglifao Copto-Ebraico : opera che vinse il grande premio
reale di linguistica conferito nell' anno 1886 dalla R. Accademia dei Lincei, e
piibblicalo dopo incorraggiamcnto delta ginn!a del consiglio superiore della
islruzione piibblica.
Turin, 1887-1894.