Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Egyptian
e
ln"AfrTca
language.
Perpetual
n S r
Valley.
Borrowings
pToTo-Sernitic.
Addition of
Ixviii Introduction.
speech as it was before it passed into the peculiar form in which
we may be said to know it historically. 1
Now no one who has worked at Egyptian can possibly doubt
that there are many Semitic words in the language, or that many
of the pronouns, some of the numbers, and some of its gram-
matical forms resemble those found in the Semitic languages.
But even admitting all the similarities that Erman has claimed,
it is still impossible to me to believe that Egyptian is a Semitic
language fundamentally. There is, it is true, much in the Pyramid
Texts that recalls points and details of Semitic Grammar,
but after deducting all the triliteral roots, there still remains a
very large number of words that are not Semitic, and were never
invented by a Semitic people. These words are monosyllabic,
and were invented by one of the oldest African (or Hamitic, if
that word be preferred) peoples in the Valley of the Nile of whose
written language we have any remains. These are words used
to express fundamental relationships and feelings, and beliefs which
are peculiarly African and are foreign in every particular to
Semitic peoples. The primitive home of the people who invented
these words lay far to the south of Egypt, and all that we know
of the Predynastic Egyptians suggests that it was in the neigh-
bourhood of the Great Lakes, probably to the east of them. The
whole length of the Valley of the Nile lay then, as now, open to
peoples who dwelt to the west and east of it, and there must
always have been a mingling of immigrants with its aboriginal
inhabitants. These last borrowed many words from the new-
comers, especially from the " proto-Semitic " peoples
from the
country now called Arabia, and from the dwellers in the lands
between the Nile and the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, but they
continued to use their native words to express their own primitive
ideas, especially in respect of religious beliefs and ceremonies.
Words like tef "father," sa "^ "son," sen I "brother,"
3.- _/j a
df *^. "flesh," qes ^ "bone," tep "head," db V "heart,"
a n "hand," fetes "^[1 "self," ka (J " double," ba ^ "soul,"
A
dakh *^* "spirit," and scores of others that are used from the
earliest to the latest times, are African and have nothing to do
with the Semitic languages. When they had invented or borrowed
the art of writing, they were quick to perceive the advantage of
addinS to their pictures signs that would help the eye
1
of the
Lectures on the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages. Cambridge,
1890, pp. 33-34.