Reflections on the Historical Study of Egyptian

Abstract

Under this stodgy title, in this ruminative monologue, I wish to take on some meta-metalinguistic questions, regarding certain points of interest in Egyptian as a whole, namely its diachrony: the chronological taxonomy of the huge corpus of corpuses that is the Egyptian language. I shall try to be extra-cautious with banalities, but, as behooves a scholar of more than half-a-century’s work on the Egyptian language (always including Coptic), I shall be outspoken to a degree. I will present these reflections as short theses, summing up the central issues involved, all familiar enough. Critical assessment of received notions (I trust not pedantic quibbles) will be followed by a few particularly revealing examples