The Morphological and Graphical Substitution of Ältere Komposita. Etymological Archaism and Contemporaneous Perception as Opposing Principles

In recent years, a high-ranking personage Ar-ma-a- (Ar-ma-a-aš) in a Hittite cuneiform letter from the time of the late Egyptian 18th Dynasty has been identified with Haremhab, generalissimo under Tutankhamun and later king himself. Despite convincing reconstructions of historical events and courses of events, substantial linguistic difficulties, among them the representation of Egyptian ḥ as cuneiform ḫ or its ommission, have not been addressed from an Egyptological perspective. This contribution reviews previous research and analyses the onomastic and linguistic background to the result that Egyptian ḥ, if preserved in Egyptian itself, is always rendered with cuneiform ḫ, and that Ar-ma-a- (Ar-ma-a-aš) therefore cannot represent the Egyptian full name Haremhab. Instead, and following a widespread practice of Egyptian officials to use hypocoristic names in cuneiform correspondence, it is a hypocoristic name *(’)ăr-mắ derived from the full name Haremhab which Haremhab must have used prior to his ascension to the throne.

Haremhab und Ar-ma-a-aš: Einige ägyptologisch-sprachwissenschaftliche Bemerkungen

Gundacker

2023

Die Langform des koptischen Pronominalsuffixes der zweiten Person Plural

Peust

2023

“The long form of the Coptic 2nd person pl. pronominal suffix” I discuss the development and function of the long form of the 2nd person pl. pronominal suffix, -ⲧⲏⲩⲧⲛ in Sahidic. It is argued that at a certain point of time, probably during the New Kingdom, the regular suffix =T°n developed a stressed variant =T±n in some contexts in order to reduce ambiguity and to avoid certain morphological complexities. Later on, this variant was expanded by the 3rd person pl. suffix to give rise to a form -T´n=w, which became grammaticalized in Demotic most prominently for expressing the 2nd pl. pronominal direct object after verbs. A series of phonetic and analogical transformations -tênw > -têwn > -têwtn, which did not reach completion in all regions of Egypt, brought it again into more conformity with the regular short suffix =ⲧⲛ. Once the long suffix had come into existence, it slowly gained ground to the expense of the short suffix, while never replacing it entirely. The long suffix has always remained paradigmatically isolated and has no counterpart in any of the other grammatical persons.

Old Egyptian Multiword Expressions Consisting of a Head Word and ib “Heart”

Díaz Hernández

2024

This paper discusses the use of multiword expressions (MWEs) consisting of the noun ib “heart” with a metonymic or figurative meaning in Old Egyptian. It has the following parts: (§ 1) a theoretical approach, which provides a definition of “multiword expression” according to studies on Natural Language Processing and a typology of MWEs; (§ 2) an explanation of the semantic uses of ib in Old Egyptian; (§ 3) a syntactic and semantic analysis of 65 Old Egyptian MWEs containing the word ib and an annotation of 115 instances (4–118); and (§ 4) a typology of MWEs containing the word ib and a formulation of the rules involved in their formation.