Egyptian Root Lexicon

Although the lexicography of the Egyptian language has been under way since nearly two hundred years, this activity has never yielded an inventory of the roots of the language. The roots, abstract elements from which the words or lexemes are derived, differ often from the latter, thus appearing on different places in the alphabetic order of the lexicon: Some stems of Egyptian verbs are derived from their roots by the addition of a prefix, like s-, n-, or m-, and/or by reduplication of the root, as snsn to join, to associate with, as compared with sn, with a similar meaning. The identification of the roots is by no means always an easy task; in many cases it takes both philological and linguistic methods to determine or discern them. Whereas it is important to describe and systematize the mechanics of derivation, further to analyse historical changes of phonetics and writing conventions, the study of the semantics, the development of meaning, is of equal importance. The corpus of the Egyptian language is in constant change. New items may come up whenever a new text is published. With every philological research new meanings and functions or new spellings of existing items may surface. A great collection of lexemes is the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae of the Acadamy of Science in Berlin, which presents online all the items of the big Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (main volumes accomplished 1931) and all the numerous slips produced for it at that time by an international team of experts of Egyptian texts, but it also keeps track of all later development. There are, however, further lexicographical devices, including the dictionaries of R. Hannig (Old and Middle Kingdoms), of L. Lesko (Late Egyptian), of P. Wilson (Ptolemaic texts), and others. To these should be added the demotic and Coptic dictionaries, for tracing the roots and lexemes into the latest stages of the language. The project Egyptian Root Lexicon shall be executed by the applicant and two younger colleagues. They will be working in the Egyptological Institute of the University of Vienna. The envisaged duration of the project will be 24 months. The resulting lexicon is to be published both as a book and online, in order to facilitate future updating.

The root of a word is its basic form; it is its core, deprived of all lexical and grammatical additions, such as prefixes or suffixes; it is the morphologically indivisible part of a word. Knowing the root is important for elaborating the entire family of a word, that is the totality of all words that are genetically related. In Egyptian language studies there is a total lack in respect to this, although the vocabulary of this language has been researched for some two hundred years: there is still no list of the roots of the Egyptian language, although fortunately the lexicon is relatively well researched and well documented - not in printed dictionaries, then in electronic form. A peculiarity of Egyptian is that it is basically written without specifying the vowels - as otherwise only Ugaritic in ancient Syria, preserved on clay tablets, and in the Ancient South Arabian idioms. As the etymological research in the field of Afro-Asiatic is not sufficiently advanced, the roots dealt with in this lexicon are not established on etymological grounds. Rather, the roots were determined by us on the basis of attested lexemes of obvious phonetic and semantic resemblance. This can only be a temporary, tentative result. One difficulty in studying Egyptian is that it is obviously inconsistent in terms of phonetics: Egyptian appears to be the result of a mixture of dialects, if not languages. This is certainly a handicap for determining the roots. The alphabet of Semitic languages (Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic / Syriac, Arabic) is structured in such a way that the noting of vowels is developed only secondarily, as may be used for certain contexts. One part of the results of the project will be published in the form of an Egyptian Root Lexicon. It is also planned to make the complete set of data online accessible, a format which offers greater query options.