Peust, Carsten: Egyptian phonology: an introduction to the phonology of a dead language (Göttingen, 1999)

The group-writing element <nr> was not taken over into Demotic. Instead a new grapheme
<1> was created from <r> by means of a diacritic stroke.1"!2

3.11.5 The so-called lambdacism in Fayyumic

One of the most salient features of the Fayyumic dialect of Coptic is its so-called
"lambdacism": In Fayyumic \ HI appears in many, but not all cases in which the other
Coptic dialects have p /r/. Thus we have three sets of sound correspondences:^3

1) p throughout, e.g. spH, fpe "sun"; ^pCOTe, Wfmf "milk"

2) \ in Fayyumic, p in the other dialects, e.g. sp&N, <AeN "name"; sUJHpe, f«JH\l
"child"

3) \ throughout, e.g. S\\C, <XeC "tongue"; sdAe, feAH "to ascend".

Although no phonetic conditions have been proposed to date for the development of these
three subsets, I hesitate to assume that they are reflexes of three distinct original liquid
phonemes since split developments from a single etymological source can be found:

• The ancient wordpr "house" is preserved in sppO, %pp&. "king, pharaoh" (< pr-"
"great house"; II- was reinterpreted as a definite article and deglutinated), but also
in saeNe-n(up, {2S.e\e-JlO\ "roof (lit.: top of house)". The liquid belongs to class 1)
in the former compound but to class 2) in the latter.

• iri.t "to do" > ^ipe, %l (= class 2), but di.t iri "to cause to do" > sTpe-, fTpe-(stat.
pron.) (= class ±)144

• In the archaic Fayyumic Papyrus Hamb. Bil. I the verb for "to be strong" (Egyptian
drj) is written Z.W in the infinitive but A&p in the stative (see Schenke 1991: 93).
In all other Fayyumic texts this morphophonological alternation has been elimi-
nated: They have p throughout as do the other Coptic dialects.

Throughout the other Coptic dialects, variation of \ and p is uncommon, the only clear
example being ^tfl^n, '"GtOpiI "to uncover", a word of unclear etymology.
The integration of Greek liquids in borrowings into Coptic has not yet been explored
systematically. In most cases, at least as far as literary texts are concerned, X and p are
retained as in the source language.MS This seems to be true even of many Fayyumic texts.

142 See Clarysse & van der Veken (1983: i42f.). The first examples of Demotic <1> are
found around 265BC; by the 2nd century bc the use of <1> had become quite regular
although occasional writings of <r> for /!/ can still be found in the Roman period.

143 Group 2) is the most numerous. A list of words belonging to group 1) is given by
Schenke (1991: 92).

144 This is not true for all Fayyumic texts since some have T6-. The existence of another
variety TA€- is doubtful; T\6- is, however, attested as the status nominalis, cf.

DlEBNER & KaSSER (1989: 36o).

145 In sQWGW, b<\?r£dA, f2<VS"GHA "anchor", which is considered an early loan from
Greek ayicvpa (Westendorf 1965/77: 405; Fecht 1985: 93f.), Greek p is irregularly
represented as ?\.

i3o