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

Egyptian language. I am unable to define a functional difference between these alterna-
tive compound formations. It is possible that still unexplored features of the internal
syntactic or semantic structure of the compound played a role. Vycichl (1990: 252)
suspects that dialectal divergences were responsible.

Some examples of type 1/2 compounds which I consider comparatively certain are cited
below. They are arranged by the date at which they are first attested in combination. This
does not, of course, imply that the process of compounding actually took place at the
indicated time since a) the compound may have been used earlier than its first known
occurrence, and b) the fact that the elements occurred in syntagmatic combination does
not presuppose that they already formed a compound at the time in question.

6.s

Examples

com-
pound
type

Coptic or Greek
transcription

Egyptian

references

ATTESTED FROM THE Old KlNGDOM ON

1 or 2

yexov*45

w'd-WT "sea", lit. "(the) large
blue"

Fecht (i960: 10-12)

2

=€^012 "shepherd"

mr-ih.w, lit. "overseer (of)
cattle"

Fecht (i960: 38)34&

1 or 2

sAfiqe, bJ\enm "Memphis
(city)"

mn-nfr (originally name of
the pyramid of Pepi I, a king
of the late Old Kingdom;
later name of the adjacent
city of Memphis)

Fecht (i960: 43f.)

2

s-bHl* "who?"347

in~m (focalizing particle +
interrogative pronoun)

Fecht (i960: 95)

2

snp&rtm "archive",
M>P&NHJ

pr-'nh, lit. "house (of) life(?)"

Osing (1976a: note
1122 on p. 836f.)348

345 Final d (or ou) reflects /w/ of wt, whereas y reflects /w/ of w>i. We have to read
either /'wetu/ or /wo'tDw/ (or similarly).

346 Vycichl (1983: 42 and 1990: 248) rejects this example, to my mind not convincingly.

347 The first syllable was lost irregularly in the New Kingdom. The focalizer in was re-
duced to n at the same time. This seems to indicate that in-m was still morphologi-
cally analyzable at that time (which is certainly no longer the case in Coptic).

348 For Old Kingdom attestations oipr-'nh and for the general meaning of this term see
Gardiner (1938: 160). The Bohairic form only occurs in the compound ''C-^p&.NUJ
"dream interpreter" where the etymology of the first element is disputed. There is
also doubt about the meaning and the grammatical form of the element cnh. On these
questions see Lucchesi (1975) and Vycichl (1983: i94f.). Osing convincingly argues
that the stressed vowel -\- must be a part of pr no matter which form cnh may be
(stressed s'b&. before M is impossible morpheme-internally, E5° § 5.10).

278