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

6.2.a.3 The development of compounds with non-final stress: previous
interpretations

It is evident that all compounds-to-be must have once been syntagms consisting of
several independent words. When a compound was formed, stress was fixed on one of its
components, and the other components were phonetically reduced. Consider the noun ntx
"god" which turns up in Coptic as sNOTSTe /'nutg/, bHOVf in isolation but as -NT in the
compound 20-NT /'ha-nt/ and as -NA€ in Nubian TOgO-NAC. The noun t' "earth" becomes
sTO Ad/, be0 in isolation but -T(6) in pe-T and Cl-T(e). There have been several attempts
to explain this phonetic reduction.

• Sethe simply seems to assume a synchronic compound rule for Earlier Egyptian
according to which, after stress had been fixed on the first component, the non-first
components were phonetically changed. To Sethe, this is a rule specific to
compound forming which is not related to the development of individual words. It is
the opposite of the rule for type 3 compounds according to which all non-final
components of a compound were phonetically reduced. Cf.:

"In all diesen Fallen hat eine Zurtickziehung des Tones (...) und eine Neu-
vokalisierung des Wortes stattgefunden." (Sethe 1910: 25)

"Angesichts dieses Befundes wird man sich zu fragen haben, ob nicht fur die
altere agyptische Sprache (...) ein dementsprechendes Betonungs- und
Enttonungsgesetz anzunehmen ist, das dem spater im Kopt. herrschenden
entgegengesetzt war." (Sethe 1928: 192)

• Fecht (i960) proposes a historical explanation to explain the form of type 1/2
compounds. By Fecht's time, the opinion had gained ground that unstressed syllables
of Egyptian words in general experienced massive phonetic reduction on the way to
Coptic (K5° §5.8.1). So Fecht advances the suggestion that non-stressed components
of a compound were treated like non-stressed syllables of a word and the phonetic
reductions of both are essentially due to the same phonetic process. If this scenario
is accepted, the development of compounds can in turn shed light on the
development of single words in Egyptian. Fecht has devoted a whole book (Fecht
i960) to the development of type 1/2 compounds and the conclusions he draws from
them for the development of Egyptian stress rules and syllable structure in general.

"Es muB angenommen werden, daB unser bisher nur bei den «alteren
Komposita» festgestelltes Dreisilbengesetz einmal allgemeine Giiltigkeit
auch auBerhalb der Komposita besessen hat. (...) Unterschiede zwischen
Komposita und einfachen Wortern in der Schnelligkeit der Entwicklung
sind naturlich moglich (...) - eine primare, prinzipielle Verschiedenheit in
der Betonungsweise ist aber ausgeschlossen; derartiges gibt es in keiner
Sprache." (Fecht i960: § 326)

Since according to Fecht unstressed compound elements are reduced due to regular
processes of Egyptian word phonology, the compounds must have been created (e.g.

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