Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 12:07:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Graham <geoffrey.graham@yale.edu>
Subject: Nouns, Gender, & Adjectives

Hi,

I have a new lesson here, and there is an accompanying section for it out on the web too. All the examples are written in hieroglyphs out there so you can see them and compare with this message. Then there is a brief exercise which accompanies this lesson. The idea is to start back on square one and learn about nouns and adjectives in Egyptian.

NOUNS:
A noun is a person, place, or thing. It is one of the basic building blocks in the grammar of any language. In English we have nouns in the singular and the plural. In other languages there are more options. For instance, in French, German, Arabic, and many other languages, nouns have gender. This means that the person, place, or thing is treated as masculine or feminine, or neuter. English does not have genders associated with nouns, but Egyptian did.

Gender can be associated with the real gender of a living being. The words for "man", "boy", "father", and "rooster" might all be masculine because the objects represented by these words are naturally male... they have the male genital organs and not female ones. Similarly the corresponding words, "woman", "girl", "mother", and "hen" might all be feminine because these words represent inherently female beings with female genitalia.

However, in most languages that have gender as a grammatical feature, all words have some gender, even if they are not inherently male or female by their nature. This will be easy for speakers of German, French, and various other languages to understand, because their languages have always had words of different genders. German has three genders, and French has two Genders, but English has NO genders. English speakers are often at a loss to understand why a noun should be considered masculine or feminine because the English language does not make any grammatical distinctions except for in very few words like the pronouns: "he, she, it", etc.

In Egyptian there were only two genders: masculine and feminine. The masculine was the unmarked form, while the feminine had a feminine suffix ending marking it as such. Some masculine words in Egyptian can be converted to their feminine equivalents by simply adding this suffix.

I. Examples: (the feminine suffix ending is .t)

nTr "god"		nTr.t "goddess"
nb "lord"		nb.t "lady"
zj "man"		zj.t "woman"
z3 "son"		z3.t "daughter"
sn "brother"		sn.t "sister"
j3d.y "boy"		j3d.y.t "girl"
jH "ox"			jH.t "cow"

There are, however, many more masculine and feminine words in Egyptian that derive from distinct roots. Note also that some masculine words can end in /t/. These are /t/s which are part of the root of the word, and not a suffix ending. This is why, in my transliteration, I am always careful to point off a suffix /t/ with a period (.t).

II. Examples:
jt "father"		mw.t "mother"
hj "husband"		Hm.t "wife" 
pr "house"		Hw.t "mansion"
xt "tree"		jx.t "thing/possession" 
nbw "gold"		m-fk3.t "turquoise" 
Sfdw "scroll"		m-D3j.t "book" 
X3r "sack"		Tj.t "table"

As you can see, some of the above words are obviously male or female, such as: "father", "mother", "husband", and "wife", but others are not obviously so. There is nothing inherently masculine about "gold" or feminine about "turquoise". The only way to learn the masculine from the feminine is to memorize them. Fortunately this is very easy in Egyptian because feminine nouns almost ALWAYS have their feminine suffix ending .t on them. The only areas for possible confusion will be masculine words which also end in /t/, such as the words for "father" and "tree" above.

Now, every noun also has number in Egyptian. In English we have two numbers: singular and plural. In Egyptian they had three: singular, dual, and plural. Dual means that there is a pair of something, two of them. In Old Egyptian the dual was much more important than it was in Middle Egyptian, and separate pronoun endings existed for each dual form. By the time of Middle Egyptian the dual was already becoming slightly less frequent, so that nouns could be made into the dual, but the adjectives which modified them and the verbs for which they were the subjects, as well as the pronouns which referred to them did not have to agree with them and be dual anymore. They would simply use the plural forms with dual nouns in Middle Egyptian.

In both feminine and masculine nouns, the singular was unmarked. This means that there was no special written cue telling you that a noun was singular. The noun written alone is assumed to be singular.

The dual and plural were marked. This means that each form, whether masculine or feminine, had morphemes (changeable grammatical features) which showed whether it was dual or plural.

The masculine nouns had an ending .wy for the dual, and an ending .w for the plural.

III. Examples of number on masculine nouns:
pr "house"	pr.wy "two houses"	pr.w "houses" 
jt "father"	jt.wy "two fathers"	jt.w "fathers" 
nTr "god"	nTr.wy "two gods"	nTr.w "gods"

The feminine nouns had an ending .ty for the dual, and an ending .w.t for the plural.

IV. Examples of number on feminine nouns: 
Hw.t "mansion"	Hw.ty "two mansions"	Hw.w.t "mansions" 
mw.t "mother"	mw.ty "two mothers"	Mw.w.t "mothers" 
nTr.t "goddess"	nTr.ty "two goddesses"	nTr.w.t "goddesses"

Possession of Nouns:
Any noun can have a personal pronoun suffix affixed to it. This indicates possession by the person whose suffix pronoun is used.

V. Examples: mw.t=j "my mother" 
mw.t=k "your (m.) mother" 
mw.t=T "your (f.) mother"
mw.t=f "his mother" 
mw.t=s "her mother" 
mw.t=n "our mother" 
mw.t=Tn "your (pl.) mother" 
mw.t=sn "their mother"

Sometimes it happens that a singular noun has a plural suffix on it, and seems odd to English. In these cases, it is often correct to translate the noun as plural:

Example: jb=sn literally "their heart" but actually translatable as "their hearts".

Nouns Possessing Nouns:
There are several ways to express possession in Egyptian. One of them is called the "direct genitive". This is a construction wherein one noun is followed by another noun. The first noun is the possessed thing and the second noun is the possessor of the first. The possessor is also called the "regens" and the possessed is called the "rectum".

VI. Examples: 
sn j3d.y "brother of a boy" 
pr Hm.t=f "house of his wife" 
jx.t hj=s "possessions of her husband" 
nb.t pr "lady of a house" (house-mistress) 
X3r nbw "sack of gold" 
m-D3j.t z3=sn "book of their son"

ADJECTIVES:
An adjective is a word that characterizes a noun. It "modifies" it. I can tell you that I have a house. But I can modify your concept of my house by specifying more about it with adjectives. "I have a big house." Now, you know that my house is big. It is not just a house, but now it is a "big house". Most languages have adjectives, and those that do not still have ways of making adjectival expressions in other ways. In Egyptian the category of adjective was not as static as it is in a language like English. In Egyptian certain words could move from the category of verb to noun to adjective rather easily.

(In Old and Middle Egyptian what we might call adjectives were something like verbs and they became adjectives as participles of verbs. However, increasingly, in Late Egyptian, Demotic, and totally in Coptic these words were all becoming nouns and the category of "adjective" disappeared entirely, and modifications of nouns were carried out by juxtaposition of nouns with a preposition between them.)

Suffice it to say that every Middle Egyptian adjective was also an adjectival verb.

VII. Examples:
nfr "good/become good" 
bjn "bad/become bad" 
wr "great/become great" 
nDs "small/become small" 
dSr "red/redden" 
qnj "yellow/become yellow" 
w3D "green/flourish/become green" 
jrtyw "blue/become blue" 
Tms "purple/become purple" 
km "black/become black"
HD "white/brighten" 
hrw "happy/become content" 
Dwj "sad/become sad" 
wsx "wide/become wide" 
Sm` "narrow/become narrow"
jz "light/become light" 
dns "heavy/become heavy"

These verbs were not always conjugated the same way as any other verb, however. So, "good" was not just the adjective "good"... it was also the verb "become good". For the most part however, these adjectives were only used initially with a noun or a dependent pronoun for their subjects. We call this the nfr sw construction.

VIII. Examples: 
nfr wj "I am good" 
nfr Tw "you (m.) are good" 
nfr Tn "you (f.) are good" 
nfr sw "he is good"
nfr sy "she is good" 
nfr st "it is good" 
nfr n "we are good" 
nfr Tn "you (pl.) are good" 
nfr sn "they are good"
nfr st "they (inanimate) are good"

The same can be done with nouns:

IX. Examples: 
nfr zj "the man is good" 
nfr zj.t "the woman is good" 
nfr zj.wy "the two men are good" 
nfr zj.ty "the two women are good" 
nfr zj.w "the men are good" 
nfr zj.w.t "the women are good"

Notice that the adjective remains the same throughout the paradigm. It is only the subjects which vary.

On the other hand, when an adjective modifies a noun, and "being/becoming" that adjective is not the main event in a sentence, then the adjective has to agree in gender and number with the noun it modifies. This is accomplished by the addition of similar affixes to the ones we just learned about for nouns: feminine .t, masculine dual .wy, masculine plural w, feminine dual .ty, and feminine plural .w.t.

X. Examples: 
z3.w nfr.w  "good sons" 
jH wr "great ox"
mw.t nfr.t "good mother" 
z3.ty nfr.ty "two good daughters"
etc...

Yours, Geoff Graham
sokar@minerva.cis.yale.edu