Yes, Coptic is indeed a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. There is
reason to believe that the language has changed considerably since
then. We now have only the consonants, and apparently no vowels.
Maybe someone has re-created a pronunciation guide for this ancient
language. In any case, in Historical Linguistics there is a certain
amount of guesswork. How would we be able to determine how accurate it
would be?
John
--- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, Christophe <xof@...>
wrote:
>
>
> On 12 Apr 2006, at 10:56, tschibasch wrote:
> > An interesting language that has truly died off is Ancient Egyptian.
> > We have an idea how it sounded, since we have figured out the
> > consonants and consonantal clusters. But the vowels are unknown. So
> > our best efforts to reproduce it would have to be off.
>
> Isn't Coptic a linear descendant of Ancient Egyptian, though? Of
> course, the vowels could have shifted all over the place, but doesn't
> that give us a clue as to what they might have been?
>
Received on 2006-04-12 13:57:48
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: 2020-02-04 07:16:24 UTC