Egypt's Place in Universal History Volume 1; The Sources and Primeval Facts of Egyptian History

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ...communications made to us by the missionary Lieder, who, in conjunction with Kruse in Cairo, is engaged in stimulating and assisting the unfortunate descendants of the Egyptians to the recovery and use of their mother tongue, we are led to hope that not only the pronunciation of the Coptic, which has survived the knowledge of the language more than a century, but that even the language itself, may still maintain a wretched existence in some retired villages of the Thebaid. Should this turn out to be the case, it would certainly be worth while to collect and study its remains. The loss of the living traditional pronunciation implies a loss of much more than what we generally call pronunciation. Lepsius in one of his letters has called attention to a circumstance, which may be of considerable importance in promoting the restoration of the Egyptian phonetic system. He remarks that the vowel forming the termination of certain polysyllabic Egyptian words, in Coptic always forms part of the sound of the first syllable. For instance, Abydos, in Coptic Ebot, is written hieroglyphically Ebt-u; Anubis, Anp-u; Month (mojvs), Mnt-u; Chons (X.wvg), Xns-u. Iom, the Coptic word for sea, is written in hieroglyphics iuma, where the Coptic pronunciation is corroborated by the Hebrew iom. Attention is here more especially due to the name of the crocodile, which in Coptic is written msuh, msooh, but in hieroglyphics sometimes msh, sometimes mshu, sometimes msuh. Lepsius calls this the only instance of a medial vowel hieroglyphically expressed in words where the Coptic pronunciation also gives it in the middle. He explains this apparent exception by supposing that msuh is a compound word, namely, m-suh out of the egg: the vowel u therefore is not...