埃及语
维基百科，自由的百科全书
現存有關古埃及語文的記錄最早可追溯至公元前26世纪。古埃及語屬亞非語系，跟含語族(主要是北非諸語)和閃語族(例如：希伯來語及阿拉伯語)有很密切的關係。古埃及語在古埃及帝國一直通用，直至古埃及滅亡後約二百年時間，即約公元2世紀時消亡，結束其長達2800年的生命，是現存文字當中已知通行最長久的語言文字。
由於伊斯蘭教興起之後，伊斯蘭文化對埃及地區的影響日漸加深，古埃及語及其變體科普特语亦漸漸被人遺忘。加上18世纪西方傳教士在錯誤理解聖經之下，認為當時保存的科普特及古埃及文化乃邪惡的文化活動而把他們一把火燒光了，使這些文化傳承中斷了。現時我們對古埃及文化的認識，都是來自後世學者的辛勤研究。
目录 |
[编辑] 語言的發展
没有一種語言能夠在沒有遭受變革的情況下維持幾千年。這些改變可以是外力所帶來的，也可以是為了使語言更簡化或其它原因所造成。埃及語也不例外。而學者們將埃及語分成五大類：
- 古埃及語（Old Egyptian, 西元前2600年至前2000年）
- 中古埃及語（Middle Egyptian, 西元前2000年至前1300年）
- 新埃及語（Late Egyptian, 西元前1300年至前700年）
- 世俗體（Demotic, 西元前第7世紀至西元5世紀）
- 科普特語（Coptic, 西元第3世紀至14世紀）
最早的埃及文溯源於前3000年。
古埃及語從公元前2600年開始，通行了約500多年。中古埃及語由公元前2100年起，延續了500多年，新埃及語開始出現。世俗體在公元前650年開始出現，一直延續至西元5世紀還有人使用。科普特語其實是埃及語的 Bohraic 方言，由於一直用於埃及基督教會內，所以得以一直保存。直到西元14世紀，科普特語還在社會中通行，但之後就變成了一種只有宗教儀式使用的死語言。
古埃及語、中古埃及語及新埃及語都以聖書體書寫。世俗體則以一種類似現代阿拉伯文的文字書寫，但兩者並無關係。
科普特語的書面形式是用希臘文加上一些符號來補充希臘語中没有的一些輔音。
[编辑] 埃及文字
[编辑] 概述
當說到埃及文的書寫時，大多數人都會想到象形文字。一個象形文字是一個實體的圖案，然而，象形文字卻擁有三種功能：壹、代表其圖形內容；貳、代表一種與之相關的概念；參、代表其所表之發音。例如：一個「太陽」的圖形⊙，可以來代表「太陽」本身，亦可以代表「太陽光」或是「熱」（因為太陽是個發光體，而且也提供熱），亦或者可以代表其發音「r3」。 但是到了更後期的埃及語（中晚期）則大部分剩下第三種功能，到後來的世俗體和柯普特語則幾乎完全廢除了象形文字。
It is surmised that primitive people's first attempt at writing was to use the first method. Naturally, people are not able to write about objects or matters not able to be represented so the original hieroglyphs were extended to the second usage. Finally, people developed and practiced the idea of using the hieroglyphs not as a representation of what they actually were, but instead as a representation of sound.
The writing varied throughout the five stages of Egyptian. Old Egyptian uses a mixture of hieroglyphs as concrete representations and as symbols for sounds. Middle Egyptian uses the same mixture, although less concrete representations existed. Late Egyptian still used Middle Egyptian and much like English the spellings often did not change though the pronunciation did. Demotic uses a script called Demotic script and does not use any hieroglyphs at all. Finally, Coptic uses a modified version of the Greek alphabet. Nubian uses a similar alphabet, and some letters in the Cyrillic alphabet may come from Coptic.
[编辑] 語言
埃及语是典型的亞非語系的語言。大部分的埃及語詞根是由三個輔音组成，最小的詞根只有兩個輔音（例如：/r?\/ “月亮”， "?\" 代表濁咽喉擦音），最大的有五個（例如： /sxdxd/ “顛倒”）。 Vowels and other consonants were then added to this root in order to derive words, in the same way as Arabic and other Afro-Asiatic languages do today. However, we do not know what these vowels would have been, since like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Egyptian does not write vowels; hence "ankh" could represent either "life", "to live" or "living". In transcription, "a", "i" and "u" all represent consonants; for example, the name Tutankhamen was written in Egyptian "twt 'nkh ymn" (the apostrophe represents a glottal stop). Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values in order to fake a pronunciation. Unfortunately, this convention has often been mistaken for actual pronunciation.
Egyptian's basic word order is Verb Subject Object; where we would write "the man opens the door", Egyptians would say "opens the man the door". The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words /p?\/, /t?\/ and /n?\/ for this purpose. Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to French and Irish Gaelic; it also uses three grammatical numbers: like most other Afro-Asiatic languages, it contrasts singular, dual and plural forms. When saying something like "the man is red", the word "red" (dSrt in Egyptian) acts as a predicative verb.
Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonants, in a distribution rather similar to that of Arabic.
[编辑] Hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs from the
Black Schist sarcophagus of Ankhnesneferibre.
Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, about 530BC, Thebes.
The British Museum, London, UK.
[编辑] About the Hieroglyphs
According to scholars, one needs to learn approximately 600 separate hieroglyphs to understand any given Egyptian text. Although this sounds like a large amount, it is made easier in that a smaller subset of these hieroglyphs represent the sounds of Ancient Egyptian. Provided you can remember the words the context will normally indicate the meaning of a hieroglyph.
Hieroglyphs were generally etched into wood or carved into stone. The greatest surviving hieroglyphs are religious texts made for the benefit of the body's immortal Ka. A number of other examples exist showing a shorter, more flowing style of hieroglyph. These are called "cursive" hieroglyphs and were generally used in day-to-day correspondence. Less examples of these exist because they were written with reed brushes on papyrus as opposed to stone monuments and tombs.
It is unknown how the hieroglyphs were created. They seem to just suddenly appear out of nowhere. Scholars support two theories for this: the first is that some creative genius, or group of geniuses, simply invented the system and managed to get the support to implement it. The second theory is that we simply do not have copies of the hieroglyphs in their development stage because the materials used simply could not last the 3 or more millennia for us to view them.
[编辑] Hieroglyphic Usage During the Five Stages of the Egyptian Language
Records show that hieroglyphic writing underwent the most significant changes during the Old Egyptian period. During the Middle Egyptian era, hieroglyphic stabilises and these hieroglyphs remain the same up until the disappearance of hieroglyphic in 1AD. Therefore, one only needs to learn Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic to understand the vast majority of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts.
Hieroglyphic was used for all forms of written communication during the Old and Middle Egyptian eras. However, hieroglyphic was reserved for important religious texts during the Demotic era and was rarely found during the Coptic stage of Egyptian. Although difficult to ascertain, it appears that the memory of how to read hieroglyphic was almost forgotten by 1AD.
[编辑] 象形文之句法
正如前述，大部分的古埃及象形文字在書文中並不代表其圖形內容。他們大多數都是表音，或者是「限定詞」（determinatives）。古埃及象形文可以以下列方式書寫：
- 橫向書寫：左至右
- 橫向書寫：右至左
- 垂直書寫：（圖像朝左）左至右
- 垂直書寫：（圖像朝右）右至左
Written, cursive hieroglyphic is generally written in columns, top-to-bottom or horizontally, right-to-left. In the latter stages of hieroglyphic cursive the only surviving examples are written horizontally, right-to-left; vertical hieroglyphic should be read from top-to-bottom.
It is generally an easy task to determine which way to read the hieroglyphs even if you are unable to understand their meaning. Hieroglyphs with a definite front and back (for example, a person) will generally:
- face the beginning of the sentence
- face the same direction as any person or large object in a picture they describe
As an example, if a tableau contains a picture of a man seated and facing right, then all the hieroglyphs with a definite front and back would face to the right as well. The actual hieroglyphs would be read from right-to-left because these images almost always face the beginning of the sentence.
Hieroglyphic texts that do not display this behaviour are said to be in retrograde. Once one understands hieroglyphic it is easy to determine if one is examining a retrograde text because it will simply make no sense at all!
As an aid to reading, and perhaps to the Ancient Egyptian's sense of aesthetics, hieroglyphs were also packed together into neat patterns. In general, two or more short or thin (depending on which direction one was writing the hieroglyphs) would be written in the same block as each other. Occasionally, a tall or wide symbol would be made smaller and placed with another short or thin hieroglyph.
Finally, hieroglyphic had no standard punctuation. Religious texts generally have no punctuation at all, whilst texts from the latter part of the Ancient Egyptian language have full stops between important lines of thought.
[编辑] 古埃及象形文如何被譯釋？
Until recently, given the time span we are talking about, the decipherment of hieroglyphic was hampered because those attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for son, a goose, was chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same sound as the word for son. A further impediment was the lack of complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in close proximity to another translation.
Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic, developed the notion that this last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphic he could not prove this notion. However, in 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars finally had an example of hieroglyphic, demotic and Ancient Greek that they were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In hieroglyphic, the name of the King or Pharaoh and God's names are often placed within a circle called a cartouche. 一位名叫讓·弗朗索瓦·商博良的年輕法國學者，論證了克麗奧帕特拉（即埃及豔后）這個名字是怎樣以象形文字書寫的。 此外， 他還利用自己對科普特語的深厚造詣，作出了這樣的推測：很大一部分表示日常事物的象形符號都可以用科普特語讀出來。 Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly confirmed 商博良's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other grammatical parts.
[编辑] 現今資源
若您對古埃及語甚感興趣，您仍可繼續學習。例如，在倫敦的牛津大學及一些其他的地方仍有在教授古埃及語。由於許多資料不僅僅是以英文寫成，尚有以法文或德文等撰寫的資料，所以，您若會任何一個上述的語言，那將會很有用。 在電影「星際奇兵」（Stargate）片中，一名語言學家被委派發展一種人造語言來模擬單獨於另一星球生活過千年的古埃及人的口音。 由於埃及文化是影響西方文明的文化之一，有些源於埃及的字彙仍保留於英文中。更確切地說，這些與古埃及相關的字彙，往往是以希臘文的形式保留於英文中。
以下一書詳述中古埃及語之文法：
Allen, J. P. 2000. Middle Egyptian - An Introduction to the Language and Culture of the Hieroglyphs. First Edition. Cambridge University Press. United Kingdom.
[编辑] 線上資源
- （中文） 學習象形文字
- （英文） Discovering Writing
- （英文） Hieroglyphs Lessons
- （英文） Jim Loy's Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Egyptology Page
- （英文） Reading Hieroglyphs - The First Steps
- （日文） 學習古埃及語
- （日文） Egyptian Hieroglyph Room
- （日文） Coptic Circle
- （法文） Hieroglyphes
- （法文） 古埃及語文法（商博良著）
- 多語網站古埃及語
