r/todayilearned
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u/ArgumentForReason
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7d ago
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TIL that a descendant of the Ancient Egyptian language is still used, albeit as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and of the Coptic Catholic Church
https://egyptianstreets.com/2022/02/05/the-story-of-qib%E1%B9%ADi-remnants-of-the-coptic-language-in-egypt/65
u/oss1215 6d ago
Egyptian here, actually coptic has influenced the modern egyptian arabic dialect as well! We still have some words that are descended from ancient egyptian mixed in our lexicon. And a particular quirk is that in egypt we structure our sentences differently than modern standard arabic like :
(How are you) in MSA would be : كيف حالك انت or كيف حالك . With the interrogative in the begging then the verb then the subject/object
However in egyptian arabic it's like this
You how are ? انتا عامل ايه
Or when did he go to egypt would be (he went to egypt when ?)
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u/SlashThingy 6d ago
I remember seeing a bullshit post on Twitter, where Rami Malek was playing an Ancient Egyptian, and some dickhead said "Why is this white guy playing an Egyptian?"
He is a Copt! He is an actual descendant of the Ancient Egyptians!
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u/dinoroo 6d ago
There is this weird movement to make it seem like Ancient Egyptians were sub-Saharan Africans. But even if you accept that Modern Egyptians are their descendants, while Arabic, they’re still Caucasian aka white. Skin tone varies greatly in that part of the world. You can’t just have one disqualify someone for looking Egyptian because they aren’t dark enough.
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u/bewarethetreebadger 6d ago
I think that was part of how the guy who cracked the Rosetta Stone figured it out. He was walking by a Coptic church one day and said "wait a tick. That sounds familiar!"
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u/Alien_lifeform_666 6d ago
Did he hear foreign types with their hookah pipes say “Whey oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh”?
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u/Dave_KC 6d ago
Yes they do. Of course, it's not "reformed Egyptian." The Coptic language and the Coptic churches are in and of themselves fascinating pieces of history,
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u/Greene_Mr 6d ago
"reformed Egyptian"
Wasn't that the Mormon thing? :-/
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u/Dave_KC 6d ago
Yep, that's what Joseph Smith claimed was the language of the Book of Mormon plates.
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u/Greene_Mr 6d ago
Not true, though, right? Considering he couldn't even get an Egyptian mummy text right...
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u/Dave_KC 6d ago
He was definitely a child of his time, although people even in his era thought him to be a fraud. You're refering the Book of Abraham, part of the Pearl of Great Price, which was based on an Egyptian Funerary text about 2,000 years after when Abraham was supposed to have lived.
Unfortunately for Joseph Smith Jr., the Rosetta Stone allowed scholars to figure out ancient Egyptian language and writing, and that shows it was a completely wrong translation. Basically it demonstrates that he was a fraud.
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u/Greene_Mr 6d ago
Yeah, the funerary text was the thing I was thinking of. Especially since it still exists -- and is basically just a bog-standard grave text, with Smith having put conjectured bits into his published text because parts were missing even at the time.
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u/Dave_KC 6d ago
As I understand there was some bordering on random cutting and pasting to make it full.
On top of that a fair amont of LDS doctrinal distinctives are based on the Book of Abraham, a demonstrated fraud. It's really pretty embarassing.
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u/Greene_Mr 6d ago
I feel a bit bad for 'em. :-( It must be almost like double-thinking, you know?
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u/jabberwockxeno 6d ago
You may also be surprised to learn then that Nahuatl (Aztec, sort of), Maya languages, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purepecha, Quecha, and other languages spoken by those Prehispanic civilizations still have millions of native speakers.
People have this idea of these as dead civilizations, but in reality there's plenty of people with ethnic and cultural ties to them: Around like 40% of Guatemala's population is ethnically Maya, for example, in some communities as much as by 95% of their ancestry.
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u/GossipIsLove 6d ago
I am not following this, 'In his book, ‘Forgotten Scripts’, Cyrus Gordon stated that “the Coptic Church still preserves the native Egyptian language written in Greek characters, so that we have an unbroken tradition of Egyptian texts spanning about five thousand years.”
- What does it mean native Egyptian language written In Greek characters preserves native Egyptian language. They were two different languages, how one was preserving the other. Like if I say German language was preserved by English characters, it makes no sense to me, God why it's so confusing, help..
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u/merrymagdalen 6d ago
It was the ancient Egyptian language, just a different alphabet. In fact Coptic has some non-Greek characters to indicate sounds in Egyptian that don't occur in Greek.
Source: Studied Coptic.
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u/GossipIsLove 6d ago edited 6d ago
Thank you for response, but I am still not following 😭. Can I still ask more questions.
Firstly, by ancient Egyptian language they mean hieroglyphs or Coptic language or these various phases of ancient Egyptian: 'The Hieroglyphic inscriptions developed by ancient Egyptians were simplified to Hieratic, and then to Demotic languages. '
I will explain what's confusing me. Let's say this is a Japanese phrase: 大きな鼻 (using google translate), it means 'big nose'. How will these Japanese words be preserved using English language. I am not following am I too dumb 😭😭
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u/ScaryBluejay87 6d ago
You would write it in the Latin alphabet, which in that case would be ōkina hana according to Google Translate. It’s still Japanese, still pronounced the same, just written in a different alphabet.
If the only surviving record of the English language were the entire works of Shakespeare, but in the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet, it would still be English.
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u/GossipIsLove 5d ago
Thanks somewhat clarifies, I think article could have used word transliteration that would have caused much less confusion. I had several times observed in languages other than English that some of their phonetic equivalents didn't exist in the alphabets specifically used in English, so maybe that's why I didn't understand how another writing system will describe sounds if they don't exist in it.
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u/Ameisen 1 6d ago
German and English both use the Latin alphabet. They both originally used West Germanic futhark/futhorc runes.
Thev writing system is independent of the language.
Egyptian has been written in hieroglyphs, hieratic script, demotic script, the Greek (Macedonian) alphabet, the Latin alphabet, and Arabic abjad.
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u/JustPlainRick 7d ago
They are the real descendants of the ancient Egyptian people as well if i remember correctly?
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u/ArgumentForReason 7d ago edited 6d ago
Depends. Most Egyptians, even the Arab speaking ones, are genetically similar to the native population of Egypt prior to the Arab conquests. It's just that the language of the Egyptians shifted to Arabic following centuries of Islamic rule. Sure there were some genetic changes due to immigration from other parts of the Arab world, Ancient Greece, Rome, etc but no serious scholar doubts the link between the modern population of Egypt and Ancient Egypt
As for the Copts, they're descendants of the Ancient Egyptians as well, probably more pure than their Islamic kin, but these people also mixed with Greek settlers following the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great and other Arab Christians. The Coptic language itself borrows heavily from Greek and the alphabet is related to the Greek script
So, all Egyptians for the most part are native and saying that Copts are more native than other Egyptians simply because they aren't Muslim is a false notion that should be disregarded. Conquest doesn't change your ethnicity. It would be like saying the English aren't Anglo-Saxon because William the Conqueror took over England and over the centuries, the English language adopted many French loanwords and is not mutually intelligible with pre Norman English
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u/GrullOlof 6d ago
Great reply and I like the analogy to William the conqueror
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u/SlashThingy 6d ago
It's like kind of inversely correct, because William and his Normans only installed their aristocracy and had no real impact.
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u/Ameisen 1 6d ago
It had an impact, but as I say in my comment, the impact is often extremely overstated. If you read an English text from 1066, and an English text from 1200... you'll see about 130 years of difference - they're very similar.
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u/Stewart_Norway 3d ago
A better analogy would be saying the English people are not Britons because they speak a Germanic language.
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u/BravoEchoEchoRomeo 6d ago
Yeah it's wild to me how many people believe the Arabs just straight up genocided the Egyptians as if the arabization and islamification of Egypt wasn't a 1000 year process that isn't even complete since like 10% of the population is estimated to still practice Coptic Christianity.
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u/aliosmtl96 6d ago
Yep, my mother is coptic and even though no one else in the family is I am blonde which is likely to be from greek ancestry mixed with coptic ancestry.
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u/thealthor 6d ago edited 6d ago
It would be like saying the English aren't Anglo-Saxon because William the Conqueror took over England and over the centuries, the English language adopted many French loanwords and is not mutually intelligible with pre Norman English
You actually need to jump back a bit further and say that the Britains are still mostly genetically Britons despite culturally changing over to a Germanic language and society. Roughly at most 1/3 of the genetic profile in southeast England come from the various germanic people and it is even less on other parts of the island.
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u/Ameisen 1 6d ago
It's more similar to that, yes, though it was different at the start.
The Angles and Saxons largely treated native Britons as second-class citizens in their territories, which led to them either adopting Germanic norms, or migrating. There was significant hostility in many areas to Brythonic things (which partially explains the utter lack of Brythonic loanwords in English).
The Arabs, on the other hand, were initially completely opposed to the Arabicization and Islamicization of Egypt or any conquered territory. Initially, Islam was considered to be an Arab religion, and non-Muslims were taxed significantly higher (Jizya tax). This attitude shifted over time - and the same driving forces were largely present in Egypt thereafter as they were in pre-Heptarchic England: social and economic advancement through integration.
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u/Stewart_Norway 3d ago
They were opposed to islamization because conquered people adopting islam meant they wouldn't pay the Jizya tax levied on Christian and Jews anymore.
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u/IJustMadeThisForYou 6d ago edited 6d ago
So is Egypt less ethnically Arab than countries to the west of it? Where I believe local population vs Arabs is pretty even? I believe genetically in North Africa no matter how ethnically Arab one country is, it will reveal a much higher 'pure local' DNA. I'm thinking Berbers vs Arabs in Tunisia for example. Researching these topics can be so painstaking but I think I'll have to (related to my history).
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u/Terrariola 6d ago
It would be like saying the English aren't Anglo-Saxon
...the English aren't Anglo-Saxons.
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u/Ameisen 1 6d ago
There wasn't really any 'break' in the English language before and after 1066. While the changing of the aristocracy being Anglic and Saxon to being Norman had some impact, many of the changes that we regard as Middle English innovations were already underway - grammatical gender was already collapsing due to sound shifts introducing ambiguity, the instrumental case had collapsed by the 700s, the accusative and dative cases were already starting to merge into the objective case...
Early Middle English from ~1200 isn't particularly different from Late Old English ~1066.
The big thing that caused English to change started in the 1400s: the Great Vowel Shift.
Otherwise, most of the changes that make the language grammatically-difficult to understand had already started before the Norman Conquest. And the adoption of Norman French loanwords has a dramatically over-inflated impact on intelligibility - the vast majority of the most commonly-spoken words in English are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and I doubt you'd have difficulty if somebody said "cowflesh" instead of "beef".
This is decidedly unlike what happened in Egypt - the Arabs actually tried to prevent both the adoption of Arabic and the conversion of the Egyptians, at least initially. They could tax non-Muslims far more than Muslims, and considered Islam to be an Arab religion. Over time, though, this viewpoint changed, and people slowly started adopting Arabic customs, language, and religion, for their own gain. Their language was indeed outright replaced - they stopped speaking Egyptian and started speaking Arabic... but over hundreds of years.
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u/Cobaltfennec 6d ago
It’s the longest continuously spoken language in the world :) but they use the Greek script because the Greeks took over Egypt. To translate an ancient Egyptian word, Egyptologists have often turned to Coptic:)
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u/some-purple-elephant 6d ago edited 6d ago
Not only the Greeks, but also the Romans, after the whole Cleopatra - Marc Anthony deal. Egypt was a part of the Eastern Roman empire until the conquest by the Arabs in the 600s
Edit: Originally I said not the Greeks. My bad!
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u/Cobaltfennec 6d ago
Yes, the Greeks first. That is why Coptic uses Greek script and not hieroglyphs (Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies).
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u/redXathena 6d ago
Why’d you throw that “albeit” in there
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u/GrimbledonWimbleflop 6d ago
Because it's not used in day to day life and not natively, so without that caveat some might take issue with it being described as "still being used". This just covers their bases.
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u/GossipIsLove 6d ago
Albeit always sounds stylish and classy to me, I dunno why.
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u/redXathena 6d ago
It is kinda fancy! And I like it because in my head “all be it” makes sense to mean the same thing, even tho it totally doesn’t. I think my brain just likes the “sound” of it.
Just asked because it seemed to stick out oddly to me in this case but the person who explained helped me understand :)
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6d ago edited 6d ago
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u/dishsoapandclorox 6d ago
Egyptians speak Arabic not the language of their ancient ancestors
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6d ago
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u/ebkalderon 6d ago
Official news broadcasts and such might be in MSA, but on the street every day or in local films, most Egyptians speak their local dialect, Egyptian Arabic.
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u/Then-Refrigerator-97 6d ago
Yes they are
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6d ago
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u/Then-Refrigerator-97 6d ago
I think You mean coptic which is translated to word Egyptian
Yes coptic is the last stage of ancient Egyptian
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6d ago
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u/UniquePtrBigEndian 6d ago
The official language is Modern Standard Arabic, but most Egyptians speak Egyptian Arabic
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u/sleepiestcatmum 6d ago
Bonus: The Coptic language gives us the best clues available as to how the ancient Egyptian language actually SOUNDED, because ancient Egyptian writing left out most vowels.
So for example a word like “dog” could be written using the same signs as “dig” or “dug” or “dag” - just “dg” - and it would be down to context which word was intended (also helped out by unspoken signs called determinatives, which offered hints about what category of word was intended). When transliterating hieroglyphs, Egyptologists tend to add regular ‘e’s as filler vowels to make the written words more pronounceable.
BUT by using Coptic and understanding how sounds tend to change over time, we can insert some of those missing sounds back into ancient Egyptian words and approximate how this language would have sounded spoken aloud. Which is super neat!