Some Common Features of Akkadian and Egyptian Revisited

chApter 6 Some Common Features of Akkadian and Egyptian Revisited Understanding the place of Ancient Egyptian within the Afroasiatic family may ask more questions than is possible to answer in the actual state of our knowledge. However, it is certainly an achievable goal to clarify the problem in the light of recent progress made both in the field of general historical linguistics and in the analysis of relevant Ancient Egyptian data. My contribution will thus go as follows. In section 1, after briefly summarizing the current controversy about the right way of modeling language family relationships, I will try to assess the relevance of the tree model and of alternative perspectives for the special case of Ancient Egyptian, taking into account problems of scale and applicability in relationship to the Afroasiatic historical context. Section 2 is devoted to the notion of Proto-Egyptian as a contact language as it has been promoted in past studies, showing the relevance of contact in general to the problem of situating Egyptian within the Afroasiatic family, be it as a branch in a tree or according to another model. This methodological discussion leads us to focus in section 3 (nominalizations in the inner Egyptian development of new conjugations), section 4 (Egyptian Old Perfect and Akkadian Stative) and section 5 (similar independent pronouns in Egyptian and Akkadian) on more specific problems raised by the hypothetically closer relationship of Ancient Egyptian and another ancient language belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family—namely, Akkadian. Original results of my ongoing research on the renewal of the Proto-Egyptian verbal system are put in perspective with the question asked. This fresh view on diachronic processes allows to revisit the data in the light of the hypothesis of a special relationship between Semitic and Proto-Egyptian. 6.1. The Tree Controversy and the Ancient Egyptian Case: Clinging to Branches? Asking the question of how Ancient Egyptian departed from the Afroasiatic family falls within a burning debate in historical linguistics. There has been no lack of critics and objections to the tree model of representation for the genetical relationships * Many thanks are due to Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli, the organizers of the workshop held at Brown University in April 2018, for reviving a discussion that is in need of further research and bringing together specialists from various fields in a meeting that was both fertile and welcoming. 161 An Imprint of Penn State University Press
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%JTUSJCVUJPO Elsa Oréal