Does Egyptian Have Grammar? When reading
transcriptions of Egyptian texts, you might get the impression that
Egyptian has no grammatical forms, or that they are hopelessly ambiguous.
For example, in the September, 1999, issue of Smithsonian magazine
are the pictures of two statues. On page 113 is a baboon statue inscribed
with the words
mr-r-n-rA anx
Dt "Merenre , living forever." On page 114 is a picture of
king Pepi II and his mother, inscribed
nfr-kA-rA (?) di anx
"Neferkare, given life". It's pretty clear that
anx
"life" is
being used in two different ways in these inscriptions, in the first
as an adjective (or maybe an active verbal participal), and in the second
as a noun, yet both instances are transcribed simply
anx
.
We would expect there to be some difference between the two parts of speech. Probably the vowel patterns of Ancient Egyptian set them apart. If they had the same vowel patterns as modern Arabic (not likely!), then these words might be pronounced 'anikh (adjective) and 'ankha (noun). (Recall that the letters A i a were not really vowels in Ancient Egyptian, despite our modern pronunciation, but were consonants.)
Another example is the glyph 
,
transcribed
wab and pronounced
by modern Egyptologists as /wab/. In different contexts, the
actual pronounciation was probably wabaw "is
pure", wa'ab "become pure", or
wi'ab "priest".
These particular examples might be completely wrong, but the point is that there is grammatical information missing from the inscriptions that was present for those ancient Egyptians who read these inscriptions and who knew the proper vowelling patterns for their own language. Those of us reading the inscriptions 3,000 years later don't know those vowelling patterns, and so must record only the information we do have, the letters anx.
So, many glyphs you encounter, especially in formulaic writing, are really a sort of shorthand or an abbreviation for the fuller, grammatically correct form. It's as if we wrote liv. in our language and relied on the reader to know when to pronounce it living and when life. This does introduce some ambiguity, but the fault lies in our lack of knowledge, not in the Egyptian language itself.
Reference: Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Lingustic Introduction (1995)
© 1999, Terrence Donnelly