Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective

✍ Scribed by Eitan Grossman (editor); Martin Haspelmath (editor); Tonio Sebastian Richter (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 588
• Series: Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]; 55
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume presents the Egyptian-Coptic language in cross-linguistic (‘typological’) perspective. It is aimed at linguists of all stripes, especially typologists, historical linguists, and specialists in Egyptian-Coptic, Afroasiatic languages, or African languages.
Uniquely, the contributions are written by both typologists and experts of Egyptian-Coptic and typologists. The former provide case studies dealing with particular aspects of the various phases of the Egyptian-Coptic language (e.g., COLLIER on conditional constructions), while the latter situate Egyptian-Coptic data in cross-linguistic perspective (e.g., those by GUELDEMANN and GENSLER). The volume also includes an introductory section that includes an overview of the Egyptian-Coptic language (HASPELMATH), a sketch of its sociohistorical setting (GROSSMAN & RICHTER), its relationship with language typology (RICHTER), and the way in which Egyptian-Coptic data should be presented to nonspecialists, focusing on transliteration and glossing (GROSSMAN & HASPELMATH).
This is the first book to bring together language typology and the Egyptian-Coptic language in an explicit fashion.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Contents
Part I: Propaedeutics
Early encounters: Egyptian-Coptic studies and comparative linguistics in the century from Schlegel to Finck
The Egyptian-Coptic language: its setting in space, time and culture
A grammatical overview of Egyptian and Coptic
The Leipzig-Jerusalem Transliteration of Coptic
Part II: Studies
Conditionals in Late Egyptian
A typological look at Egyptian *d > ?
No case before the verb, obligatory case after the verb in Coptic
How typology can inform philology: quotative j(n) in Earlier Egyptian
The three adnominal possessive constructions in Egyptian-Coptic: Three degrees of grammaticalization
Egyptian non-selective interrogative pronominals: history and typology
Typological remodeling in Egyptian language history: salience, source and conjunction
Towards a typology of poetic rhyme
The Old and Early Middle Egyptian Stative
A rare change: the degrammaticalization of an inflectional passive marker into an impersonal subject pronoun in Earlier Egyptian
The oblique expression of the object in Ancient Egyptian
Index of authors
Index of languages
General index