دكتور محمود حامد الحصري Dr-Mahmoud Hamid Elhosary

  The Origin of the Coptic Language   Semitic or Hemitic: The ancient Egyptian language, which was the origin of the Coptic language, was one of the groups of languages scholars have classified as Hemito- Semitic. 1 This classification includes as well ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic. The philologists who agree with this classification discovered that the ancient Egyptian language consisted of two elements: Semitic and Hemitic, or Indian-European. Other scholars believe that the language tended to be of the Semitic group because there was a great similarity between the Semitic and ancient Egyptian languages. At this time, there is no definite answer as to which group is related. 2 The Ancient Egyptian Literature: The ancient Egyptian language has its own grammar and literature. Many thousands of distinct texts were left on their pyramids, temples, tombs, obelisks, statues, ostraca, stela, papyri, sarcophagi, coffins, vessels, and different o...

Egyptian Language   Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian is the result of modern scholarship, for since the Renaissance, a symbolical and allegorical interpretation was favored, which proved to be wrong. The learned Jesuit antiquarian Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680) proposed nonsensical allegorical translations ( Lingua Aegyptical restituta , 1643). Thomas Young (1773 -1829), the author of the undulatory theory of light, who had assigned the correct phonetical values to five hieroglyphic signs, still maintained these alphabetical signs were written together with allegorical signs, which, according to him, formed the bulk. The final decipherment, starting in 1822, was the work of the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, 1790 - 1832, cf. Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens par M.Champollion le jeune , 1824. Champollion, who had a very good knowledge of Coptic (the last stage of Egyptian), proved the assumption of the...