Demotic language

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Demotic
Period about 650 BC BC - around 450 AD

Formerly spoken in

Egypt
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

egy (Egyptian language)

ISO 639-3

egy (Egyptian language)

The demotic language is a stage of development of the Egyptian language , which began around the 7th century BC. Appears in Egypt . It differs significantly in grammar and vocabulary from the Egyptian language of the New Kingdom . The language is considered a dialect of Lower Egypt . The demotic was mostly written in the demotic script , with exceptions, as the demotic language could also be written in other written forms.

Herodotus coined the term demotic (Greek for popular) for this, while Porphyrios speaks of the epistolographic script , which is an exact translation of the Egyptian name. For about 1000 years, the demotic remained the language and written form used in everyday life, with the spoken language developing further. During this period, hieroglyphs were only used for monuments and other permanent testimonies, the hieratic script was reserved for the initiated priests for religious texts.

history

Stele in demotic table
Demotic lettering of the Rosetta stone

Linguistically, the demotic stands between the New Egyptian and the Coptic . It shares with both u. a. the extensive use of definite and indefinite articles and auxiliary verbs. In contrast to Coptic, the old synthetic conjugation (so-called sdm = f ) is still in use. Differences to New Egyptian exist e.g. B. in the already fairly consistent prepositional connection of the direct object in the duration ("Jernstedt's rule") as well as in the development of a special sentence type of the adjective predication ( n3 + adjective + subject).

The demotic was strongly influenced by the politically dominant Greek. Many demotic administrative documents are followed by a Greek summary; There are also bilingual texts in which Greek foreign words in Greek script (from left to right) are inserted into the primarily demotic text (written from right to left).

Even under the Romans, the demotic disappeared in the administration, where now Greek prevailed. Demotic was used almost exclusively in the private and religious areas. With the Christianization of Egypt in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the relatively complicated demotic script was replaced by a new, much simpler alphabetic script derived from the Greek alphabet and expanded to include a few characters of demotic origin, typical to be able to denote Egyptian sounds. A written language was also created that was adapted to the language spoken at the time and was called Coptic from then on . The demotic script died out and was completely forgotten until it was learned to decipher again in the 19th century. The main breakthrough in deciphering came from the Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch , who even as a schoolboy was passionate about the demotic papyri exhibited in the Berlin Museum and published the results in his Grammaire demotique in 1855 . The essential basis for Brugsch's decipherment was of course the knowledge of the Egyptian language, which was already available at that time due to the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 .

For the further history of the language see Coptic language .

literature

See also

Web links