Conjunction, Contiguity, Contingency: On Relationships Between Events in the Egyptian and Coptic Verbal Systems

by Leo Depuydt

This monograph comprises three intimately related studies on the grammar of hieroglyphic Egyptian and its linear descendant, Coptic, covering a period of 4000 years of language history. Depuydt approaches the subject from the standpoint of the 'Standard Theory' developed by his mentor, the distinguished Egyptologist, Hans Jakob Polotsky. The first essay studies the verb form called 'conjunctive', arguing that the function of the conjunctive is to 'conjoin' a chain of two or more events into a single - though compound - notion. The second essay shows how a certain syntactic construction can be used to refer to events that are contiguous, that is, events that succeed one another rapidly in time. The third essay examines verb forms that refer to events whose occurrence is contingent on the occurrence of other events implied or explicitly mentioned in the context. The respective grammatical phenomena are labelled conjunction, continguity and contingency. Taken together, these three studies constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the ancient languages of Egypt.

281 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1993