1

Comparing Egyptian and Semitic Roots: A Basic Toolkit

compiled by Joshua D. Tyra

Suppose you have found a Semitic word and an Ancient Egyptian word that are close
enough in form and meaning to suggest they may be related. To determine whether
a connection really exists and if so, of what kind, here is a checklist of questions and
resources.
1. Could the Semitic word be a loanword from Egyptian?

a. Muchiki, Yoshiyuki. Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-
West Semitic.1

i. Check the table of consonant correspondences on 313-314.
For a discussion of specific consonants, see 314-325. For a
more detailed discussion of the correspondences in each
Northwest Semitic language or dialect, see the chapter devoted
to each language. If youre lucky, your Semitic word and its
putative Egyptian source will be listed among the data.

ii. NB: As the name indicates, the Muchiki study does not reflect
data from Akkadian. Allen says that working with Akkadian
transliterations of Egyptian words is problematic because of
the ambiguity of cuneiform writing.2

2. Could the Egyptian word be a loanword from Semitic?

a. Hoch, James E. Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom
and Third Intermediate Period.3

i. Check the tables of consonant correspondences on 431-437.
The discussion of specific consonants and phonological issues
is found on 399-430. Again, if youre lucky, your Egyptian word
and its Semitic source will be specifically mentioned in the

Yoshiyuki Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West

Semitic, ed. Michael V. Fox, SBL Dissertation Series 173 (Atlanta, GA: Society of
Biblical Literature, 1999).
1

James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 31.
2

James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third
Intermediate Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
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Comparing Egyptian and Semitic Roots: A Basic Toolkit

Joshua D. Tyra

body of this work.

ii. NB: Although this remains a basic handbook on the topic, some
scholars including Rainey have had serious reservations about
some of Hochs conclusions. It is a very good idea to check
Raineys review of Hoch to see if his comments have any
bearing on your words.4 (Raineys scathingly sarcastic tone
adds real entertainment value to this piece!)

b. Allen, James P. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study.5

i. See the table of consonant correspondences on p. 31 (found in
an abbreviated form on p. 36, Semitic column) and the brief
but helpful discussion on 31-33.

3. Could both these words have developed from the same source in Afroasiatic?
That is, are they true cognates?

a. Allen, James P. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study.6

i. See the table of consonant correspondences on p. 36
(Cognates column) and the discussion of cognates on 33-36.
Specific Egyptian and Semitic words can be accessed via the
word index (243-250).

Read (and heed) Allens caveats about the uncertainty of
working with Afroasiatic cognates (33).

b. Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction.7

i. Though Loprieno does not have a handy table of Afroasiatic-
derived consonant correspondences between Egyptian and

Anson F. Rainey, Egyptian Evidence for Semitic Linguistics (Review of

Hoch), in Past Links: Studies in the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East,
ed. Shlomo Isreel, Itamar Singer, and Ran Zadok, Israel Oriental Studies, XVIII
(Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 43153. For further Hoch criticism, see Allen,
The Ancient Egyptian Language, 31 n. 3, 205206.
4

Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language.

Ibid.

Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995).
7

Semitic, Chapter 3 on Egyptian phonology discusses a number

of Afroasiatic words (see esp. 31-35). The word index, which
includes Afroasiatic and Proto-Semitic, is also helpful (304-
312).

4. Are these two words close enough in form and meaning that one of the above
relationships is possible?

a. In principle, the correspondence in form and meaning should be exact.
Deviations from the normal phonetic correspondences should be
explicable with reference to known linguistic phenomena (and
common sense). Changes in meaning should be plausible and not
involve too many speculative steps.

b. In practice, as the data show, there could be significant variation in
transliterating Egyptian to Semitic and vice versa. There is seemingly
even greater latitude in the correlation of consonants in words
inherited from Afroasiatic.8 Still, if your two words are going to
deviate phonetically from the statistical norms, they should at least
deviate in attested ways. (Let them be, as Aristotle said in the Poetics,
consistently inconsistent.) Shun the equation of two consonants
whose correspondence is completely unknown in the source
documents.

5. Are these two words close enough in space and time that one of the above
relationships is possible? Propinquity, propinquity, propinquity.

a. Date the sources of your words, if possible. Bear in mind that Genesis
and Exodus contain most of the Egyptian loanwards in the Old
Testament, as one might expect from the content.9 Allen notes that
Semitic loan-words and proper names are found mostly in texts of
the New Kingdom and later but also appear in Egyptian execration
texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms.10

Allen alludes to a fascinating system of ranking the certainty of proposed

cognates, which he goes on to use in his discussion (The Ancient Egyptian Language, 34
36).
8

And there arent all that many. See Thomas O. Lambdin, Egyptian Loan Words
in the Old Testament, Journal of the American Oriental Society 73, no. 3 (1953): 145
55. This material is incorporated into Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords
in North-West Semitic.
9

10

Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language, 31.

Comparing Egyptian and Semitic Roots: A Basic Toolkit

Joshua D. Tyra

b. It may not be possible (or necessary) to be more specific than Egypt

and the Levant, but considering the geographical provenience of
source material is important. In the case of loanwords, it is part of the
overall plausibility of the borrowing scenario.

6. What was the Proto-Semitic form of my Semitic word?

a. The answer to this question can affect the consonants you will expect
to find in a cognate or loanword. If your Semitic word has cognates in
other Semitic languages, take careful note of the correspondences
between them. Many Hebrew phonemes, for example, are mergers of
multiple Proto-Semitic phonemes, and several Hebrew letters
represented more than one sound. This means that if your Hebrew
word contains //, you should be aware that this phoneme was a
merger of two Proto-Semitic sounds, * and *, and that the letter
was probably used for both sounds even into the biblical period.
Reference to cognates in Ugaritic and Arabic, which preserved the
distinction, will tell you if the Hebrew root contains // or //. If it is
// then you will be looking for an Egyptian cognate with //, //, or
even //. If it is //, then the Egyptian cognate will need to have //.11
For Biblical Hebrew, working carefully through all the data in HALOT
should sort this out.

b. The exact phomenic inventory of Proto-Semitic is still being worked
out. See Huehnergard,12 Lipiski,13 and Allen14 for three different
takes (Allen says his chart is a summary of recent scholarly
concensus15).

7. Where can I look up Egyptian words online?

11

Ibid., 36.

John Huehnergard, Introduction, in Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical

Hebrew and Related Languages, ed. John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie (Leiden and
Boston: Brill / Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), 12.
12

Edward Lipiski, Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar, First

Edition, Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta 80 (Louvain: Peeters Publishers, 1997), 107,
150.
13

14

Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language, 34.

15

Ibid., 34 n. 24, 206207.

a. The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae16 is a digitalized version of the great

Wrterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache. This mammoth dictionary,
though published from 1926-1931, has remained a standard resource
of the Egyptian language. The Digital Slip Archive contains
fascinating extra material that would not fit into the dictionary: for
instance, information about word use at various periods and in
different genres.17

b. You will need to create a free account with username and password
and agree to the terms of use in order to access the site.

c. Once logged in, click on search the list of Egyptian words.

d. Enter your search for an Egyptian word in the Lemma field. The
Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae uses the Manuel de Codage (MdC) system
of hieroglyphic transliteration, which is case sensitive and uses only
the regular letters of the Roman alphabet. A chart giving the phonetic
hieroglyphic signs, their standard Egyptological transliterations, and
their equivalents in MdC can be found here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_de_Codage>

e. Be sure to check the box labelled English translation (not available
for list of Demotic lemmata), or your results will all be in German.
Note that the checkbox is far to the right of the screen and its label is
far to the left.

f. Note that you can restrict the word class of your results and even
search on the English or German translations (a great feature!).

16

<http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/TlaLogin>.

17

See <http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/S05?d=d007&h=h018>.

Comparing Egyptian and Semitic Roots: A Basic Toolkit

Joshua D. Tyra

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, James P. The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Hoch, James E. Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third
Intermediate Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Huehnergard, John. Introduction. In Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew

and Related Languages, edited by John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie.
Leiden and Boston: Brill / Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.
Lambdin, Thomas O. Egyptian Loan Words in the Old Testament. Journal of the
American Oriental Society 73, no. 3 (1953): 14555.
Lipiski, Edward. Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar. First
Edition. Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta 80. Louvain: Peeters Publishers,
1997.
Loprieno, Antonio. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Muchiki, Yoshiyuki. Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic.

Edited by Michael V. Fox. SBL Dissertation Series 173. Atlanta, GA: Society of
Biblical Literature, 1999.
Rainey, Anson F. Egyptian Evidence for Semitic Linguistics (Review of Hoch). In
Past Links: Studies in the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East,
edited by Shlomo Isreel, Itamar Singer, and Ran Zadok, 43153. Israel
Oriental Studies, XVIII. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998.