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Asyut Governorate

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Asyūṭ Governorate ( Arabic : محافظة أسيوط ) is one of the many governorates of Egypt . It stretches across a section of the Nile River. The capital of the governorate is the city of Asyut .

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101-543: The name of Asyut is derived from early Egyptian Zawty ( Z3JW.TJ ), late Egyptian Səyáwt into Coptic Syowt . An A was added to the beginning of the name Syowt to become Asyut. The rate of poverty in Asyut is more than 60%. Recently, some social safety networks have been provided, in the form of financial assistance and job opportunities. The funding has been coordinated by Egypt's Ministry of Finance , with assistance from international organizations. The governorate

202-773: A literary language , and was also the language of the New Kingdom administration. Texts written wholly in Late Egyptian date to the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt and later. Late Egyptian is represented by a large body of religious and secular literature , comprising such examples as the Story of Wenamun , the love poems of the Chester–Beatty I papyrus, and the Instruction of Any . Instructions became

303-576: A synthetic language , Egyptian by the Late Egyptian phase had become an analytic language . The relationship between Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian has been described as being similar to that between Latin and Italian. The Late Egyptian stage is taken to have ended around the 8th century BC, giving rise to Demotic. Demotic is a later development of the Egyptian language written in the Demotic script , following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic ,

404-575: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

505-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

606-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

707-558: A few have survived that were written in hieratic and (later) demotic. There was also a form of cursive hieroglyphs , used for religious documents on papyrus, such as the Book of the Dead of the Twentieth Dynasty ; it was simpler to write than the hieroglyphs in stone inscriptions, but it was not as cursive as hieratic and lacked the wide use of ligatures . Additionally, there was a variety of stone-cut hieratic, known as "lapidary hieratic". In

808-495: A few specialists in the language. For all other purposes, the Egyptological pronunciation is used, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced. The following consonants are reconstructed for Archaic (before 2600 BC) and Old Egyptian (2686–2181 BC), with IPA equivalents in square brackets if they differ from the usual transcription scheme: / l / has no independent representation in

909-470: A large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century. Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages , first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC . It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years. Its classical form, known as " Middle Egyptian ," served as

1010-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

1111-690: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

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1212-442: A popular literary genre of the New Kingdom, which took the form of advice on proper behavior. Late Egyptian was also the language of New Kingdom administration. Late Egyptian is not completely distinct from Middle Egyptian, as many "classicisms" appear in historical and literary documents of this phase. However, the difference between Middle and Late Egyptian is greater than the difference between Middle and Old Egyptian. Originally

1313-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1414-444: A scribe jokes that his colleague's writing is incoherent like "the speech of a Delta man with a man of Elephantine ." Recently, some evidence of internal dialects has been found in pairs of similar words in Egyptian that, based on similarities with later dialects of Coptic, may be derived from northern and southern dialects of Egyptian. Written Coptic has five major dialects, which differ mainly in graphic conventions, most notably

1515-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1616-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1717-569: A solid waste management program in Asyut, a project with the Egyptian Ministry of Environment that will conclude in 2021. The National Solid Waste Management Programme (NSWMP) involves the construction of infrastructure for new as well as the expansion and improvement of existing waste treatment, landfill, and recycling facilities. Ancient quarries are an important feature of Asyut. There are about 500 rock-cut tombs and limestone quarries all around Asyut. The governorate of Asyut includes

1818-503: A stressed vowel (⟨ bjn ⟩ = */ˈbaːjin/ 'bad') and as ⟨ jj ⟩ word-medially immediately before a stressed vowel ( ⟨ḫꜥjjk⟩ = */χaʕˈjak/ 'you will appear') and are unmarked word-finally (⟨ jt ⟩ = /ˈjaːtVj/ 'father'). In Middle Egyptian (2055–1650 BC), a number of consonantal shifts take place. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom period, / z / and / s / had merged, and

1919-510: A stressed vowel in syllables that had been closed in earlier Egyptian (compare ⲛⲟⲩⲃ < */ˈnaːbaw/ 'gold' and ⲧⲁⲡ < * /dib/ 'horn'). The phonemes /d g z/ occur only in Greek loanwords, with rare exceptions triggered by a nearby /n/ : ⲁⲛⲍⲏⲃⲉ/ⲁⲛⲥⲏⲃⲉ < ꜥ.t n.t sbꜣ.w 'school'. Earlier *d ḏ g q are preserved as ejective t' c' k' k ' before vowels in Coptic. Although

2020-644: A transliteration of the corresponding Demotic "alphabetical" sign(s) in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ . More changes occur in the 1st millennium BC and the first centuries AD, leading to Coptic (1st or 3rd – c. 19th centuries AD). In Sahidic ẖ ḫ ḥ had merged into ϣ š (most often from ḫ ) and ϩ / h / (most often ẖ ḥ ). Bohairic and Akhmimic are more conservative and have a velar fricative / x / ( ϧ in Bohairic, ⳉ in Akhmimic). Pharyngeal *ꜥ had merged into glottal / ʔ / after it had affected

2121-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

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2222-465: A uniliteral hieroglyph. Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar noted that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African", reflecting the local wildlife of North Africa, the Levant and southern Mediterranean. In "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence [North] African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects

2323-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

2424-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

2525-737: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

2626-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2727-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

2828-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

2929-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

3030-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

3131-474: Is dated from the oldest known complete sentence, including a finite verb , which has been found. Discovered in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen (dated c.  2690 BC ), the seal impression reads: Extensive texts appear from about 2600 BC. An early example is the Diary of Merer . The Pyramid Texts are the largest body of literature written in this phase of the language. One of its distinguishing characteristics

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3232-424: Is divided into municipal divisions , with a total estimated population of 5,169,423 as of January 2024. In Asyut Governorate, there is 1 new city, three aqsam and eleven marakiz. Sometimes a markaz and a qism share a name. According to 2024 estimates, the majority of residents in the governorate live in rural areas, with an urbanization rate of only 26.5%. Out of an estimated 5,169,423 people residing in

3333-629: Is home to a very conservative society and in October, 2016 Upper Egypt's first beauty pageant, which was to be held in Asyut, had to be canceled due to death threats and security issues. According to the Egyptian Governing Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), in affiliation with the Ministry of Investment (MOI), the following industrial zones are located in this governorate: In 2016, Switzerland committed to funding

3434-452: Is not a contrastive feature; all obstruents are voiceless and all sonorants are voiced. Stops may be either aspirated or tenuis (unaspirated), although there is evidence that aspirates merged with their tenuis counterparts in certain environments. The following table presents the consonants of Demotic Egyptian. The reconstructed value of a phoneme is given in IPA transcription, followed by

3535-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

3636-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

3737-399: Is sometimes reserved for the earliest use of hieroglyphs, from the late fourth through the early third millennia BC. At the earliest stage, around 3300 BC, hieroglyphs were not a fully developed writing system , being at a transitional stage of proto-writing ; over the time leading up to the 27th century BC, grammatical features such as nisba formation can be seen to occur. Old Egyptian

3838-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

3939-424: Is the best-documented variety of the language, and has attracted the most attention by far from Egyptology . While most Middle Egyptian is seen written on monuments by hieroglyphs, it was also written using a cursive variant , and the related hieratic . Middle Egyptian first became available to modern scholarship with the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the early 19th century. The first grammar of Middle Egyptian

4040-406: Is the tripling of ideograms , phonograms, and determinatives to indicate the plural. Overall, it does not differ significantly from Middle Egyptian, the classical stage of the language, though it is based on a different dialect. In the period of the 3rd dynasty ( c.  2650  – c.  2575 BC ), many of the principles of hieroglyphic writing were regularized. From that time on, until

4141-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

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4242-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

4343-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

4444-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

4545-589: The Ancient Egyptian tombs of Meir , and the town of Durunka , which is a pilgrimage site for many Copts who come to visit a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary . Egyptian language The Egyptian language , or Ancient Egyptian ( r n kmt ; "speech of Egypt") is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt . It is known today from

4646-565: The Coptic Catholic Church . Most hieroglyphic Egyptian texts are written in a literary prestige register rather than the vernacular speech variety of their author. As a result, dialectical differences are not apparent in written Egyptian until the adoption of the Coptic alphabet . Nevertheless, it is clear that these differences existed before the Coptic period. In one Late Egyptian letter (dated c.  1200 BC ),

4747-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

4848-588: The hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. Demotic is the name of the script derived from the hieratic beginning in the 7th century BC. The Coptic alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet , with adaptations for Egyptian phonology. It was first developed in the Ptolemaic period , and gradually replaced the Demotic script in about the 4th to 5th centuries of the Christian era. The term "Archaic Egyptian"

4949-528: The liturgical language of the Coptic Church . The Egyptian language branch belongs to the Afroasiatic language family . Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afroasiatic are its fusional morphology, nonconcatenative morphology , a series of emphatic consonants , a three-vowel system /a i u/ , a nominal feminine suffix * -at , a nominal prefix m- , an adjectival suffix -ī and characteristic personal verbal affixes. Of

5050-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

5151-568: The vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period . By the time of classical antiquity , the spoken language had evolved into Demotic , and by the Roman era , diversified into various Coptic dialects . These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt , although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as

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5252-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

5353-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

5454-571: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

5555-834: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

5656-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

5757-690: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

5858-576: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

5959-597: The Semitic preference for triradical roots. Egyptian is probably more conservative, and Semitic likely underwent later regularizations converting roots into the triradical pattern. Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is very different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic languages in general, and Semitic languages in particular. There are multiple possibilities: perhaps Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before it

6060-473: The cognate sets between Egyptian and Afroasiatic, the traditional theory and the neuere Komparatistik , founded by Semiticist Otto Rössler. According to the neuere Komparatistik , in Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants */d z ð/ developed into pharyngeal ⟨ꜥ⟩ /ʕ/ : Egyptian ꜥr.t 'portal', Semitic dalt 'door'. The traditional theory instead disputes

6161-574: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

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6262-838: The definite article ⲡ is unaspirated when the next word begins with a glottal stop: Bohairic ⲡ + ⲱⲡ > ⲡⲱⲡ 'the account'. The consonant system of Coptic is as follows: Here is the vowel system reconstructed for earlier Egyptian: Vowels are always short in unstressed syllables ( ⟨tpj⟩ = */taˈpij/ 'first') and long in open stressed syllables ( ⟨rmṯ⟩ = */ˈraːmac/ 'man'), but they can be either short or long in closed stressed syllables ( ⟨jnn⟩ = */jaˈnan/ 'we', ⟨mn⟩ = */maːn/ 'to stay'). Arabic Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

6363-587: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

6464-637: The emphatic consonants were realised is unknown. Early research had assumed that the opposition in stops was one of voicing, but it is now thought to be either one of tenuis and emphatic consonants , as in many Semitic languages, or one of aspirated and ejective consonants , as in many Cushitic languages . Since vowels were not written until Coptic, reconstructions of the Egyptian vowel system are much more uncertain and rely mainly on evidence from Coptic and records of Egyptian words, especially proper nouns, in other languages/writing systems. The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by

6565-439: The end of a stressed syllable and eventually null word-finally: ⟨pḏ.t⟩ */ˈpiːɟat/ > Akkadian transcription -pi-ta 'bow'. The most important source of information about Demotic phonology is Coptic. The consonant inventory of Demotic can be reconstructed on the basis of evidence from the Coptic dialects. Demotic orthography is relatively opaque . The Demotic "alphabetical" signs are mostly inherited from

6666-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

6767-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

6868-547: The first known Coptic text, still pagan ( Old Coptic ), from the 1st century AD. Coptic survived into the medieval period, but by the 16th century was dwindling rapidly due to the persecution of Coptic Christians under the Mamluks . It probably survived in the Egyptian countryside as a spoken language for several centuries after that. Coptic survives as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and

6969-510: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

7070-414: The governorate, 3,799,525 live in rural areas, as opposed to only 1,369,898 in urban areas. Asyut has a population of over 4 million people, with a significant Coptic presence. Muslims and Christians have lived together in Asyut and at times there have been clashes. In July 2013, a large number of Christians took to the streets to protest Muslim extremism in Asyut. Whether Christian or Muslim, Asyut

7171-655: The graphemes ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩ are used interchangeably. In addition, / j / had become / ʔ / word-initially in an unstressed syllable (⟨ jwn ⟩ /jaˈwin/ > */ʔaˈwin/ "colour") and after a stressed vowel ( ⟨ḥjpw⟩ */ˈħujpVw/ > /ˈħeʔp(Vw)/ '[the god] Apis'). In Late Egyptian (1069–700 BC), the phonemes d ḏ g gradually merge with their counterparts t ṯ k ( ⟨dbn⟩ */ˈdiːban/ > Akkadian transcription ti-ba-an 'dbn-weight'). Also, ṯ ḏ often become /t d/ , but they are retained in many lexemes ; ꜣ becomes / ʔ / ; and /t r j w/ become / ʔ / at

7272-435: The hieroglyphic orthography, and it is frequently written as if it were / n / or / r / . That is probably because the standard for written Egyptian is based on a dialect in which / l / had merged with other sonorants. Also, the rare cases of / ʔ / occurring are not represented. The phoneme / j / is written as ⟨ j ⟩ in the initial position (⟨ jt ⟩ = */ˈjaːtVj/ 'father') and immediately after

7373-519: The hieroglyphic script, and due to historical sound changes they do not always map neatly onto Demotic phonemes . However, the Demotic script does feature certain orthographic innovations, such as the use of the sign h̭ for / ç /, which allow it to represent sounds that were not present in earlier forms of Egyptian. The Demotic consonants can be divided into two primary classes: obstruents ( stops , affricates and fricatives ) and sonorants ( approximants , nasals , and semivowels ). Voice

7474-597: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

7575-464: The language's final stage of development, the Coptic alphabet replaced the older writing system. Hieroglyphs are employed in two ways in Egyptian texts: as ideograms to represent the idea depicted by the pictures and, more commonly, as phonograms to represent their phonetic value. As the phonetic realization of Egyptian cannot be known with certainty, Egyptologists use a system of transliteration to denote each sound that could be represented by

7676-613: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

7777-604: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

7878-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

7979-406: The latter of which it shares much with. In the earlier stages of Demotic, such as those texts written in the early Demotic script, it probably represented the spoken idiom of the time. However, as its use became increasingly confined to literary and religious purposes, the written language diverged more and more from the spoken form, leading to significant diglossia between the late Demotic texts and

8080-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

8181-782: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

8282-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

8383-469: The other Afroasiatic branches, linguists have variously suggested that the Egyptian language shares its greatest affinities with Berber and Semitic languages, particularly Arabic (which is spoken in Egypt today) and Hebrew . However, other scholars have argued that the Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with northeastern African regions. There are two theories that seek to establish

8484-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

8585-512: The quality of the surrounding vowels. / ʔ / is not indicated orthographically unless it follows a stressed vowel; then, it is marked by doubling the vowel letter (except in Bohairic): Akhmimic ⳉⲟⲟⲡ /xoʔp/ , Sahidic and Lycopolitan ϣⲟⲟⲡ šoʔp , Bohairic ϣⲟⲡ šoʔp 'to be' < ḫpr.w * /ˈχapraw/ 'has become'. The phoneme ⲃ / b / was probably pronounced as a fricative [ β ] , becoming ⲡ / p / after

8686-870: The reality" that the geographical location of Egypt is, of course, in Africa. While the consonantal phonology of the Egyptian language may be reconstructed, the exact phonetics is unknown, and there are varying opinions on how to classify the individual phonemes. In addition, because Egyptian is recorded over a full 2,000 years, the Archaic and Late stages being separated by the amount of time that separates Old Latin from Modern Italian , significant phonetic changes must have occurred during that lengthy time frame. Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants. Egyptian also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afroasiatic languages, but exactly how

8787-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

8888-599: The same graphemes are used for the pulmonic stops ( ⟨ ⲧ ϫ ⲕ ⟩ ), the existence of the former may be inferred because the stops ⟨ ⲡ ⲧ ϫ ⲕ ⟩ /p t c k/ are allophonically aspirated [pʰ tʰ cʰ kʰ] before stressed vowels and sonorant consonants. In Bohairic, the allophones are written with the special graphemes ⟨ ⲫ ⲑ ϭ ⲭ ⟩ , but other dialects did not mark aspiration: Sahidic ⲡⲣⲏ , Bohairic ⲫⲣⲏ 'the sun'. Thus, Bohairic does not mark aspiration for reflexes of older *d ḏ g q : Sahidic and Bohairic ⲧⲁⲡ */dib/ 'horn'. Also,

8989-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

9090-433: The script was supplanted by an early version of Coptic (about the third and fourth centuries), the system remained virtually unchanged. Even the number of signs used remained constant at about 700 for more than 2,000 years. Middle Egyptian was spoken for about 700 years, beginning around 2000 BC, during the Middle Kingdom and the subsequent Second Intermediate Period . As the classical variant of Egyptian, Middle Egyptian

9191-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

9292-480: The southern Saidic dialect, the main classical dialect, and the northern Bohairic dialect, currently used in Coptic Church services. Most surviving texts in the Egyptian language are written on stone in hieroglyphs . The native name for Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is zẖꜣ n mdw-nṯr ("writing of the gods' words"). In antiquity, most texts were written on the quite perishable medium of papyrus though

9393-619: The spoken language of the time, similar to the use of classical Middle Egyptian during the Ptolemaic Period. Coptic is the name given to the late Egyptian vernacular when it was written in a Greek-based alphabet, the Coptic alphabet; it flourished from the time of Early Christianity (c. 31/33–324) , but Egyptian phrases written in the Greek alphabet first appeared during the Hellenistic period c.  3rd century BC , with

9494-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

9595-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

9696-644: The values given to those consonants by the neuere Komparatistik , instead connecting ⟨ꜥ⟩ with Semitic /ʕ/ and /ɣ/ . Both schools agree that Afroasiatic */l/ merged with Egyptian ⟨n⟩ , ⟨r⟩ , ⟨ꜣ⟩ , and ⟨j⟩ in the dialect on which the written language was based, but it was preserved in other Egyptian varieties. They also agree that original */k g ḳ/ palatalise to ⟨ṯ j ḏ⟩ in some environments and are preserved as ⟨k g q⟩ in others. The Egyptian language has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots, in contrast to

9797-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

9898-428: Was published by Adolf Erman in 1894, surpassed in 1927 by Alan Gardiner 's work. Middle Egyptian has been well-understood since then, although certain points of the verbal inflection remained open to revision until the mid-20th century, notably due to the contributions of Hans Jakob Polotsky . The Middle Egyptian stage is taken to have ended around the 14th century BC, giving rise to Late Egyptian. This transition

9999-479: Was recorded; or the Afroasiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semitocentric approach; or, as G. W. Tsereteli suggests, Afroasiatic is a sprachbund , rather than a true genetic language family. The Egyptian language can be grouped thus: The Egyptian language is conventionally grouped into six major chronological divisions: Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian were all written using both

10100-530: Was taking place in the later period of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (known as the Amarna Period ). Original Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian texts were still used after the 14th century BCE. And an emulation of predominately Middle Egyptian, but also with characteristics of Old Egyptian, Late Egyptian and Demotic, called " Égyptien de tradition " or "Neo-Middle Egyptian" by scholars,

10201-606: Was used as a literary language for new texts since the later New Kingdom in official and religious hieroglyphic and hieratic texts in preference to Late Egyptian or Demotic. Égyptien de tradition as a religious language survived until the Christianisation of Roman Egypt in the 4th century. Late Egyptian was spoken for about 650 years, beginning around 1350 BC, during the New Kingdom of Egypt . Late Egyptian succeeded but did not fully supplant Middle Egyptian as

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