Thursday, March 10, 2011

Ad rem Aegyptiae intelligendam

One of the forms of the Egyptian verb, and one which we recently studied, is called the "pseudo-verbal" form. This consists of a limited number of prepositions followed by the Egyptian "infinitive". The citation forms for the most common pseudo-verbals are transliterated conventionally as "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm". Although it is difficult to describe concisely an English structural parallel, students of the Romulan tongue might find a better comparison between the Egyptian pseudo-verbal form and the Latin gerundive.

In this case, the Egyptian forms "Hr sDm", "m sDm", and "r sDm" correspond (with due allowance for prepositional semantics) to the Latin forms "de aliquo audiendo", "in aliquo audiendo", and "ad aliquid audiendum". The Latin trio, however, is crippled in its syntactical ability compared to that of the Egyptian, which can support a complex noun phrase.

Since the meanings of the constructions differ, I am presenting this as a mnemonic rather than a detailed grammatical analysis.

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