Language
The Egyptian language, which formed a separate branch among the family of Afro-Asiatic languages, was among the first written languages, and is known from hieroglyphic inscriptions preserved on monuments and sheets of papyrus. The Coptic language, the last stage of Egyptian, is today the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Hieroglyphs were written on peoples front doors, so that the news of the pharaoh would travel to everyone.
The "Koiné" dialect of the Greek language was important in Hellenistic Alexandria, and was used in the philosophy and science of that culture, and was later studied by Arabic scholars.
Arabic came to Egypt in the 7th century, and Egyptian Arabic has become today the modern speech of the country. Of the many varieties of Arabic, it is the most widely spoken second dialect, due to the influence of Egyptian cinema and media throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
In the lower Nile Valley, around Kom Ombo and Aswan, there are about 300,000 speakers of Nubian languages, mainly Nobiin, but also Kenuzi-Dongola. The Berber languages are represented by Siwi, spoken by about 5,000 around the Siwa Oasis. There are over a million speakers of the Domari language (an Indo-Aryan language related to Romany), mostly living north of Cairo, and there are about 60,000 Greek speakers in Alexandria. Approximately 77,000 speakers of Bedawi (a Beja language) live in the Eastern Desert.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Egypt
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)