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

Language is in large part about the description of events occurring in the world around us. Relationships of different sorts may be perceived between those events. And some of these relationships can be expressed by specific verb forms–or by syntactic constructions involving specific verb forms. The present study examines this facet of the Egyptian and Coptic verbal systems in isolation, singling out three types of relationships between events and the linguistic means by which they are expressed. The first essay studies the verb form called conjunctive, arguing that the function of the conjunctive is to con-join 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 labeled conjunction, contiguity, and contingency. This study constitutes a significant advancement in our understanding of the ancient language of Egypt, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Egyptology, Coptology, and the Ancient Near East, as well as linguists, Byzantinists and Classicists.