[MUSIC] I wanted to talk now about ancient Egyptian grammar. It's really important to understand the grammar because without that, it's very hard to understand what they were writing. It's not just word after word, it actually follows a form and a structure. So one of the most important things to know is that in the earlier phases, the ancient Egyptians did not use the definite article. And that is the. They didn't write that, and it wasn't until the New Kingdom that they began to write it. It begins to appear towards the end of the Middle Kingdom and sporadically even earlier. But as a general rule, it does not occur in the earlier phases of the language. Once we know that, we would follow the form that we find in the earlier phases of the language to start with. And for example, we can talk about sentence structure. Well what is the sentence structure? Well most of the time, the subject of the sentence will be in the front, and most of the time the predicate, Is at the end. But that's not all the time. Sometimes we will have the predicate first, And then the subject. So when might that happen? Well, let's start with number one and then go to number two. This would occur in what we call non-verbal sentences. And that means a sentence which does not have a verb. In English that does not exist, but in other contemporary languages it does exist. So let's take a look at an example in English. The man is in the house. In English, it's very clear it has a verb, it's the verb is. But that doesn't really exist in ancient Egyptian. Because it must have been apparently quite clear that if you say the man in the house, it's to be understood as the man is in the house. So we would call this the non-verbal sentence pattern. There is another type. In English, the woman is my friend. In ancient Egyptian, it would be, the woman my friend. This is another type of the subject plus predicate, or in this case, what we would call an A = B sentence pattern. And because it's like a mathematical equation, B would also equal A. So in ancient Egyptian, you could understand a simple sentence like this as the woman is my friend or my friend is the woman. Either way, it's possible. So now, coming down to the second type, which is called the predicate plus the subject. That generally, although it's not exclusive to it, is when there is a real verb. So for example, if we have the verb say. So if we wanted to say he, or let's say, she says the name. In ancient Egyptian, it would actually be done, Says she the name. And here's where things get very important for you to remember the word order, because in ancient Egyptian, it's quite distinct. So in this case, you start out with the predicate, which is a verb, and here is the subject. And now you may remember this from sixth grade grammar, that I'm diagramming the sentence, but it helps you understand. So how would we do this in ancient Egyptian, well, I'm going to put what we call the transliteration, the sounding out, of how this might be. So jed S ren, jed mean says, S means she, and ren means name. I put that in parentheses because, as I said, it's not written during this time. So in order for us to translate this, literally it says, she the name. But we can then say in English, she says the name. The ancient Egyptians also had a way of negating sentences. So for example, if you wanted to say, Take the same sentence, She says the name, if we wanted to negate that, N for the negation, So this would probably be translated, she hasn't said the name. Now, suppose you wanted to make a question. The ancient Egyptian had a question mark, and it was written like this. They had more than one, but this was the major one, and it functions very similarly to our question mark. Suppose we wanted to make the sentence that we have, she, In English, if we wanted to question it, we would simply put a question mark here. And then when we repeat it we would say, she says the name? So that would indicate a question. In ancient Egyptian, this is what we have. But instead of putting it over here, the ancient Egyptians put it in the front, so, Same sentence. And it really means, does she say the name? There are all sorts of words, small words, that we call particles, that can help us understand the nature of the sentence. And in some cases be very helpful for us. And without them, we may not know whether it's an independent sentence, or a dependent clause, and a variety of other things. But this is only an introduction. If you are interested in learning more about the ancient Egyptian language and translation, there are several books that you could refer to that are listed as suggested readings.