Approximately in the middle of its lifespan, Egyptian underwent a shift in its verbal system, part of the difference between Egyptian I, comprising Old–Middle Egyptian, and Egyptian II, consisting of Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic (see Chapter 1, Section 1.2). Within each phase, historical developments in the verbal system are relatively linear; these are discussed in the present chapter and the next. Chapter 11 deals with the relationship between the verbal systems of the two phases.

Morphology

The verbal system of Egyptian I is primarily synthetic, depending on changes in verbal morphology to signal differences in meaning. This phase of the language has some nineteen different verb forms, which can be grouped into five categories.

Infinitivals

The category of infinitivals comprises forms that express the action of the verb without connotations of tense, aspect, mood, or voice. Three are commonly recognized as having specific syntactic functions: the infinitive, negatival complement, and complementary infinitive. Infinitivals have four forms: the verb root (ḥtp), root–t (ḥtpt), root–w (ḥtpw), and root–wt (ḥtpwt). For verbs such as ḥtp “become content,” which have more than one verbal noun, the distinction in meaning between the different forms is not always evident: all those cited above, for example, evidently mean something like “peace, contentment.”