Egyptian loanwords in Somali languages

The linguistic similarities between Ancient Egypt and the Somali language

is fascinating 

African languages are old. Some of them are so old that they (seem to) contain loanwords from the old Egyptian language. Egyptian loanwords have been attested in Arabic and other Semitic languages but this case of African languages is less known.

One case of African languages that is under examination in this article is the Somali language. Many different languages are spoken in different parts of Africa, thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Two of them belong to different language families than Egyptian.

In the case of Somali, I have adhered to my own observations. Serious researches on the subject has not been made. The material is scarce, basically few items in each language. But those few words incontrovertibly hint at the early influence from Egyptian to these languages. So the idea of linguistic, and also cultural borrowing cannot be completely neglected, how implausible it might appear.

African languages have been documented quite recently, within decades. They are not the same languages any more than those spoken in times contemporaneous to the Ancient Egypt. It is possible that there has been even more languages bearing common vocabulary and other linguistic elements with Egyptian than what has remained hitherto. Singular words may be found also in other modern African languages than dealt in this article.

Ancient Egyptian is known only through hieroglyphic texts. The number of these texts is not big. Known vocabulary of this language is thus far from complete. So there may be even more (unrecognized) loanwords in African and other languages than gathered in this article. 

Hieroglyphs are essentially a form of consonantal writing. Thus wovels of this language are basically unknown. Guesses can be made with a help of other languages. ‘E’ has traditionally been the wovel used in transcription in uncertain cases. 

Ancient Egyptian has been under investigation now for a couple of centuries. The most comprehensive grammar is J.P. Allens Middle Egyptian. This is a good item to start to get acquainted with this language. 

SOMALI 

Somali belongs to the Cushitic branch of Afroasiatic languages. It is nowadays spoken in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia and northern Kenya. The number of native speakers is around 15 million.

The following words of the ancient Egyptian and modern Somali show remarkable resemblance to each other:

                        

                                               EGYPTIAN                                 SOMALI

Besides these few lexical items, Egyptian and Somali have one almost the same grammatical feature in common.

End.