- Relationship to other languages -

Situated in the north-eastern corner of the African continent, on the border with Asia, the Egyptian language evolved between two important linguistic families: the Semitic languages of the Near-East (Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, ...) and the Hamitic languages of Central- and North-Africa (Somali, Galla, Berber, ...). It is thus not surprising that the Egyptian language shows some similarities with both the Semitic and the Hamitic language groups. 

In general semantics, it shares with the Semitic languages the peculiarity that its word-stems (roots) are combinations of consonants, which in most cases are unchangeable.

Grammatical inflection and minor changes of meaning were probably contrived by changing the internal vowels, which were left unwritten.

More important differences of meaning are created by whole or partial duplication of the root, or by placing a special consonant before or after the root: 

• words beginning with s often denote a causative verb; for instance, the verb mn means "be established" and its derived form smn means "cause to be established", hence "establish"; qb means "to be cool", sqb means "to refresh", ...
• words beginning with m often denote a place; thus sDr means "to lie down" and msDr means "the place of lying down" hence "the ear"... This, however, does not imply that all words beginning with an m denote a place.
• the ending .t is used for feminine and abstract words in Egyptian, Arabic and many other Semitic languages.

There are also many similarities in the vocabulary itself. The following is a short list of some similarities between Ancient Egyptian words and words in several Semitic languages. Please note, however, that the representation of the Ancient Egyptian words is but a consonantal skeleton of the words as the Egyptians did not write any vowels.

Sometimes such semantic similarities are obscured by unobvious consonantal changes or by a changing in the order of the consonants. Thus the Ancient Egyptian word snb "be healthy" may berelated to the Arabic word salima where the Egyptian n has been transformed into the Arabic l and the b into m. 

This, however, does not mean that the language of the Ancient Egyptians was a mere combination of linguistic and semantic elements of the Semitic and Hamitic languages! It shows many of its own peculiarities that belong to neither linguistic families and that can only be explained if it were part of yet another linguistic family: the Hamo-Semitic languages.