Wiktionary:About Demotic

This page describes policies and practices specific to Demotic entries on the English Wiktionary. These are in addition to Wiktionary’s overall standards which are listed at Entry layout explained. It is very much a work in progress, and you are encouraged to offer criticism, suggestions and other input.

“Demotic” (code  ) here is used in reference to the phase of Ancient Egyptian spoken between Late Egyptian and Coptic; for considerations on the demotic register of modern Greek, see About Greek.

Script
The Demotic script is not encoded in Unicode, and there is no expectation that it will be any time soon. For this reason, entries are lemmatized at their Latin-script transliteration. However, entries should also be provided with images of the term in the original script. These can be added to the headword template using the parameter. The most convenient way to input images of Demotic characters is via the template, which automatically converts certain glyph codes to images and puts them in proper right-to-left writing order; see the documentation of that template for details on how it’s done. As an example, the sequence of codes



input into the template produces the sequence of images



Transliteration
Wiktionary transliterates the uniliteral signs as follows:

Note that some characters are multivalent, e.g. can be either j or ḥ depending on the context. Also note the use of j rather than ꞽ, following German tradition and maintaining consistency with Wiktionary’s transliteration of hieroglyphic Egyptian (and incidentally circumventing the problems associated with using a character so recently encoded in Unicode as ꞽ).

Determinatives and phonetic complements are not ordinarily transliterated. However, when a phonetic complement’s transliteration conflicts with that of the sign it is complementing, precedence is given to the value suggested by the complement.

Historically two different styles of transliteration have been used for Demotic: one, the English system, based on the reconstructed pronunciation and closely tied to Coptic; and one, the German (or ‘historic’, or ‘historical-etymological’) system, based on the hieroglyphic origins of the Demotic signs and closely tied to classical Egyptian. At the 1979 Second International Congress of Egyptology, the community of Demotic scholars broadly settled on the second of these schemes, the historical-etymological one, though variation from author to author persists. Wiktionary consequently also broadly adheres to such a scheme, though with certain exceptions (see the section on t, d, ṯ, and ḏ below). This means that most multiliteral signs and ligatures are transliterated as their precursor hieroglyphs would be, except in all cases where phonetic complements indicate a changed pronunciation and take precedence.

Plurals
The plural marker is treated as a phonetic w rather than a determinative, and when it comes after the feminine marker  (t) it is always transliterated as if it came before it: thus  ‘(female) servant’ is transliterated bk.t but  ‘(female) servants’ is bk.wt, NOT bk.tw as might be expected.

t, d, ṯ, and ḏ
In many words that had ṯ or ḏ in Old Egyptian, these signs changed to t and d, respectively, from the Middle Egyptian period onward. By Demotic times the distinction between t and d had further been lost in all words, so that in many cases all four of these collapsed down to just t. In words where the choice of one of these transliterations is ambiguous, they should be transliterated as actually pronounced if this is known from e.g. Coptic – though t that has weakened to a glottal stop or vanished should still be rendered as t – and otherwise as they were in earlier Egyptian. They should never be transliterated as d in native words; the Demotic d is used for rendering foreign sounds and is not a continuation of earlier Egyptian d.

Morpheme division
Suffixes that are generally written after the determinative of the word they attach to are separated from the stem by a period/full stop ; note that, while this is the same rule Wiktionary uses for earlier Egyptian, it means that certain suffixes written without a full stop in Egyptian are now written with a full stop in Demotic. Thus the feminine suffix is transliterated in hieroglyphic Egyptian but  in Demotic, reflecting differences in the original script.

Suffix pronouns are not separated by a full stop but instead by a double oblique hyphen (⸗), as in the notation for Coptic pronominal states.

Suffixes and inflectional endings written before the determinative should not be separated. Phonetic complements written after the determinative that complement signs written before the determinative should also not be separated.

Proper nouns should be connected together with hyphens.

Sorting
The sorting order is (or should be) the same as the order given in the table of uniliteral signs above, except that ṱ is sorted as if it were t and h̭ is sorted as if it were ḫ. Thus, the order in its entirety is ꜣ j e ꜥ y w b p f m n r l h ḥ ḫ/h̭ ẖ s š q k g t/ṱ ṯ ḏ. d is not used in native words. The implementation of this is incomplete.

Pronunciation
By the time of Demotic the various changes in pronunciation that brought about the differences between the Coptic dialects were already well underway. Therefore, reconstructed pronunciations should specify which proto-dialect they represent using qualifiers in parentheses.