House of the Scribe.

I started Lesson 3 in Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar book this week. This chapter is long and complex, filled with quite a few topics. Over the next few days, I may be describing some of them, more as a reference for me, but also for those of you who are following my progress.

Today’s topic is what Hoch terms “the Genitival Relationship” or more simply possession. No, not the demonic kind, just the ordinary grammatical sort of one thing (i.e. a noun or pronoun) possessing another. In English, I might say, “John’s book,” or “her cat,” or “the sword of Damocles.” In all of those cases, there is a possessor (John, her, Damocles) and a possessed (book, cat, sword). Notice that there are three ways that I can express possession, I can add an ending to a noun (‘s), I can use a possessive adjective (like her), or I can use a preposition to from a possessive prepositional phrase (“the sword of Damocles.” “The car belongs to me.” “The girl with the dragon tattoo.”)

Middle Egyptian also has a few different ways to express possession. The first, the direct genitive (or bound construction) where two nouns are placed next to each other. Unlike in English, the thing possessed comes first and the thing possessing comes second. Schematically, as the moderator of my GlyphStudy discussion group put it, the direct genitive consists of two nouns juxtaposed, AB, where B possesses A. That is “the A of B” or “B‘s A.”

So, means the “house of the scribe” or “the scribe’s house.”

The other way of expressing possession is the indirect genitive (or genitival adjective). This is analogous to the possessive prepositional phrase in English. It makes use of something called a nisba adjective (not covered in full detail yet in the text) derived from the preposition which means “belonging to” or “of.” To make things more “fun” the same preposition is also used to mean “to” or “for” (the dative, used as, for example an indirect object in English like “he gave John the ball,” or “he gave the ball to John.”) Context determines whether is a genitival adjective or dative.

So, also means “the house of the scribe” or “the scribe’s house” (or even, “the house belonging to the scribe.”)

One last complication, the genitival adjective has inflected forms (or is declined, for those who have studied Latin or Greek):

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular
Plural
Dual