Language Contact Studies between Africa and Asia Arabic and the Ancient Egyptian Language: An Approach of the Configuration of the History of Language Development Exemplified by Strata of the Afro-Asiatic and Semitic Language Families

Abstract

This article is interested in the development of language as a human feature and a historical development linguists classify using specific classifications of ‘strata’ to indicate dominant and recessive language types in language contact situations. The influence of the ancient Egyptian language, which had words, that we can still find with slight phonetic changes in contemporary Arabic is a paradigm for the study in the development of language. But these linguistic findings are also the ground for questioning the positions and theories on mainstream research positions. This discussion we will have after the presentation of our findings. The corpus of this study consists of 2900 entries in the Project Tower of Babel of Semitic words. The words of this corpus that have a corresponding word in contemporary Arabic are presented. The distinction between the Afroasiatic and the Semitic language families is a basic assumption in linguistics. Egyptian is classified as an Afroasiatic language, while Arabic is a Semitic language.