Traditional Egyptian

English

Etymology

Calque of French égyptien de tradition.

Proper noun

Traditional Egyptian

1. (linguistics, history) Synonym of Neo-Middle Egyptian
   • 2002, László Török, The Image of the Ordered World in Ancient Nubian Art: The Construction of the Kushite Mind, 800 BC—300 AD, page 331:

     The principal concern of those who are interested in the texts of this period is the varying, and with time increasing, extent of the deviation of their language from Traditional Egyptian.

   • 2007, Elizabeth Frood, Biographical Texts from Ramessid Egypt, page 16:

     Monumental texts, in particular, tend to be composed in a more elevated and traditional register termed “Neo-Middle Egyptian” or “Traditional Egyptian (égyptien de tradition).” Biographical texts participate in this linguistic proliferation in complex ways, from the formal texts of Bakenkhons (no. 2), composed in “Traditional Egyptian,” to the mix of registers, from Middle Egyptian to Late Egyptian, in the biography of Samut (no. 11a; see 4.3).

   • 2016, Pascal Vernus, “Traditional Egyptian I (Dynamics)”, in Julie Stauder-Porchet, Andréas Stauder, Willeke Wendrich, editors, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, page 1:

     Traditional Egyptian I (Dynamics) [article title]

   • 2017, Antonio Loprieno, Matthias Müller, Sami Uljas, Non-Verbal Predication in Ancient Egyptian, page 2:

     For more than a millennium, Traditional Egyptian coexisted with the various stages of Later Egyptian (see below) in a situation of diglossia, maintaining the linguistic structures of the classical language, but displaying, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, an expansion of its graphic inventory.

Usage notes

Though this term has some currency, the equivalent French term égyptien de tradition is more commonly used by English-speaking Egyptologists.