DemotiÃÂ Egyptian language was the state of the Egyptian language from the seventh century BC to the fifth century AD. The formation and development of the Demotic language as a separate language from New Egyptian was strongly influenced by Aramaic and Ancient Greek.
As a stage in the continuing evolution of the Egyptian language that would eventually pass into the Coptic language, Bresciani (1986) divides the history of the Demotic language (as well as its script) into three periods:
Roman Demotic in particular exhibits a number of grammatical innovations that distinguishes it from earlier forms of Demotic, such as:
Like earlier phases of the Egyptian language, Demotic was written with a consonant-based script. These consonant-based graphemes form the basis for the reconstructions of Demotic consonants, as presented in the table below.
Demotic had definite and indefinite articles that exhibited a three-way distinction between gender and number.
Some examples:
In some specific cases, definite nouns could appear with no article, such as in expressions of time, or with body part nouns in a direct genitive construction:
The definite article could also combine with and a suffix pronoun to form possessives, which could be followed by a noun or appear alone. Some examples:
As with earlier periods of Egyptian, Demotic had a set of independent pronouns and another of dependent pronouns.
Independent pronouns in Demotic served in nominal sentences and cleft sentences, and had distinctions for person, number, and gender.
Dependent pronouns in Demotic served as pronominal direct objects following imperatives or conjugated verbs.
Demotic also had a set of interrogative pronouns, including and , both of which meant 'who?' or 'what?'.
Demotic had two types of simple prepositions: those that maintained a single form in all environments, and those that changed form if followed by a pronominal object. Those that had a single form included 'with, and', 'between', 'without', 'in', and 'over, upon'. Prepositions that changed form did so as in the table below.
Some examples of simple prepositions with nouns:
Demotic possessed a system of particles that worked with verbs and clauses in various functions. A table of some of these with their functions appears below.
A special group of particles, termed "sentence markers" or "converters", could appear at the beginning of a clause to modify the clause's function or meaning. These included the circumstantial converter , the relative converter , the second tense converter , and the imperfect converter .
Adverbs in Demotic included adverbs of quality, place, and time. Adverbs composed of a single word include 'here', 'where', and 'tomorrow'. Multiword adverbial expressions included 'outside', 'inside', 'yesterday', 'at night', and 'never'.
Among the monuments of a new daily language literature, comparing to the previous stages of the Egyptian language comes fairy genre, a fable. These fables were intimately entwined with the mythology and narrated the adventures of the mythological characters of the Egyptian religion. Leiden papyrus, dating from the I-II centuries BC, contains such fables.