Agyptische Verbum_
(1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb in Egyptian
and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very
imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important
subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest
branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The
subject has been reviewed by Erman, _Die Flexion des agyptischen
Verbums_ in the _Sitzungsberichte_ of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The
Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next
turned its attention to lexicography. It has devised a scheme, founded
on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost
mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in
any text examined. Scholars in England, America and Denmark, as well
as in Germany, have taken part in this great enterprise, and though
the completion of it may be far off, the collections of classified
material already made are very valuable for consultation.[11] At
present Egyptologists depend on Heinrich Brugsch's admirable but
somewhat antiquated _Worterbuch_ and on Levi's useful but entirely
uncritical _Vocabolario_. Though demotic has not yet received serious
attention at Berlin, the influence of that great school has made
itself felt amongst demotists, especially in Switzerland, Germany,
America and England. The death of Heinrich Brugsch in 1895 was a very
severe blow to demotic studies; but it must be admitted that his
brilliant gifts lay in other directions than exact grammatical
analysis. Apart from their philological interest, as giving the
history of a remarkable language during a period of several thousand
years, the grammatical studies of the last quarter of the 19th century
and afterwards are beginning to bear fruit in regard to the exact
interpretation of historical documents on Egyptian monuments and
papyri. Not long ago the supposed meaning of these was extracted
chiefly by brilliant guessing, and the published translations of even
the best scholars could carry no guarantee of more than approximate
exactitude, where the sense depended at all on correct recognition of
the syntax. Now the translator proceeds in Egyptian with some of the
sureness with which he would deal with Latin or Greek. The meaning of
many words may be still unknown, and many constructions are still
obscure