emporary speech, but
preserves in the main the characteristics of the language of the Old
Kingdom.

_Middle and Late Egyptian._--These represent the vulgar speech of the
Middle and New Kingdoms respectively. The former is found chiefly in
tales, letters, &c., written in hieratic on papyri of the XIIIth Dynasty
to the end of the Middle Kingdom; also in some inscriptions of the
XVIIIth Dynasty. Late Egyptian is seen in hieratic papyri of the XVIIIth
to the XXIst Dynasties. The spelling of Late Egyptian is very
extraordinary, full of false etymologies, otiose signs, &c., the old
orthography being quite unable to adapt itself neatly to the profoundly
modified language; nevertheless, this clumsy spelling is expressive, and
the very mistakes are instructive as to the pronunciation.

_Demotic._--Demotic Egyptian seems to represent approximately the vulgar
speech of the Saite period, and is written in the "demotic" character,
which may be traced back to the XXVIth Dynasty, if not to a still
earlier time. With progressive changes, this form of the language is
found in documents reaching down to the fall of Paganism in the 4th
century A.D.[12] Under the later Ptolemies and the Roman rule documents
in Greek are more abundant than in demotic, and the language of the
ruling classes must have begun to penetrate the masses deeply.

_Coptic._--This, in the main, represents the popular language of early
Christian Egypt from the 3rd to perhaps the 10th century A.D., when the
growth of Coptic as a literary language must have ceased. The Greek
alphabet, reinforced by a few signs borrowed from demotic, rendered the
spoken tongue so accurately that four distinct, though closely allied,
dialects are readily distinguishable in Coptic MSS.; ample remains are
found of renderings of the Scriptures into all these dialects. The
distinctions between the dialects consist largely in pronunciation, but
extend also to the vocabulary, word-formation and syntax. Such
interchanges are found as _l_ for _r_, [Coptic: qima] (_k_, _ch_) for
[Coptic: dandia] (_dj_), final _i_ for final _e_, _a_ for _e_, _a_ for
_o_. Early in the 2nd century A.D., pagan Egyptians, or perhaps
foreigners settled in Egypt, essayed, as yet unskilfully, to write the
native language in Greek letters. This _Old Coptic_, as it is termed,
was still almost entirely free from Greek loan-words, and its strong
archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the literary language, even in
its mos