The Negation of the so-called ‘the Second Tense’ in Middle Egyptian

Document Type : Original Article

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Abstract

In linguistic dictionaries (English, French, German, Arabic, etc..), there is no existence for the second tense, this term was established by Polotsky (Polotsky, H.J., Études de syntaxe copte, Publications de la Société d' Archéologie Copte, Le Caire, 1944), according to his theory, the second tense is a nominalized verb form, and usually used as a noun clause; referring to the subject before the focused adverbial phrase. On one hand, the second tense form is a special case of ‘relative forms’ use. Therefore, on the other hand, it is actually not a tense, but rather use of grammar element. It is simple, one can say the second tense is equal to (Restriction form by innama) in Arabic. As for Arabic and Ancient Egyptian are relating to the same Language family ‘Afro-asiatic family’, one expected that they at least have more or less the same main linguistic terms. In the article, I try to give a general idea about the meaning of the so-called ‘Second Tense’, and its important usages. Moreover, the article focuses on the negation of the so-called "Second Tense."
The point of departure of the article was an investigation of the negative particles according to their appearance in various sentence patterns, I found that some particles are limited to negate the adverbial adjunct of the sentence,  whereas others negate the verb itself.

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