Sentences without a verb for being

English normally uses “is”, “am” or “are” in statements such as “The house is beautiful”. Middle Egyptian can express comparable statements without a separate verb meaning “to be”. Identify the subject and what is said about it, called the predicate. ¹⁵

Identity and classification

A nominal predicate identifies or classifies the subject. In jnk sš, “I am a scribe”, jnk is the independent pronoun “I” and sš supplies the classification “scribe”. English needs “am”, but there is no separate Egyptian word for it in this construction. ¹⁶

Another common pattern uses pw after a nominal predicate. In sš pw, “He is a scribe” or “It is a scribe”, the surrounding text supplies the reference. Learn this sentence pattern as a whole; avoid treating pw as a universal equivalent of English “is”. ¹⁶

Location and circumstance

An adverbial predicate gives information such as where someone is. In jw.s m pr, “She is in the house”, .s identifies the subject and m pr supplies the location. Here jw introduces the statement; it should not be translated mechanically as “is”. ¹⁷

Quality or description

A basic adjectival sentence places its predicate before a noun subject. Compare these two constructions:

In the basic adjectival predicate construction, the predicate uses the masculine singular form even with a feminine noun subject. This differs from the agreement of an adjective that modifies a noun directly. ^{9, 18}

Why word order matters

There is no single word order that explains every Egyptian sentence. First identify the sentence type, then analyse the positions of its words. The examples above show classification, location and quality expressed through different patterns.