I am doing research on the ancient Egyptian (Kemetic) gods, and am currently working on Sobek (Sbk). This made me wonder what the word for crocodile is in ancient Egyptian. I have found db or dbj, and msha as the words for crocodile. Now I need to know what the plural forms are. Based on sites I have found online, [here|https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/hieroglyphs-tutorial2/], the possible plural for db would be db-w and msha would be msha-w. I am not well versed in ancient Egyptian, so this is just guess-work at this point. Can anyone confirm this if it is correct, or if it isn't, what is the right answer?
1 Answer
There's two "plurals" to consider: collective nouns and quantitative plurals
Collective nouns:
Quantitative plurals:
The Egyptians employed a number of methods to indicate that a word was plural. The most common is the plural determinative (three strokes). However, it is also common to find the determinative or logogram repeated three times. The single consonant sounds “w” and “u” also indicate that a noun is plural in hieroglyphs (while in english “boy” becomes “boys”, in hieroglyphs “sn” becomes “sn-w”). However, the sign is often omitted to save space.
You can apply the plural as indicated in the examples above to:
Note: all this is Middle-Egyptian
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Thank you, again, Codosaur! You always have great, knowledgeable answers! In fact you answered it in a way that I hadn't even thought of articulating. It is the collective term I was looking for, crocodiles as a species.– WalterCommented Jul 17, 2021 at 4:35
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