Conference Presentations by Maxim N . Kupreyev
DARIAH Annual Event 2023: Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?, 2023
The project "The School of Salamanca" is creating a freely-accessible online collection of texts ... more The project "The School of Salamanca" is creating a freely-accessible online collection of texts produced in the intellectual centre of the Spanish monarchy during the 16th and 17th centuries. Currently 33 works have completed the production cycle (out of total 116) which includes TEI XML encoding, HTML export for the online access and full-text search, IIIF presentation APIs, PDF, and RDF export. The development of a sustainable workflow for the project has been influenced by the massive size of our textual collection and its unique features. In preparing editions of Early Modern Latin and Spanish texts it is crucial to take into account their inherent instability, i.e. heterogeneous structures, orthographic, typographical, and punctuation variations etc. Our editorial principles were therefore shaped by the necessity to trace and reproduce the development steps at any given moment; to reuse tools independent of the context and individual texts; to scale the complex processing tasks; to perform constant data quality checks, and to document the requirements and the results.
///
Salamanca’s workflow shares common ground with both Waterfall and Agile development techniques. The concept of pipeline, inherent to Waterfall, is in the centre of Salamanca’s editorial technique: the production on the edition consists of a number of steps executed sequentially, where the output of each stage serves as the input for the next one.
///
Digitization → Transcription in TEI TITE → Structural annotation → TEI transformation → Manual and automatic corrections → HTML, PDF, IIIF, and RDF generation.
///
The advantage of such a predefined sequence is its reproducibility, where each part of an editorial process can be restored at any time. It makes individual work steps traceable and enables comprehensive documentation in form of the program code and editorial guidelines.
///
In Agile, the software product is built in small chunks, and each of the development cycles includes feature clarification, design, coding, testing and deployment. For this purpose Agile integrates the software development, testing and operations teams in a single collaborative iterative process. In Salamanca’s adoption of Agile practises each of the above-mentioned development stages contains the definition of the requirements, development and quality assurance. This also means that each stage of the production of the digital edition delivers a part of the overall product features, which can be accessed and disseminated.
///
For example, the QA routines after step 1 - digitization of the print originals - allow us to publish the IIIF presentation manifests even before the TEI transcription starts. IIIF manifests are later enriched with additional data, pertaining to chapters and pagination. The same applies to PDF generation – it was initially intended to be one of the export methods, located at the end of the workflow. Yet, when implemented, it exposed a number of semantic and structural inconsistencies of the source XML. We therefore decided to use PDF earlier in the pipeline as a diagnostic tool and data quality service. In our talk we will show how the sustainable editorial workflow, adapted for processing of large-scale textual sources, translates into the delivery of high-quality data.
Talks by Maxim N . Kupreyev
According to Sahle (2017) digital editions are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, meth... more According to Sahle (2017) digital editions are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method, and practice, and thus “cannot be given in print without significant loss of content and functionality”. This talk touches upon the challenges of printing TEI XML datasets, but also highlights a useful diagnostic value of the PDF export for the data quality. PDF output, indeed, represents only a part of the encoded information, but it can play an essential role in data curation and quality assurance.
Fragen werden meistens zu Informationszwecken gestellt. Es gibt auch Sätze, die als Fragen formul... more Fragen werden meistens zu Informationszwecken gestellt. Es gibt auch Sätze, die als Fragen formuliert werden, die aber zu anderen pragmatischen Kategorien gehören, wie Aufforderungen
oder Bitten. Die alten Ägypter fragten oft über Person (nym:“wer?“), Sache (jx: “was?“; jT:“welches?“), Grund (r jx, Hr jx: „warum?“), Art und Weise (mj jx: „wie?“), Ort (Tnw: „wo?“) und Maß (wr: „wie viel?/wie lange?“). Außerdem nutzten sie die Fragen zur Begrüßung: "Wie ist dein Zustand? Wie geht es dir?"(P. Northumberland 1, 2-3; 1,11). ALLERDINGS GIBT ES EINE – FÜR MODERNE KOMMUNIKATION ESSENTIELLE - KATEGORIE DER FRAGESÄTZE, DIE IM NEUÄGYPTISCHEN FEHLT: ZEITFRAGEN. Der einzig bekannte Beleg für „wann“ wird in die 2. Zwischenzeit
datiert (P. Westcar 9,15). Erst zwei Jahrtausende später tritt „wann?“ wieder auf - als tnau im Koptischen (Till §441).
Ist die Seltenheit der Zeitfragen im Ägyptischen ein Ergebnis mangelnder Quellenlage? Oder ist sie kulturell bedingt? In diesem Vortrag gehe ich auf die Problematik der Zeitfragen genauer ein.
Egyptian language displays the capacity to express complex ideas with sophisticated grammatical t... more Egyptian language displays the capacity to express complex ideas with sophisticated grammatical tools. One such tool, normally used to obtain information, is a question or interrogative sentence.
The analysis of interrogative patterns in Late Egyptian shows the incredible variety of questions, used to inquire about matter, reason, manner, measure, place, person and state/condition. There is one category, however, which is very rare in Late Egyptian: questions of time.
""First appearance of emphatic demonstratives pA, tA, nA in tomb inscriptions of the Dynasty VI a... more ""First appearance of emphatic demonstratives pA, tA, nA in tomb inscriptions of the Dynasty VI and their rapid expansion during the Middle Kingdom signals the emergence of a hitherto hidden grammatical category, definiteness. It is expressed by the definite article, which marks the noun as known in discourse. Once the definite article is grammaticalized and starts being used with a priori definite nouns like pA nTr wa “the sole god” or pA HqA “the ruler” (Dynasty XVIII) the indefinite article appears. Often neglected in Egyptology, further article development in Demotic and Coptic shows that another function becomes more prominent: a nominalizing one. Attached to a relative phrase article creates a new noun, which can be further determined. Coptic words with “double” articles like xenpetnanouf “some good deeds” or ppetouaab “the saint” prove that “article + relative phrase” constructions were perceived as nouns. The appearance of articles in Egyptian poses fundamental questions:
Why does article appear in the first case? How was definiteness expressed in Egyptian before article arrived? Is the article was “born” can it also disappear?""
Papers by Maxim N . Kupreyev
Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, 2024
This article discusses the challenges of printing TEI XML data sets, and highlights a useful diag... more This article discusses the challenges of printing TEI XML data sets, and highlights a useful diagnostic value of PDF export for data quality. PDF output, indeed, renders only a part of the encoded information, but it can expose problems pertaining to the semantic accuracy and consistency, syntactic compliance, and completeness of the data. The uncovered problems are presented as possessing three dimensions: internal (the compliance of XML code with data models and schemata), external (the consistency of the print output in rendering the original), and contextual (arising from the interaction of XML with the transformation scenarios). These dimensions help to provide the definition of an error in the context of scholarly digital editions—both retro-digitized and originally digital. The article examines the extended skill set required of quality assurance specialists in social sciences and humanities (SSH) as compared to their industrial counterparts. It also places PDF production within the Agile testing framework, which aims to capture and eliminate defects in the early stages of product development.
"The analysis of interrogative patterns in Late Egyptian shows the great variety of question... more "The analysis of interrogative patterns in Late Egyptian shows the great variety of questions, which can be roughly subdivided into general (expecting the answer yes/no) and special ones (asking for particular information). Special questions were used to inquire about subject and matter, reason, manner, measure, place, person and state/condition. However, there is one category, which is extremely rare in Late Egyptian: questions of time. This fact is especially intriguing as Egyptian possesses extensive vocabulary for dating and inscriptions from as far back as Dynasty IV prove that civil calendar was used in non-royal and non-religious contexts."
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The diction... more We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
BRILL eBooks, Dec 13, 2022
BRILL eBooks, Dec 13, 2022
BRILL eBooks, Dec 13, 2022
BRILL eBooks, Dec 13, 2022
CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, Sep 21, 2022
Studies in Ancient Art and Civilisation, Dec 30, 2014
Sortieren – Edieren – Kreieren. Zwischen Handschriftenfunden und Universitätsalltag. Stephen L. Emmel zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, 2022
The collection of Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum in Baltimore, USA preserves a wo... more The collection of Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum in Baltimore, USA preserves a wooden tablet containing a Coptic inscription. A brief note about the tablet was issued in the “Proceedings of the American Oriental Society, at its meeting in Boston, Mass., May 7th, 1890,” dubbed by its authors as the first publication of a Coptic text in the US. It is one of several Coptic tabulae inscribed with psalms, preserved in museums around the world. As I describe, translate, and provide parallels to the Baltimore item, I draw conclusions about its context and function. The investigation also allowed me to collate the tablets Biblioteca del Vaticano, inv. Copt. 6 and the private Schøyen Collection, inv. MS 1760/1, which were once a single document containing Ps 49. It is my privilege to offer the present study in tribute to Stephen Emmel, whose name over the course of his illustrious career has become synonymous with Coptology.
Refubium - Repositorium der Freien Universität Berlin, Jul 24, 2020
TEI XML compliant “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon v1.2” including both original Egyptian-Coptic lem... more TEI XML compliant “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon v1.2” including both original Egyptian-Coptic lemmata and loanwords from ancient Greek. Joint release of the BBAW Academy research project “Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache”, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin and the “Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC)” project, Freie Universität Berlin. The major changes and new features are:
- Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms: they are now used with collocated prepositions and adverbs only, e.g. ⲁⲗⲉ (ⲉϩⲣⲁⲓ).
- Optimized data structure (e.g., <sense> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
- Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
- Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
- Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of senses.
- Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
- Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.
- Search for word form IDs (CF...) activated.
Refubium - Repositorium der Freien Universität Berlin, May 12, 2019
TEI XML compliant “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon” including original Egyptian-Coptic lemmata and l... more TEI XML compliant “Comprehensive Coptic Lexicon” including original Egyptian-Coptic lemmata and loanwords from ancient Greek. Joint release of the BBAW Academy research project “Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache”, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin and the “Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC)” project, Freie Universität Berlin. It comes with the following features:
- Version 3 of the BBAW lexicon of Coptic Egyptian with a number of issues resolved.
- Version 1 of the DDGLC lexicon of Greek loan words in Coptic.
- New TLA TEI XML headers.-Extended TLA TEI XML Schema.
Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, Aug 2018
We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The diction... more We describe a new project publishing a freely available online dictionary for Coptic. The dictionary encompasses comprehensive cross-referencing mechanisms, including linking entries to an online scanned edition of Crum’s Coptic Dictionary, internal cross-references and etymological information, translated searchable definitions in English, French and German, and linked corpus data which provides frequencies and corpus look-up for headwords and multiword expressions. Headwords are available for linking in external projects using a REST API. We describe the challenges in encoding our dictionary using TEI XML and implementing linking mechanisms to construct a Web interface querying frequency information, which draw on NLP tools to recognize inflected forms in context. We evaluate our dictionary’s coverage using digital corpora of Coptic available online.
Uploads
Conference Presentations by Maxim N . Kupreyev
///
Salamanca’s workflow shares common ground with both Waterfall and Agile development techniques. The concept of pipeline, inherent to Waterfall, is in the centre of Salamanca’s editorial technique: the production on the edition consists of a number of steps executed sequentially, where the output of each stage serves as the input for the next one.
///
Digitization → Transcription in TEI TITE → Structural annotation → TEI transformation → Manual and automatic corrections → HTML, PDF, IIIF, and RDF generation.
///
The advantage of such a predefined sequence is its reproducibility, where each part of an editorial process can be restored at any time. It makes individual work steps traceable and enables comprehensive documentation in form of the program code and editorial guidelines.
///
In Agile, the software product is built in small chunks, and each of the development cycles includes feature clarification, design, coding, testing and deployment. For this purpose Agile integrates the software development, testing and operations teams in a single collaborative iterative process. In Salamanca’s adoption of Agile practises each of the above-mentioned development stages contains the definition of the requirements, development and quality assurance. This also means that each stage of the production of the digital edition delivers a part of the overall product features, which can be accessed and disseminated.
///
For example, the QA routines after step 1 - digitization of the print originals - allow us to publish the IIIF presentation manifests even before the TEI transcription starts. IIIF manifests are later enriched with additional data, pertaining to chapters and pagination. The same applies to PDF generation – it was initially intended to be one of the export methods, located at the end of the workflow. Yet, when implemented, it exposed a number of semantic and structural inconsistencies of the source XML. We therefore decided to use PDF earlier in the pipeline as a diagnostic tool and data quality service. In our talk we will show how the sustainable editorial workflow, adapted for processing of large-scale textual sources, translates into the delivery of high-quality data.
Talks by Maxim N . Kupreyev
oder Bitten. Die alten Ägypter fragten oft über Person (nym:“wer?“), Sache (jx: “was?“; jT:“welches?“), Grund (r jx, Hr jx: „warum?“), Art und Weise (mj jx: „wie?“), Ort (Tnw: „wo?“) und Maß (wr: „wie viel?/wie lange?“). Außerdem nutzten sie die Fragen zur Begrüßung: "Wie ist dein Zustand? Wie geht es dir?"(P. Northumberland 1, 2-3; 1,11). ALLERDINGS GIBT ES EINE – FÜR MODERNE KOMMUNIKATION ESSENTIELLE - KATEGORIE DER FRAGESÄTZE, DIE IM NEUÄGYPTISCHEN FEHLT: ZEITFRAGEN. Der einzig bekannte Beleg für „wann“ wird in die 2. Zwischenzeit
datiert (P. Westcar 9,15). Erst zwei Jahrtausende später tritt „wann?“ wieder auf - als tnau im Koptischen (Till §441).
Ist die Seltenheit der Zeitfragen im Ägyptischen ein Ergebnis mangelnder Quellenlage? Oder ist sie kulturell bedingt? In diesem Vortrag gehe ich auf die Problematik der Zeitfragen genauer ein.
The analysis of interrogative patterns in Late Egyptian shows the incredible variety of questions, used to inquire about matter, reason, manner, measure, place, person and state/condition. There is one category, however, which is very rare in Late Egyptian: questions of time.
Why does article appear in the first case? How was definiteness expressed in Egyptian before article arrived? Is the article was “born” can it also disappear?""
Papers by Maxim N . Kupreyev
- Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms: they are now used with collocated prepositions and adverbs only, e.g. ⲁⲗⲉ (ⲉϩⲣⲁⲓ).
- Optimized data structure (e.g., <sense> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
- Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
- Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
- Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of senses.
- Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
- Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.
- Search for word form IDs (CF...) activated.
- Version 3 of the BBAW lexicon of Coptic Egyptian with a number of issues resolved.
- Version 1 of the DDGLC lexicon of Greek loan words in Coptic.
- New TLA TEI XML headers.-Extended TLA TEI XML Schema.
///
Salamanca’s workflow shares common ground with both Waterfall and Agile development techniques. The concept of pipeline, inherent to Waterfall, is in the centre of Salamanca’s editorial technique: the production on the edition consists of a number of steps executed sequentially, where the output of each stage serves as the input for the next one.
///
Digitization → Transcription in TEI TITE → Structural annotation → TEI transformation → Manual and automatic corrections → HTML, PDF, IIIF, and RDF generation.
///
The advantage of such a predefined sequence is its reproducibility, where each part of an editorial process can be restored at any time. It makes individual work steps traceable and enables comprehensive documentation in form of the program code and editorial guidelines.
///
In Agile, the software product is built in small chunks, and each of the development cycles includes feature clarification, design, coding, testing and deployment. For this purpose Agile integrates the software development, testing and operations teams in a single collaborative iterative process. In Salamanca’s adoption of Agile practises each of the above-mentioned development stages contains the definition of the requirements, development and quality assurance. This also means that each stage of the production of the digital edition delivers a part of the overall product features, which can be accessed and disseminated.
///
For example, the QA routines after step 1 - digitization of the print originals - allow us to publish the IIIF presentation manifests even before the TEI transcription starts. IIIF manifests are later enriched with additional data, pertaining to chapters and pagination. The same applies to PDF generation – it was initially intended to be one of the export methods, located at the end of the workflow. Yet, when implemented, it exposed a number of semantic and structural inconsistencies of the source XML. We therefore decided to use PDF earlier in the pipeline as a diagnostic tool and data quality service. In our talk we will show how the sustainable editorial workflow, adapted for processing of large-scale textual sources, translates into the delivery of high-quality data.
oder Bitten. Die alten Ägypter fragten oft über Person (nym:“wer?“), Sache (jx: “was?“; jT:“welches?“), Grund (r jx, Hr jx: „warum?“), Art und Weise (mj jx: „wie?“), Ort (Tnw: „wo?“) und Maß (wr: „wie viel?/wie lange?“). Außerdem nutzten sie die Fragen zur Begrüßung: "Wie ist dein Zustand? Wie geht es dir?"(P. Northumberland 1, 2-3; 1,11). ALLERDINGS GIBT ES EINE – FÜR MODERNE KOMMUNIKATION ESSENTIELLE - KATEGORIE DER FRAGESÄTZE, DIE IM NEUÄGYPTISCHEN FEHLT: ZEITFRAGEN. Der einzig bekannte Beleg für „wann“ wird in die 2. Zwischenzeit
datiert (P. Westcar 9,15). Erst zwei Jahrtausende später tritt „wann?“ wieder auf - als tnau im Koptischen (Till §441).
Ist die Seltenheit der Zeitfragen im Ägyptischen ein Ergebnis mangelnder Quellenlage? Oder ist sie kulturell bedingt? In diesem Vortrag gehe ich auf die Problematik der Zeitfragen genauer ein.
The analysis of interrogative patterns in Late Egyptian shows the incredible variety of questions, used to inquire about matter, reason, manner, measure, place, person and state/condition. There is one category, however, which is very rare in Late Egyptian: questions of time.
Why does article appear in the first case? How was definiteness expressed in Egyptian before article arrived? Is the article was “born” can it also disappear?""
- Standardized use of parentheses “( )” in word forms: they are now used with collocated prepositions and adverbs only, e.g. ⲁⲗⲉ (ⲉϩⲣⲁⲓ).
- Optimized data structure (e.g., <sense> element now contains a unique ID, facilitating the ongoing work on linking CCL to the databases of semantic relations such as Coptic WordNet).
- Correction of orthographic, grammatical and semantic information of the existing entries and addition of new entries.
- Linking to Perseus Greek morphology tool via the Greek head words. DDGLC lemma IDs are now displayed in the entry view of Coptic Dictionary Online.
- Improved usability of the section of Greek loanwords due to exclusion or change of a number of senses.
- Link to attestation search for nouns filtered by entity-type (e.g., search for ⲟⲩⲟⲛ standing for a person, an animal, or an inanimate object) in Coptic Scriptorium.
- Phrase network visualization of most common word sequences containing nouns, verbs and prepositions.
- Search for word form IDs (CF...) activated.
- Version 3 of the BBAW lexicon of Coptic Egyptian with a number of issues resolved.
- Version 1 of the DDGLC lexicon of Greek loan words in Coptic.
- New TLA TEI XML headers.-Extended TLA TEI XML Schema.
pA / tA / nA in northern Egyptian letters of the 6th Dynasty and their absence from southern Egyptian sources indicates the growing difference between the language variants spoken in these broadly defined regions. Originating from the Old Egyptian pronominal stems p- / t- / n-, the use of these new demonstratives expands rapidly during the Middle Kingdom. In their weak form as definite articles, they indicate that a noun is known in discourse and thus signal a hitherto hidden grammatical category – definiteness. Once the definite article is grammaticalised and starts to be used with a priori definite nouns such as pA nTr wa ‘the sole god’ or pA HqA ‘the ruler’ (18th Dynasty), the indefinite article appears. The further development in Demotic and Coptic shows that the article was on the way to becoming a noun marker. When attached to a relative phrase, it created a new noun, which could be further determined (xenpetnanouf ‘some good deeds’, ppetouaab ‘the saint’). The following article traces the regional origins of the definite article as well as the main principles governing their development.
In order to define the features of the Old Kingdom demonstratives, I provide an in-depth introduction into the current methods of analysis of deixis and specificity. I further summarize the Egyptological research, dedicated to the demonstratives in Old Egyptian. Although the temporal frames of this study are confined to Old Kingdom, I deal extensively with the category of determination in Middle Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. I extend the reviews with the commentaries, and introduce the original topics, such as determiner compatibilities and syntactic specificity effects. In preparation for the analysis of demonstratives in the Old Kingdom I provide the diachronic, diaphasic, and diastratic features of the core textual records.
The analysis section embraces the typological and diatopic traits of Old Kingdom demonstratives, supplemented by the overview of the grammaticalization patterns of Afro-Asiatic deictic roots. I demonstrate the presence of two competing deictic systems in the Old Kingdom Egypt: one based on the joint attentional focus of the interlocutors, operating with "pn" as attention shifter and "pw" as attention tracker; and an alternative one, relying on the distance contrast, utilizing "pf" for a distal referent and "pn" for a proximal referent. The attentional system is visibly in decline in the literary discourse, the process possibly triggered by the arrival of the emphatic "pf". It persists, however, in the colloquial stratum, as manifested by the emergence of the recognitional "pȝ", "tȝ", "nȝ". The morphological features suggest that these are the allomorphs of the attention trackers "pw", "tw", "nw", as proven by the change "w" → "ȝ" in deictic and non-deictic lexemes containing the final "w". I put forward the hypothesis that strong variants of "pȝ", "tȝ", "nȝ", initially not distinguished from weak forms in writing, should have appeared after the proclitic forms were able to obtain stress. Syntactic features uncover the mechanism behind the pronominal conversion – the shift of enclitic demonstratives to the pre-nominal position. I challenge the established opinion that this front-movement was emphatic and conditioned by the “pusuit for expressivity”. The explanation, in my opinion, lies rather in a larger prosodic context, extending beyond the core phrase noun + demonstrative. My data show that demonstratives could be drawn to the front, abiding to the Wackernagel law, which demanded clitics to follow the first stressed unit in a sentence, e.g. verbs in the imperative. The prosodic features of the construction N + pw/tw + relative phrase, on the other hand, had an opposite effect: in it the enclitic pw/tw was detached from the noun to join a following prosodic unit of the relative phrase. This is the source construction for the strong pA/tA, as it allows demonstrative to obtain accentuation under the conditions of the “rule of three syllables”.
Further, I consider the question why the bespoken grammatical phenomena were only sporadically attested in the literary sources of the Old Kingdom. I establish the comparative concepts to attribute the deictic features to the regions of Egypt, broadly defined as North and South. The deictic system of joint attention with "pn"/"pw", the non-emphatic leftward movement of enclitic "pw", and the “rule of three syllables” could be assigned to the northern dialects. The spatial deictic system with "pn" and "pf", the fixed post-nominal position of the demonstratives, and the early adoption of the “rule of two syllables” characterized the southern linguistic type. The demonstrative "pf" was a relative newcomer in the North, while "pȝ", being the pragmatic and morphological development of "pw", gradually extended its outreach to the South. This pattern suggests that the Northern dialects shaped – at least in terms of deictica – the concept of a “literary norm” in Early Old Egyptian. The Old and Middle Egyptian standards were the product of the southern linguistic turn, occurring during the Fifth Dynasty. Lastly, my analysis places Egyptian in a wider Afro-Asiatic linguistic context, tracing the Afro-Asiatic deictic roots as source morphemes for Egyptian demonstratives, personal and relative pronouns, non-verbal copulas and focus particles.
In conclusion, I juxtapose the results of my study with some of the established tenets of article grammaticalization. I propose to reconsider the role of distance-related features and the acquisition of semantic definiteness for article development. Instead, I suggest that the system of joint attention provides a more fitting cognitive explanation for the genesis of the define article.