Robert Ritner

Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

(This article was delivered at the Eighth International Congress for Demotic udies, held in W&uouml;rzburg, August 30, 2002, and will appear in a future volume of the proceedings of that congress.)

For scholars at Chicago's Oriental Institute, a grammatical study of some sort is almost inevitable. Today it is my turn, and I hope to keep my remarks brief, linguistically significant, and no more boring than absolutely necessary. This study is in response to a provocative article by Leo Depuydt, "On a Late Egyptian and Demotic Idiom," regarding a supposed "obsolescence of the copula" in common nominal predicates.