Abstract :
[en] The goal of this paper is to explore different kinds of ‘mistakes’ in Late Egyptian texts. 'Mistakes' fall into two main categories: the ones that are emended by the ancient scribes themselves, making it visible that something went wrong, and the ones that are posited by modern scholars. In this lecture, we focus on the latter category in order to illustrate how linguistics can benefit to philology and vice versa: even if scribal mistakes are not uncommon (for accountancy, see Jassen 2005), taking variation seriously (Ragazzoli 2017, 2019) might advance our understanding of the ancient Egyptian linguistic system on the one hand and improve our text editions on the other. We study more specifically grammatical mistakes, i.e., exceptions to norms usually observed in Late Egyptian texts (understood as grammatical rules). Being generalization over empirical observations, rules are necessarily underdetermined, and new observations may lead to more complex (or at least different) rules (see the discussion about rara and rarissima in the field of linguistic typology, cf. Wohlgemuth & Cysouw 2010a & 2010b, with Grossman 2016 for an example in Coptic). The aim will be to account for such exceptions, either based on dia(-topic, -stratic, -phasic, etc.) explanations, or on a revision of current rules. The discussion targets specifically morphological and functional variations of the Conjunctive pattern (Gardiner 1928, Mattha 1947, Černý 1949, Wente 1962, Lichtheim 1964, Volten 1964, Ray 1973, Borghouts 1979, Loprieno 1980, Edwards 1981, Vergote 1982, Winand 1992, Kruchten 1994, Funk 1995, Shisha-Halevy 1995, Satzinger 1998, Winand 2001, Richter 2016).
