Language, Semantics, and Cognition in Ancient Egypt and Beyond

This collected volume gathers articles stemming from the papers presented at the international and interdisciplinary conference Language, semantics and cognition. Saying and conceptualizing the world from Ancient Egypt to modern times, organized at Yale university (online) on April 16-18, 2021. It offers a glimpse at the current state of research in different fields intersecting with the study of the Egyptian language (lexical semantics, semantic typology, visual semiotics, metaphor studies, cognitive linguistics, classifiers studies) and addresses some main research questions for the future. It lays the foundations of a methodological road map for more effective interdisciplinary research.

The studies included in this volume explore the link between the cognitive level (What are the conceptual categories in which the real is divided? How are they organized?) and the linguistic and written/visual level (How are these concepts expressed in the language/script?) through various themes. They allow for a comparison of the results obtained from different perspectives and approaches and for highlighting the differences and/or similarities that can be found cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, in pre-modern and modern languages.

A major aim of the volume is to stress the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of pre-modern languages and stress the importance of making data from these languages and their scripts accessible to scholars from other fields, in order to integrate them in a broader scientific dialogue.