Ignorance and forgetfulness in Late Egyptian and Classical Egyptian from the New Kingdom until the 26th dynasty. A lexical study

Chantrain, Gaelle [UCL]

the conceptual domain of cognition in ancient egyptian is realized linguistically through nu- merous lexemes and expressions. following fortescue2, these lexical units can be organized around five pivot-concepts that appear to consistently emerge cross-linguistically and define subdomains within cognition. these subdomains are: knowing, understanding, intending, re- membering and thinking, to which a sixth notion attention3 has here been added. the present study focuses on three verbs with negative meanings in relation to the subdomains knowing and remembering: xm “be ignorant”, smx “forget” and mhj “be forgetful, forget”, as well as the negative constructions neg. + rx “not know”. the aim of this article is to show that the semantics of these lexical units are interconnected with contextual para-synonymy and com- plementarity relations.