enclitics

Mah dadgum book, which doesn't even pop out, keeps saying "enclitics" and then refers to a § hundreds of §s farther away. Dear internet, what the heck is enclitics?

Enclitic is a type of clitic.

A clitic is a morpheme, the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning (spoken morphemes are phonemes and written morphemes are graphemes). A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, bound if it must be used alongside a free morpheme. A morphemes sound is a morph, the various vocalized morphs that do not change meaning are called allomorphs.

Wait, there's more. Derivational morphemes which can be added to a word to create another word and which carry language information, like "ness" and "ation".

Inflectional morphemes modify aspect, tense, number without creating a new word, endings like plural and possessive "s" in English and past-tense modifiers "ed" and "ied".

A clitic can be any type of word, usually pronouns, determiners ,words that modify nouns that are not adjectives words like "a", "an" "the" possessives determiners, "my", "yours", "it" and quantifiers such as "many," "all", and "some". Or clitics can be adpositions, the word for all three somethingpositions: prepositions, precede its phrase, postposition, follows its phrase and circumposition, surrounds its phrase.

As to hieroglyphics, writing is not the best way to identify clitics because they may be written as independent words, affixed to words, or separated with characters, nonetheless, that's what we're doing.

A proclitic precedes its host.

An enclitic follows its host

A mesoclitic appears between the stem and other affixes


A clitic attaches somehow to an adjacent word, some are written as a separate word, some are included within the host word, and some clitics are attached with some kind of punctuation like a hyphen.

An affix attaches to a limited part of speech to form a new word but a clitic functions above the word level, on the phrase or clause level, and attaches only to the first, last, or only word in the phrase or clause. Looking at them this way reveals that some elements called clitics are actually affixes.

Clitics do not always appear immediately beside the word or phrase to which they are associated. Some languages have rules that force them to another position. But not Egyptian, oh no, Egyptian is much more flexible than that. I think. And if it does turn out to be just so inflexible, then I'll pretend it's not and that way I will continue to be flexible, for now, in order to get through sticky wickets which I know await.

enclitics

Transliteration: ir･n(ỉ) grt m𐅁ḥ𐅁t(ỉ) r r･d n ntr 𐅁3 Translation: made I now at/by tomb my steps to god great Interpretation: "Lookie everybody, I dun made mah own dadgum tomb right there at the bottom of the steps leading to the great god hizsef!"

Transliteration: s ḏd･ỉ ỉ･f n･k mitt iry Translation: let say I this to you like therof Interpretation: "Now I relate the likes of these things thereof to you"

Transliteration: ti sw ḥm iy･f Translation: and now indeed come back he Interpretation: "Bloody wow! He is most assuredly coming back."

I might have taken some liberty there with translations, and that would surely get my ass kicked if I were taking a class. Why are enclitics so tricky? Because they do not comport precisely with the sign definitions, nor will they always be found by their transliterations or by their translations from English, French or German and because their meanings are disputed. Sometimes, they're best left untranslated. They are bits and pieces of sign combinations of other words that themselves have variations, especially across time, often with opposite meanings. Because of all this, it's incumbent upon you to determine what is intended, and your opinion is likely as good as anybody else's, especially when the person judging your translation is himself given to archaisms as "thee" and "thou" and himself takes liberty by speaking with elisions all over the place, unapproved academically, and employing that extremely irritating habit of substituting glottal stops for positively essential hard consonants, so difficult to listen to, when everybody knows the Queen's Received English got no fu'k'n go-lo(t)-al shtopsh, heard as linguistic indolence on a national scale. We notice, these are not enclitics at all. They're preclitics, and that' s another observation that would only cause trouble for myself in class. Best to avoid classes.