Evidence for Resynthesis in Writing: a Study with a Primary Focus on Egyptian and a Cross Linguistic Comparison

Although linguists have been using the terms 'synthetic' and 'analytic' since the early 19th Century, there remains much dispute over what constitutes a synthetic or analytic language, and whether certain languages display the so-called 'linguistic cycle', which describes the cycle of change between a language being predominantly synthetic or analytic. It has, however, been widely accepted that this trend of language change has occurred in the development of the Egyptian language, as a result of previous works. However, these previous studies have been extremely limited in only stating that this cycle is apparent in Egyptian, and have not provided any comprehensive study of anything other than the existence of this overlying macro trend.
My research aims to investigate the evidence from ancient Egyptian written sources for the linguistic cycle, focusing on the ways in which the language changed, and providing an investigation into the microprocesses that enabled the trend of the linguistic cycle to occur. This study will add to the understanding of the processes of change of the early Egyptian synthetic forms, which have a suffixal morphology, to analytic forms, and from these analytic forms to the resynthesised forms which show a prefixal morphology, something which is currently far from fully understood, and provide more detailed evidence for this process.
Then using this evidence from Egyptian as a model, a comparison will be made with other languages where evidence of the linguistic cycle is currently disputed by scholars due to it being somewhat limited and less obvious than in a language such as Egyptian. Previous studies of the linguistic cycle in these languages, such as the romance languages, have focused simply on the history of the language being investigated, which is often disputed as to whether it displays the trend of the linguistic cycle at all. My approach will provide a framework from a language known to exhibit the linguistic cycle, and will investigate whether those languages which potentially show resynthesis display the same trends as Egyptian. This cross linguistic comparison will add evidence to the currently unanswered question as to whether the linguistic cycle is a universal trend.