‘How great!’ : A morpho-syntactic and semantic study on the two roots aA and wr

Sammanfattning: Egyptology is a discipline in which new research and new approaches are continuously necessary and – in most cases – provided. In this constant flow of new research, some subject areas are left untouched. The lemmas aA and wr have continuously had a very homogenous translation although the morphological and syntactical differences are quite visible. The generally accepted translation of both lemmas as ‘great’ is very singular and raises the question of whether aA and wr should be considered synonyms or not. The study consists of two combined parts; a morpho-syntactical analysis of aA and wr and their conjugations and distributions as well as a semantic analysis on different expressions and sentences where both aA and wr occur with the same, or similar, syntactical structure. The aim is to give clarification to the correlation between the lemmas aA and wr and their interpretation. The study is not restricted to a specific time period, but regards linguistic developments as an important factor in the analysis. An important conclusion from this study is the clear, preferred use of wr as a qualifier for physical greatness, as opposed to aA which appears in contexts more related to metaphorical greatness. During Late Egyptian the opacity of the different uses of aA and wr increases and the differentiation becomes quite fuzzy.