There is evidence that the Egyptian graphemic system went through some notable changes in the earliest stages of the writing system. There are currently 24 recognized mono-consonant graphemes for sS-mdw-nTr. However, only 18 of them were there at the beginning. The other 6 came later on in the Old Kingdom (OK). There is increasing evidence that some of these graphemes came as a result of the changing of sounds and the need to have a grapheme to represent old sounds that have not gone under change.
For example, the V13 “tethered rope” glyph (transliterated using capital T), used in the word /nTr/ “netjer”, is commonly said to have the [tj] or [ch] sound value. However, in the beginning of the OK, this sign represented a [k] (a velar) sound value. Therefore, our word /nTr/ would have been rendered /nkr/, which in ciLuba-Bantu is rendered bu.kolè(à) “spirit; force, energy”; Nkole(a)/Nkwele(a) "God"; Dinka kuar “ancestors.”
The sound represented by the V13 rope glyph in the OK went through a process of palatalization of the velar [k]. Thus, ki > tji or ki > chi. However, the [k] sound was still present in the language and now needed a separate grapheme to represent it. Thus, the V31 “basket” glyph with the sound value [k] was developed for the script. This allowed the scribes to continue to write the words that had gone through the sound change with the original graphemes associated with the /T/ sound, and it allowed them to use the new glyph to render words that had not gone through the change.
With that said, the word /rmT/ “people, humankind; man” is rendered with the V13 tethered rope glyph in the C3 position (the third consonant position). In the early OK, this word would not have been rendered “remetch,” but something like “rameek.” However, in practically all of the compared forms to the Egyptian, the word is rendered without the /T/ final sound. A few examples will help to make this clear:
ciKam: rmT “human-being; mankind; man”
Coptic: rome “man, husband”; romi, lomi
Nuer (Sudan): ram “human person, individual”
Dinka: lan “somebody”
Dinka: raan “person, someone”
Azer (Mali): reme, reme “child” (semantic transfer)
ciLuba: mulùme(a) “male person, man”; “husband”
Sumerian: dam “spouse” (husband or wife)
Sango: lò “him, she”
Somali: lab “male”
This would indicate that the -T part of the word rmT was a grammatical morpheme. The question is, “Where did the final -T come from?” My proposal is that the final -T, which was originally a [k] sound value, is a fossilized plural marker that is found among the Nilo-Saharan speakers of the Sudan. This suffix can be seen in the word for “people” in Kalejiin:
Kalenjiin: biik "Human beings. People. Population. Race. Humanity. Humans. Mortals. Citizens. Folks. Persons. men and women. Masses. Inhabitants."
CiKam: pa.t “(the) people; humankind; patricians” [Wb 1, 503.2-11; KoptHWb 144]
In Kalenjiin, b/p interchange and the sound value given for the grapheme <a> in ciKam is lost. The word /pa.t/ in ciKam is a derived form of /papa/ “to bear; to be born” [Wb 1, 504.3-5; Lesko, Dictionary I, 171; Wilson, Ptol. Lexikon, 346].” The final -t in /pa.t/ is a nominalizing suffix.
Thus, if I am correct, /rmT/, in the early Old Kingdom, should have been rendered /rmk/. And if so, I propose that /rmk/ came from the BEER branch of Negro-Egyptian (N-E).
