Diverse Languages. While the great majority of inhabitants of Egypt spoke a single language, there were always foreigners in Egypt who spoke other languages. Egyptians had a word for "interpreter" as early as the Old Kingdom (circa 2675-2130 B.C.E.), so there must have been a noticeable presence of speakers of foreign languages in Egypt by that time. The conservatism of the Egyptian language did not prevent it from taking up words from their neighbors. It is not always possible to identify the exact origin of words that are suspected to be foreign, especially when it seems likely that the donor language was unwritten, as was the case with many African tongues. (An exception to this general rule is Meroitic, the language of a kingdom that took root in the Sudan in the late ninth century B.C.E...