Archaic or greatly restricted in usage by Middle Egyptian. The perfect has mostly taken over the functions of the perfective, and the subjunctive and periphrastic prospective have mostly replaced the prospective.
Declines using third-person suffix pronouns instead of adjectival endings: masculine .f/.fj, feminine .s/.sj, dual .sn/.snj, plural .sn.
“wsṯn (lemma ID 50030)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae[1], Corpus issue 18, Web app version 2.1.5, Tonio Sebastian Richter & Daniel A. Werning by order of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert & Peter Dils by order of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 2004–26 July 2023
James P[eter] Allen (2010) Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 156, 250.
^ The latter part of this sentence is ambiguous and can be interpreted in numerous ways. Both swꜣtr(“(when) the proper time passes”) and smḫ.n.fwstnẖtmpr.sn(“he has forgotten/having forgotten…, etc.”) may be taken either as adverbial clauses (as rendered here) or main clauses. Furthermore, if wstn is taken as a participle rather than a relative form, the phrase it introduces could mean ‘he whose belly roams free at home’ rather than ‘those in whose house his belly roams free’; in this case the preceding perfect verb form smḫ.n demands a different interpretation. One possible solution is to read it with a counterfactual meaning ‘would that he forgot…’ instead of ‘he has forgotten…’; this is substantially the tack taken in Simpson 2003, The Literature of Ancient Egypt. Such counterfactual uses of the bare perfect are, however, rare. Another solution is that taken in Allen 2015, Middle Egyptian Literature, who reinterprets smḫ.n.f as smḫnf(“those forget…”), taking nf as a pronoun referring to the “multitude” mentioned several sentences prior. This proposed antecedent is, however, far enough removed as to make such an interpretation doubtful.
