Ehret hypothesizes an origin in Proto-Afroasiatic*-bâh-(“to go secretively”) + *r;[1] as with other attempts at reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic, academic consensus is lacking.
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.
“bhꜣ (lemma ID 56700)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae[2], Corpus issue 17, Web app version 2.01 edition, 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, 2004–15 December 2022
“bhꜣ (lemma ID 56690)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae[3], Corpus issue 17, Web app version 2.01 edition, 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, 2004–15 December 2022
^ Ehret, Christopher (1995) Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (University of California Publications in Linguistics; 126)[1], Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, →ISBN.