This demonstrative was originally a determiner but could later be used alone, like a pronoun. When used as a determiner it follows or precedes the noun it describes.
It forms a contrastive pair with the demonstrative tn, in which tf is distal.
1 Unmarked for number and gender, but treated syntactically as masculine plurals when used with participles and relative forms, and as feminine singulars when referred to by resumptive pronouns.
Used chiefly in the context of old religious texts, and particularly in the Heliopolitancosmogony to describe the creation of the goddess Tefnut from Atum’s spit.
1 Used in Old Egyptian; archaic by Middle Egyptian. 2 Used mostly since Middle Egyptian. 3 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. 4 Declines using third-person suffix pronouns instead of adjectival endings: masculine .f/.fj, feminine .s/.sj, dual .sn/.snj, plural .sn.
5 Only in the masculine singular. 6 Only in the masculine. 7 Only in the feminine.
James P[eter] Allen (2010), Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 54–55.
Edel, Elmar (1955-1964), Altägyptische Grammatik, volume 1, Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, § 182 et seq., page 83 et seq.
