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This demonstrative is a pronoun, and so does not directly modify nouns. In Middle Egyptian it becomes used as a demonstrative for plural nouns in place of the old adjectives jpf and jptf. When used in this way, it precedes the noun, with the genitival adjective n(j) in between, e.g. "those feet" is nf n(j) rdw (literally "that of feet").
It forms a contrastive pair with the demonstrative pronoun nn, in which nf 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.
ꜥḥꜥ.n sbt.n.f jm.j m nn ḏd.n.j m nf m jb.f ḏd.f n.j (j)n wr n.k ꜥntjw ḫpr.t(j) ⟨m⟩ nb sntr
Then he laughed at me – and at this that I’d said – as being wrong to his mind, saying to me: Are you abundant in myrrh, turned into a lord of incense?[1]
“nf (lemma ID 851524)” and “nf (lemma ID 83280)”, in Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, 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 Allen (2010) Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 54–55, 218.
Loprieno, Antonio (1995) Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 68–70
^ Or ‘You aren’t abundant in myrrh …’, if the initial particle is read as negative nj instead of interrogative jn. The expected negative particle for such a clause would be nn, so an interrogative is more plausible. For a detailed discussion see Scalf, Foy (2009) “Is That a Rhetorical Question? Shipwrecked Sailor (pHermitage 1115) 150 Reconsidered” in Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, volume 136, issue 2, pages 155–159.
