Afro-Asiatic, Egyptian · Coptic alphabet
Coptic
ⲧⲙⲛ̄ⲧⲣⲙ̄ⲛ̄ⲕⲏⲙⲉ t-mnt-rm-n-kēme, “the language of the people of Egypt”
- Spoken
- c. AD 200 – 1600s
- Written
- still used in church liturgy
- Where
- Egypt, from the delta to Aswan
Coptic is ancient Egyptian wearing Greek clothes. When Egyptians became Christian, they began writing their own language with the Greek alphabet plus a handful of letters borrowed from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked. For the first time in four thousand years, the vowels were written down. That is why Coptic matters so much: it is our best evidence for how Egyptian actually sounded, and it was the key Champollion used to read the hieroglyphs.
Where and when
Coptic was spoken all along the Nile, in several dialects. Sahidic, from Upper Egypt, was the classical literary dialect of the early centuries. Bohairic, from the western delta around Alexandria and the monasteries of Wadi Natrun, later became the standard of the church. Smaller dialects such as Akhmimic, Lycopolitan and Fayyumic appear in early manuscripts and then fade away.
The first Coptic texts appear in the second and third centuries AD, and the language flourished from the fourth to the tenth. Monks translated the Bible and wrote sermons, saints' lives and letters, and the Nag Hammadi codices, found in 1945, preserve Gnostic gospels in Coptic translation. Coptic was also used for magical spells.
How it fell silent
The Arab conquest of Egypt in AD 641 started a slow shift. In about 706 Arabic replaced Greek as the language of administration, and over the following centuries conversion to Islam and the practical value of Arabic drew people away from Coptic. Even Coptic Christians switched: by the eleventh century church writers were working in Arabic, and Coptic-Arabic glossaries were made because readers needed them.
The spoken language lingered longest in villages of Upper Egypt. European travellers in the seventeenth century reported a few old people who still knew it, and most scholars place its death as an everyday language around then, though some think pockets survived later. It never vanished entirely: Coptic Orthodox Christians still hear it in the liturgy today, and a few families have tried to revive it at home.
How it may have sounded
-
Ⲡⲉⲛⲓⲱⲧ ⲉⲧϧⲉⲛ ⲛⲓⲫⲏⲟⲩⲓ
Peniōt etḫen niphēoui
Say it roughly peh-nee-OHT et-KHEN nee-feh-OO-ee
“Our Father, who art in the heavens”
The opening of the Lord's Prayer in Bohairic; church pronunciation was reformed in the nineteenth century, so how a medieval monk said it may have been rather different.
-
ⲕⲏⲙⲉ
kēme
Say it roughly KAY-meh/keːme/
“Egypt (the Black Land)”
The same word as hieroglyphic km.t, now with its vowels written out; the value of ē is generally thought to have been a long e.
-
ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ
noute
Say it roughly NOO-teh/nuːte/
“God”
Descended from Egyptian nṯr; the digraph ou is read as u, as in Greek, and the final e was probably a reduced vowel.
Your name, set in stone
Coptic is a full alphabet with vowels, so your name maps almost letter for letter. W and u are both written with the pair ⲟⲩ, and Greek letters such as b, d and g mostly appear in borrowed words.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Sahidic Coptic adds six Demotic-derived letters to the Greek alphabet; Bohairic adds a seventh, ϧ, for the kh sound.
- Champollion learned Coptic as a teenager, and it helped him recognise Egyptian words on the Rosetta Stone.
- 'Copt' comes from Arabic qibṭ, from Greek Aigyptios, 'Egyptian', so Copt and Egypt are the same word.