Everything about Coptic Language totally explained
Coptic or
Coptic Egyptian (
Met.Remenkīmi) is the final stage of the
Egyptian language, a northern
Afro-Asiatic language spoken in
Egypt until at least the seventeenth century CE. Egyptian began to be written using the
Greek alphabet in the first century CE. The new writing system became the
Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six to seven signs from the
demotic script to represent Egyptian
phonemes absent from
Greek. Several distinct Coptic dialects are identified, the most prominent of which are Sahidic and Bohairic.
As developmental phases of Egyptian, both Coptic and
Demotic are grammatically closely akin to
Late Egyptian, which was written in the
hieroglyphic script, but differ significantly in their graphic representation. Coptic flourished as a literary language from the second to thirteenth centuries CE, and its Bohairic dialect continues to be the liturgical language of the
Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was supplanted by
Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the early modern period, though some
revitalization efforts have been underway since the nineteenth century.
Name
The native name of the language is (
mentrmenkēmə) in the Sahidic dialect and (
metremenkīmi) in Bohairic. The particle prefix
ment-/met- is a construct of the verb
mouti ('to speak'), which forms all abstract nouns in Coptic (not only those pertaining to "language"). The expression literally means 'language of the people of Egypt', or simply 'Egyptian language'. Another name by which the language has been called is
ment kuptaion from the Copto-
Greek form
ment aiguption ('Egyptian language'). The term
logos ən aiguptios ('Egyptian language') is also attested in Sahidic, although
logos and
aiguptios are both Greek in origin. In the liturgy of the
Coptic Orthodox Church, the name is more officially
tenaspi en remenkimi, 'the Egyptian language',
aspi being the Egyptian word for language.
Geographic distribution
As a nearly
extinct language, Coptic no longer has official status in
Egypt. However, it's presently a
liturgical language of the
Coptic Orthodox and
Coptic Catholic churches (along with
Arabic). Coptic Egyptian was spoken only in Egypt, and historically has had little influence outside of Egypt proper, with the exception of monasteries located in
Nubia. Coptic's most noticeable impact has been on the various dialects of
Egyptian Arabic, whose lexicon has preserved a large number of Coptic words, in addition to Coptic
morphological,
syntactical, and
phonological features.
Influence on other languages
Apart from Egyptian Arabic, there are a handful of words of Coptic origin that have been borrowed more generally into
Classical Arabic and
Biblical Hebrew. These include:
- timsāḥ, تمساح (Arabic), תמסח (Hebrew) - "crocodile"; emsaḥ.
- ṭūbah طوبة "brick"; Sahidic to:be; Bohairic to:bi; this subsequently entered Spanish (via Andalusi Arabic) as adobe, whence it was borrowed by American English.
- wāḥah واحة "oasis"; Sahidic waḥe, Bohairic weḥi.
A few words of Coptic origin are found in
Greek, some of which were ultimately borrowed into various languages of Europe (for example
barge from Coptic
bari "small boat"). However, most words of Egyptian origin that entered into Greek, and subsequently other European languages, come directly from
ancient Egyptian (often
Demotic). An example of this is Greek ὄασις
oasis, which comes directly from Egyptian
wḥ3.t or demotic
wḥỉ. Yet Coptic re-borrowed some words of ancient Egyptian origin back into its lexicon
via Greek. For example, both Sahidic and Bohairic use the word
ebenos, which was taken directly from Greek ἔβενος "ebony", originally from Egyptian
hbny.
In addition, the Greek name Παπνούθιος Paphnutius finds its origin in Coptic
papnute 'the (man) of God' – still a common name in Egypt. The name entered Russian as Пафнутий (for example, the famous mathematician
Pafnuty Chebyshev). Finally,
Old Nubian and modern
Nobiin borrowed many words of Coptic origin.
History
Egyptian may have the longest documented history of any language, having remained in written use from
c. 3200 BC to the Middle Ages and as a spoken language for longer. The history of the language is characterized by two important transitions, one in the structure of the language and another in its orthography. First, a change from
synthetic to
analytic patterns in the verbal system and the
nominal syntax took place, and is often described in scholarly literature as a transition from "Older Egyptian" (Old and Middle Egyptian) to "Later Egyptian" (Late, Demotic and Coptic Egyptian).
On the whole, Later Egyptian is characterized by the development of analytic features such as prefixal definite and indefinite articles, which replaced the earlier suffixal markers of
morphological oppositions (more akin to
Semitic), as well as a
periphrastic development involving a change from the older VSO
word order (also characteristic of
Classical Arabic and
Biblical Hebrew) to SVO. A second change marks the transition from the older Egyptian writing systems, namely the native
hieroglyphic,
hieratic, and
demotic scripts, to the
Coptic alphabet. Coptic therefore is a reference both to the final stage of Egyptian after
Demotic, and to the new writing system that was adapted from the
Greek alphabet.
Coptic before the Islamic period
The earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet are Greek transcriptions of Egyptian proper names, most of which date to the
Ptolemaic period. Scholars frequently refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic. However, it's clear that by the
late pharaonic period, demotic scribes regularly employed a more phonetic orthography, a testament to the increasing cultural contact between
Egyptians and
Greeks even before
Alexander the Great's conquest of
Egypt. Coptic itself, or
Old Coptic, takes root in the first century CE. The transition from the older Egyptian scripts to the newly adapted Graeco-Coptic script was in part due to the decline of the traditional role played by the priestly class of
ancient Egyptian religion, who unlike most ordinary Egyptians, were literate in the temple scriptoria. Old Coptic is represented mostly by non-Christian texts such as Egyptian pagan prayers and magical and astrological papyri. Many of them served as glosses to original hieratic and demotic equivalents. The glosses may have been aimed at non-Egyptian speakers.
Under late
Roman rule,
Diocletian persecuted many Egyptian converts to the new
Christian faith. This forced new converts to flee to the Egyptian deserts. In time, the growth of these communities generated the need to write Christian Greek instructions in the Egyptian language. The early Fathers of the
Egyptian Church, such as
Anthony the Great,
Pachomius,
Macarius and
Athanasius, who otherwise usually wrote in Greek, addressed some of their works to the Egyptian monks in Egyptian. The Egyptian language, now written in the
Coptic alphabet, flourished in the second and third centuries CE. However, it wasn't until
Shenouda the Archimandrite that Coptic became a fully standardized literary language based on the Sahidic dialect. Shenouda's native Egyptian tongue and knowledge of Greek and rhetoric gave him the necessary tools to elevate Coptic, in content and style, to a literary height nearly equal to the position of the Egyptian language in
pre-Christian Egypt.
Coptic after the Islamic period
Egypt came under the dominance of
Arab rulers with the spread of
Islam in the
7th century CE. At the turn of the
8th century,
Caliph Abdel al-Malik bin Marwan decreed that
Arabic replace
Koine Greek and Coptic as the sole administrative language. Literary Coptic gradually declined such that within a few hundred years,
Egyptian bishop
Severus Ibn al-Muqaffa found it necessary to write his
History of the Patriarchs in
Arabic. However, ecclesiastically the language retained its important position, and many
hagiographic texts were also composed during this period. Until the tenth century, Coptic remained the spoken language of the native population outside the capital.
Violent persecutions under the
Mamluks led to the further decline of Coptic, until it completely gave way to
Egyptian Arabic sometime in the
17th century CE, though it may have survived in isolated pockets for a little longer. In the second half of the
19th century,
Pope Cyril IV of Alexandria started a national Church-sponsored movement to revive the Coptic language. Several works of grammar were published, along with a more comprehensive dictionary than had been previously available. The scholarly findings of the field of
Egyptology and the inauguration of the
Higher Institute of Coptic Studies further contributed to the renaissance. Efforts at language revival continue to be undertaken, both inside and
outside the Church, and have attracted the interest of both
Copts and Muslims in Egypt.
Writing system
» Main article Coptic alphabet
Coptic uses a writing system almost wholly derived from the
Greek alphabet, with the addition of a number of letters that have their origins in
Demotic Egyptian. There is some variation in the number and forms of these signs depending on the dialect. Some of the letters in the Coptic alphabet that are of Greek origin were normally reserved only for words that are themselves Greek. Old Coptic texts employed several graphemes that were not retained in the literary Coptic orthography of later centuries.
In Sahidic,
syllable boundary may have been marked by a supralinear stroke. Such words in the northern dialects have ([e] or [ə]) in place of the superlinear stroke. Some scribal traditions use a
diaeresis over /i/ and /u/ at the beginning of a
syllable. Bohairic uses a superposed point or small stroke known as a
djinkim. It is may be related to the Sahidic supralinear stroke, or additionally, it may indicate a
glottal stop. Most Coptic texts don't indicate a word division.
Literature
The oldest Coptic writings date to the pre-Christian era (Old Coptic), though Coptic literature consists mostly of texts written by prominent saints of the Coptic Church such as
Anthony the Great,
Pachomius and
Shenouda the Archimandrite. Shenouda helped fully standardize the Coptic language through his many sermons, treatises and homilies, which formed the basis of early Coptic literature.
Vocabulary
The core
lexicon of Coptic is
Egyptian, being most closely related to the preceding
Demotic phase of the language. Approximately one-third of the vocabulary of literary Coptic is drawn from
Greek, though borrowings are not always fully adapted to the Coptic phonological system and may have
semantic differences as well. There are instances of Coptic texts having passages that are almost entirely composed from Greek lexical roots. However, this is likely due to the fact that the majority of Coptic religious texts are direct translations of Greek works.
Words or concepts for which no adequate Egyptian translation existed were taken directly from Greek so as not to alter the meaning of the religious message. In addition, other Egyptian words that would have adequately translated the Greek equivalents were not employed as these were perceived as having overt pagan associations. Old Coptic texts employ many such words, phrases and epithets; for example, the word 'Who is in His Mountain', is an epithet of
Anubis. There are also traces of some archaic morphosyntactic features, such as residues of the Demotic
relative clause, lack of an indefinite article and possessive use of suffixes.
Thus the transition from the 'old' traditions to the new Christian religion also contributed to the adoption of Greek words into the Coptic religious lexicon. It is safe to assume that the everyday speech of the native population retained to a greater extent its indigenous Egyptian character, which is sometimes reflected in Coptic non-religious documents such as letters and contracts.
Phonology
Coptic provides the clearest indication of Later Egyptian
phonology thanks to its writing system, which fully indicates vowel sounds and occasionally stress pattern. The phonological system of Later Egyptian is also better known than that of the Classical phase of the language due to a greater number of sources indicating Egyptian sounds, including
cuneiform letters containing transcriptions of Egyptian words and phrases, and Egyptian renderings of
Northwest Semitic names. Coptic phonology, in addition, is known from a variety of Coptic-
Arabic papyri in which Arabic letters were used to transcribe Coptic and vice versa. They date to the medieval Islamic period, when Coptic was still spoken.
Vowels
In the
Upper Egyptian dialects, a superlinear stroke is placed over
sonorants to mark a reduced /e/. This vowel doesn't undergo reduction in northern dialects, where it's indicated by in Bohairic and or in Fayyumic. For example, /ʃemʃə/ 'to worship' is Sah/Akh/Lyc, Bohairic and Fayyumic . The vowel quality of /e/ can vary: either [e] or [ɛ] depending on the dialect. In Sahidic and other
Upper Egyptian dialects, word-final corresponds to word-final in the northern dialects.
The vowel /ɑ/ is typically represented by —its presence may be an indicator of
emphasis spread in the same syllable. For example, (used in in the construction 'man of [trade]') is transcribed [sˤɑ] in medieval Coptic-Arabic papyri. In some phonetic environments, /o/ is a more
open [ɔ], and /a/ is a more
forward [æ]. The vowel /ə/ is always unstressed and can be reduced to
Ø as in earlier Egyptian scripts, which didn't indicate unstressed and most stressed vowels.
Coptic also has three to four
diphthongs — mainly [aj], [ɔj] and [aw] — although these may be interpreted as series of vowels and glides. In some dialects, they're
monophthongized.
Consonants
The status of /p/ and /b/ in Coptic isn't entirely clear. To be sure, earlier phases of
Egyptian may have contrasted voiceless and voiced bilabial stops, but the distinction seems to have been lost sometime during the language's evolutionary history, prior to the 7th-century
Islamic conquest. Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic all interchangeably use their respective graphemes to indicate either sound — for example, Coptic for 'iron' appears alternately as, and . More confusingly, both letters were interchanged with and to indicate /f/, and was also used in many texts to indicate the bilabial approximant /w/.
There is further evidence from transcriptions of Egyptian by other languages that /b/ and /p/ were not contrasted, or that /p/ had been lost at least in later phases. For example, the name of the ancient Egyptian god
Anubis was written in
Classical Greek with a
voiced bilabial stop rather than /p/. Since Classical Greek more securely had both sounds, there's good reason to believe that ancient Greek writers transcribed the Egyptian phoneme based on how they heard it pronounced by contemporaneous Egyptians. Some
Coptologists have also suggested that Coptic may have been articulated as a
voiced bilabial fricative [β]. In the present-day Coptic Church services, this letter is realized as /v/, though this is almost certainly a result of the
pronunciation reforms instituted in the 19th century.
Whereas
Old Egyptian contrasts /s/ and /z/, the two sounds appear to be in
free variation in Coptic and are contrasted only in Greek loans; for example, Coptic (
anzībə) and (
ansībə) 'school'. Other consonants that sometimes appear to be either in free variation or to have different distributions across dialects are [t] and [d], [r] and [l] (especially in the Fayyumic dialect — a feature of earlier Egyptian) and [k] and [g], with the voiceless
stops being more common. Apart from the
liquid consonants, this pattern may indicate a
phonological change in Later Egyptian leading to a neutralization of voiced alveolar and velar stops. When the voiced stops are realized, it's usually the result of
sonorization in proximity to /n/.
Old Coptic texts graphically express the Egyptian
pharyngeals in a variety of ways. For example, the Old Coptic grapheme was occasionally used to convey a
voiceless pharyngeal fricative. In literary Coptic, the two sounds are not indicated by separate letters, suggesting loss of phonemic status. Instead, the adapted demotic grapheme, which normally stands for /h/, is used to express either sound. In unstressed initial syllables and stressed final syllables, the
voiced pharyngeal fricative is sometimes conveyed by as in /ʕʃaj/ 'to multiply'. Similarly, different methods are employed to graphically express the
glottal stop: with word-initially, with word-finally in monosyllabic words in northern dialects and in monosyllabic words in Akhmimic and Assiutic, by reduplication of a vowel's grapheme, but mostly as [Ø].
Grammar
Typical of other
Afro-Asiatic languages, Older Egyptian was a
fusional language with a
Verb Subject Object synthetic structure. Later Egyptian, including Coptic, is marked by a diachronic shift to a
Subject Verb Object word order, prefixed constructions for nominal
morphemes of gender and number, as well as a move toward a
polysynthetic type in Coptic. While some vestiges of the suffix inflectional pattern survive in Coptic (mainly to indicate
inalienable possession), the change is fairly uniform across the different dialects. The decline in suffix inflection can be observed when comparing the Classical Egyptian form
stp.f 'he chooses' to Coptic
f.sotp 'he chooses', where the third
person singular masculine marker has been preposed.
Nouns
All Coptic nouns carry
grammatical gender, either masculine or feminine. In earlier Egyptian, feminine nouns were distinguished by the Afro-Asiatic feminine suffix
-t. In Coptic, this pattern was replaced by two sets of prefixal definite and indefinite articles that also indicate
number — however, only definite articles mark gender. Coptic has a number of
broken plurals, another vestige of Older Egyptian, though in the majority of cases the prefix article marks number. Generally, nouns
inflected for plurality end in /w/ in masculine forms and in /wə/ in feminine forms, though there are some irregularities. The dual was another feature of earlier Egyptian that survives in Coptic in only few words, such as /snaw/ 'two'.
Pronouns
Adjectives
Earlier Egyptian adjectives were formed through a process known as
nisbation by adding the suffix
-j to a noun; only few such examples survive in Coptic: /hrɑ/ 'face' → /hrɑj/ 'facial'. Some nouns can also function as adjectives, but the majority of Coptic adjectives are expressed by the introduction of an attributive particle
n between two nouns, a process common to many
Berber languages. In all stages of Egyptian, this morpheme is also used to express the
genitive — for example, the Bohairic word for 'Egyptian', /remenkiːmi/, is a combination of the nominal prefix
rem- (the reduced form of
rōmi 'man'), followed by the genitive morpheme
n ('of') and finally the word Egypt
kīmi.
Verbs
Prepositions
Syntax
Dialects
There is little evidence of
dialectal differences in the pre-Coptic phases of the Egyptian language due to the centralized nature of the political and cultural institutions of
ancient Egyptian society. However, literary Old and Middle (Classical) Egyptian represent the spoken dialect of Lower Egypt around the city of
Memphis, the capital of Egypt in the
Old Kingdom. Later Egyptian is more representative of the dialects spoken in Upper Egypt, especially around the area of
Thebes as it became the cultural and religious center of the
New Kingdom.
Coptic more obviously displays a number of regional dialects that were in use from the
Mediterranean coast in northern Egypt, south into
Nubia, and in the western oases. However, while many of these dialects reflect actual regional linguistic (namely
phonological and some lexical) variation, they mostly reflect localized
orthographic traditions with very little
morphosyntactic differences.
Upper Egypt
Sahidic
Sahidic (formerly called
Thebaic) is dialect in which most known Coptic texts are written, and was the leading dialect in the pre-
Islamic period. It is thought to have originally been a regional dialect from the area around
el-Ashmunein (Coptic
Shmounein), but around
300 CE it began to be written in literary form, including translations of major portions of the
Bible. By the
6th century CE, a standardized spelling had been attained throughout Egypt. Almost all native authors wrote in this dialect of Coptic. Sahidic was, beginning in the
9th century CE challenged by Bohairic, but is attested as late as the
14th century.
While texts in other Coptic dialects are primarily translations of Greek literary and religious texts, Sahidic is the only dialect with a considerable body of original literature and non-literary texts. Because Sahidic shares most of its features with other dialects of Coptic with few peculiarities specific to itself, and has an extensive corpus of known texts, it's generally the dialect studied by learners of Coptic, particularly by scholars outside of the Coptic Church.
Akhmimic
Akhmimic was the dialect of the area around the town
Akhmim (ancient
Panopolis), and flourished during the
4th and
5th centuries, after which no writings are attested. Akhmimic is phonologically the most archaic of the Coptic dialects. One characteristic feature is the retention of the
phoneme /x/, which is realized as /ʃ/ in most other dialects. Similarly, it uses an exceptionally conservative writing system strikingly similar to Old Coptic.
Lycopolitan (also known as
Subakhmimic and
Assiutic) is a closely related dialect to Akhmimic in terms of when and where it was attested, though manuscripts written in it tend to be from the area of
Asyut. The main differences between the two dialects seem to be only graphic in nature, though Lycopolitan was used extensively for translations of
gnostic and
Manichaean works, including the
Nag Hammadi library texts.
Lower Egypt
Bohairic
The Bohairic (or
Memphitic) dialect originated in the western
Nile delta. The earliest Bohairic manuscripts date to the
4th century CE, but most texts come from the
9th century and later; this may be due to poor preservation conditions for texts in the humid regions of northern Egypt. It shows several conservative features in
lexicon and
phonology not found in other dialects. Bohairic is the dialect used today as the
liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church, replacing Sahidic some time in the
11th century. In contemporary liturgical use, there are two traditions of pronunciation, arising from successive reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries (see
Coptic pronunciation reform). Modern revitalization efforts are based on this dialect.
Fayyumic
Fayyumic (or Faiyumic; in older works it's often called
Bashmuric) was spoken primarily in the
Faiyum region west of the Nile Valley. It is attested from the
3rd to the
10th centuries. It is most notable for writing, which corresponds to /l/, where other dialects generally use /r/ (probably corresponding to a
flap [ɾ]). In earlier stages of Egyptian, the
liquids were not distinguished in writing until the
New Kingdom, when
Late Egyptian became the administrative language. Late Egyptian orthography utilized a
grapheme that combined the graphemes for /r/ and /n/ in order express /l/.
Demotic for its part indicated /l/ using a diacritic variety of /r/.
Oxyrhynchite (also called
Mesokemic or [confusingly]
Middle Egyptian) is the dialect of
Oxyrhynchus and surrounding areas. It shows similarities with Fayyumic and is attested in manuscripts from the
4th and
5th centuries.
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