The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncialGreek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the Coptic writing system may vary greatly among the various dialects and subdialects of the Coptic language.
The Coptic alphabet has a long history, going back to the Hellenistic period, when the Greek alphabet was used to transcribeDemotic texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic. During the first two centuries of the Common Era, an entire series of spiritual texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language texts written in the Greek alphabet. Seven letters, however, were derived from Demotic, and many of these (though not all) are used in “true” form of Coptic writing. With the spread of Christianity in Egypt, by the late 3rd century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, as well as Demotic slightly later, making way for a writing system more closely associated with the Christian church. By the 4th century, the Coptic alphabet was "standardized", particularly for the Sahidic dialect. (There are a number of differences between the alphabets as used in the various dialects in Coptic). Coptic is not generally used today except by the members of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria to write their religious texts. All the Gnostic codices found in Nag Hammadi used the Coptic alphabet.
The Coptic alphabet was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate vowels, making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had sonorants but no vowels; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable. Various scribal schools made limited use of diacritics: some used an apostrophe as a word divider and to mark clitics, a function of determinatives in logographic Egyptian; others used diereses over ⲓ and ⲩ to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex over any vowel for the same purpose.[2]
The Coptic alphabet's glyphs are largely based on the Greek alphabet, another help in interpreting older Egyptian texts,[3] with 24 letters of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from Demotic, depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic).[2] In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable /te/ or /de/.
As the Coptic alphabet is simply a typeface of the Greek alphabet,[4] with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the Icelandic alphabet (which likewise has added letters), or the Fraktur alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by Unicode, a proposal was later accepted to separate it, with the proposal noting that Coptic is never written using modern Greek letter-forms (unlike German, which may be written with Fraktur or Roman Antiqua letter-forms), and that the Coptic letter-forms have closer mutual legibility with the Greek-based letters incorporated into the separately encoded Cyrillic alphabet than with the forms used in modern Greek.[5][6]
Letters
These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language.
^Ⲃ seemed to have retained a [β] intervocalically in Late Coptic.
^The upper line of s connected with t to distinguishes it from the standalone "s" and "t"
^Akhmimic dialect uses the letter Ⳉⳉ for /x/. No name is recorded.
^ abϪ and ϭ seemed to have merged in Late Coptic into one phoneme, /ʃ/, with [ɟ] intervocalically.
^When part of the digraph ϯⲉ, it is pronounced [de] in Bohairic.
Letters derived from Demotic
In Old Coptic, there were a large number of Demotic Egyptian characters, including some logograms. They were soon reduced to half a dozen, for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet. The following letters remained:
Coptic numerals are an alphabetic numeral system in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such as ⲁ for 1.[11]
The numerical value of the letters is based on Greek numerals. Sometimes numerical use is distinguished from text with a continuous overline above the letters, as with Greek and Cyrillic numerals.
In Unicode, most Coptic letters formerly shared codepoints with similar Greek letters, but a disunification was accepted for version 4.1, which appeared in 2005. The new Coptic block is U+2C80 to U+2CFF. Most fonts contained in mainstream operating systems use a distinctive Byzantine style for this block. The Greek block includes seven Coptic letters (U+03E2–U+03EF highlighted below) derived from Demotic, and these need to be included in any complete implementation of Coptic.
Coptic abbreviations use U+0305◌̅COMBINING OVERLINE to draw a continuous line across the remaining letters of an abbreviated word.[13][14] It extends from the left edge of the first letter to the right edge of the last letter. For example, ⲡ̅ⲛ̅ⲁ̅, a common abbreviation for ⲡⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ 'spirit'.
A different kind of overline uses U+FE24◌︤COMBINING MACRON LEFT HALF, U+FE26◌︦COMBINING CONJOINING MACRON, and U+FE25◌︥COMBINING MACRON RIGHT HALF to distinguish the spelling of certain common words or to highlight proper names of divinities and heroes.[13][14]
For this the line begins in the middle of the first letter and continues to the middle of the last letter. A few examples: ⲣ︤ⲙ︥, ϥ︤ⲛ︦ⲧ︥, ⲡ︤ϩ︦ⲣ︦ⲃ︥.
Sometimes numerical use of letters is indicated with a continuous line above them using U+0305◌̅COMBINING OVERLINE as in ⲁ͵ⲱ̅ⲡ̅ⲏ̅ for 1,888 (where "ⲁ͵" is 1,000 and "ⲱ̅ⲡ̅ⲏ̅" is 888). Multiples of 1,000 can be indicated by a continuous double line above using U+033F◌̿COMBINING DOUBLE OVERLINE as in ⲁ̿ for 1,000.
^ abRitner, Robert Kriech. 1996. "The Coptic Alphabet". In The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1994:287–290.
^Campbell, George L. "Coptic." Compendium of the World's Writing Systems. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Biddles LTD, 1991. 415.
^"Coptic". Ancient Scripts. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
^For example: The composer's name "Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich" is Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович in Cyrillic, and Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲓ Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲉⲃⲓϭ Ϣⲟⲥⲧⲁⲕⲟⲃⲓϭ in Coptic.
Quaegebeur, Jan. 1982. "De la préhistoire de l'écriture copte." Orientalia lovaniensia analecta 13:125–136.
Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabet in Coptic, Greek". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 30–32.
Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabets, Coptic". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 32–41.
Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabets, Old Coptic". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 41–45.
Wolfgang Kosack: Koptisches Handlexikon des Bohairischen. Koptisch - Deutsch - Arabisch. Verlag Christoph Brunner, Basel 2013, ISBN978-3-9524018-9-7.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Coptic script.
Ifao N Copte – A professional Coptic font for researchers, students and publishers has been developed by the French institute of oriental archeology (IFAO). Unicode, Mac and Windows compatible, this free font is available through downloading from the IFAO website (direct link).
Coptic fonts ; Coptic fonts made by Laurent Bourcellier & Jonathan Perez, type designers
ⲡⲓⲥⲁϧⲟ: Coptic font support – how to install, use and manipulate Coptic ASCII and Unicode fonts
