| Coptic script | |
| Sample: | Coptic-render.svg |
| Time: | 2nd century A.D.[1] to present (in Coptic liturgy) |
| Iso15924: | Copt |
The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the most recent development of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the script varies greatly among the various dialects and eras of the Coptic language.
The Coptic script has a long history going back to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, when the Greek alphabet was used to transcribe Demotic texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic. As early as the sixth century BC and as late as the second century AD, an entire series of pre-Christian religious texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language texts written in the Greek alphabet.
In contrast to Old Coptic, seven additional Coptic letters were derived from Demotic, and many of these (though not all) are used in “true” form of Coptic writing. Coptic texts are associated with Christianity, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism.
With the spread of early Christianity in Egypt, knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs was lost by the late third century, as well as Demotic script slightly later, making way for a writing system more closely associated with the Coptic Orthodox Church. By the fourth century, the Coptic script 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 to write their religious texts. All the Gnostic codices found at Nag Hammadi used the Coptic script.
The Old Nubian alphabet—used to write Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language—is an uncial variant of the Coptic script, with additional characters borrowed from the Greek and Meroitic scripts.
The Coptic script 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 and to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex over any vowel for the same purpose.[2]
The Coptic script'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 pronounced as //te// or pronounced as //de//.
As the Coptic script 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. Because Coptic lowercases are usually small-caps forms of the capitals, a Greek would have little trouble reading Coptic letters, but Copts would struggle more with many of the Greek letters.[5] [6]
These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language. Coptic did not originally have case distinctions, they're a modern convention, as is the case with other classical languages like Latin.
| Uppercase (image) | Lowercase (image) | Uppercase (unicode) | Lowercase (unicode) | Numeric value | Letter Name[7] | Greek | Sahidic [8] | Bohairic | Late Coptic [9] | Greco-Bohairic [10] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alfa | Α, α | A | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
[11] | 2 | Vida | Β, β | B/V | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ (final pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ (final pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, (pronounced as /link/ often before a consonant or in a name) | ||||
| 3 | Gamma | Γ, γ | G/Gh/NG | pronounced as /link/ (marked Greek words) | — | pronounced as /link/, (pronounced as /link/ before ⲁ, ⲟ, or ⲱ) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (before pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/), pronounced as /link/ (before pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/) | |||||
| 4 | Delda | Δ, δ | TH/D | pronounced as /link/ (marked Greek words) | — | pronounced as /link/ (marked Greek words) | pronounced as /link/, (pronounced as /link/ in a name) | |||||
| 5 | Eie | Ε, ε | E | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 6 | Sou | ϛ Ϛ, ϛ | (none) | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 7 | Zata | Ζ, ζ | Z | pronounced as /link/ (marked Greek words) | — | pronounced as /link/ (marked Greek words) | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 8 | Hate | Η, η | EE | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 9 | Thethe | Θ, θ | Th/T | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 10 | Iauda | Ι, ι | I/J/Y | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (before vowels), pronounced as /link/ (after vowels to form diphthongs) | |||||
| 20 | Kapa | Κ, κ | K | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| 30 | Laula | Λ, λ | L | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 40 | Mi | Μ, μ | M | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 50 | Ni | Ν, ν | N | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 60 | Ksi | Ξ, ξ | X | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// (only in Greek loanwords) | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as ///, pronounced as /[]/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /]/ (usually following a consonant, or sometimes when starting a word) | |||||||
| 70 | O | Ο, ο | O | pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/) | ||||||
| 80 | Pi | Π, π | P | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| 100 | Ro | Ρ, ρ | R | pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 200 | Sima | Σ, σ, ς | S/C | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 300 | Tau | Τ, τ | T/D | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ (final pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 400 | Ua | Υ, υ | U/V/Y | pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (= pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/) | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (between "" and another vowel except ""), pronounced as /link/ (after pronounced as /link/ (or pronounced as /link/), pronounced as /link/ (digraph "") | ||||||
| 500 | Fi | Φ, φ | F | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/~pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| 600 | Khi | Χ, χ | K/Sh/Kh | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ (if the word is Coptic in origin), pronounced as /link/ (if the word is Greek in origin), pronounced as /link/ (if the word is Greek in origin but before pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/) | |||||
| 700 | Psi | Ψ, ψ | PS | pronounced as /[]/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /]/ (only in Greek loanwords) | pronounced as /[]/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /]/, pronounced as /[]/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /]/ (usually following a consonant) | |||||||
| 800 | Oou | Ω, ω | O/W | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| — | Shei | (none) | Sh | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| 90 | Fei | ϙ (numerical value) | F | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
[12] | — | Khei | (none) | Kh/Q | NA | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| — | Hori | (none) | H | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
[13] | — | Gangia | (none) | G/J | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ (before pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/) | ||||
| — | Shima | (none) | C/Ch | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /[]/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /]/ (usually following a consonant) | |||||
[14] | — | Dei | (none) | Ti | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as ///, pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as ///, pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// | ||||
| 900 | Sampi | Ϡ,ϡ (numerical value) | — | — | — | — | — | |||||
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:
| Hieroglyph | Hieratic | Demotic | Coptic | Late Coptic | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| → | → | → | pronounced as ///pronounced as /link/pronounced as /link/pronounced as /// |
Coptic numerals are an alphabetic numeral system in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such as for 500.[15] 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.
See main article: Greek and Coptic (Unicode block), Coptic (Unicode block) and Coptic Epact Numbers (Unicode block).
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=
These are also included in the Unicode specification.
These are codepoints applied after that of the character they modify.
Coptic uses to indicate syllabic consonants, for example .[16]
Coptic abbreviations use to draw a continuous line across the remaining letters of an abbreviated word.[17] [18] It extends from the left edge of the first letter to the right edge of the last letter. For example,, a common abbreviation for 'spirit'.
A different kind of overline uses,, and to distinguish the spelling of certain common words or to highlight proper names of divinities and heroes.[17] [18] For this the line begins in the middle of the first letter and continues to the middle of the last letter. A few examples:,, .
Sometimes numerical use of letters is indicated with a continuous line above them using as in for 1,888 (where "" is 1,000 and "" is 888). Multiples of 1,000 can be indicated by a continuous double line above using as in for 1,000.