Coptic alphabet
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The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the
Coptic language Coptic (Bohairic Coptic: , ) is a language family of closely related dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Copts, starting from the third-century AD in Roman Egypt. Coptic ...
. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the
Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...
augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
and is the first alphabetic script used for the
Egyptian language The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead language, dead Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large Text corpus, corpus of surviving texts which were made acces ...
. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the Coptic writing system may vary greatly among the various dialects and subdialects of the
Coptic language Coptic (Bohairic Coptic: , ) is a language family of closely related dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Copts, starting from the third-century AD in Roman Egypt. Coptic ...
.


History

The Coptic alphabet has a long history, going back to the
Hellenistic In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...
period, when the Greek alphabet was used to
transcribe Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
. During the first two centuries of the
Common Era Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...
, an entire series of spiritual texts were written in what scholars term
Old Coptic Old Coptic is the earliest stage of Coptic writing, a form of late Egyptian written in Coptic script, a variant of the Greek alphabet. It "is an analytical category … utilised by scholars to refer to a particular group of sources" and not a la ...
, Egyptian language texts written in the
Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...
. A number of letters, however, were derived from
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
, and many of these (though not all) are used in "true" form of Coptic writing. With the spread of
Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
in Egypt, by the late 3rd century, knowledge of
hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
writing was lost, as well as
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
slightly later, making way for a writing system more closely associated with the Christian church. By the 4th century, the Coptic alphabet was "standardised", 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 The Coptic Orthodox Church ( cop, Ϯⲉⲕ̀ⲕⲗⲏⲥⲓⲁ ⲛ̀ⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ ⲛ̀ⲟⲣⲑⲟⲇⲟⲝⲟⲥ, translit=Ti.eklyseya en.remenkimi en.orthodoxos, lit=the Egyptian Orthodox Church; ar, الكنيسة القبطي ...
to write their
religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
texts. All the
Gnostic Gnosticism (from grc, γνωστικός, gnōstikós, , 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems which coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These various groups emphasized pe ...
codices found in
Nag Hammadi Nag Hammadi ( ; ar, نجع حمادى ) is a city in Upper Egypt. It is located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about north-west of Luxor. It had a population of close to 43,000 . History The town of Nag Hammadi is name ...
used the Coptic alphabet. The Old Nubian alphabet—used to write
Old Nubian Old Nubian (also called Middle Nubian or Old Nobiin) is an extinct Nubian language, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and closely related to Dongolawi and Kenzi. It was used throughou ...
, a
Nilo-Saharan language The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. T ...
—is written mainly in an
uncial Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, p. 494. script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to ...
Greek alphabet, which borrows Coptic and Meroitic letters of
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
origin into its inventory.


Form

The Coptic alphabet was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate
vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
, making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had
sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
s 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 In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or ''whitespace''. ...
and to mark clitics, a function of
determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may ...
s in
logographic In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
Egyptian; others used diereses over and to show that these started a new syllable, others a
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
over any vowel for the same purpose.Ritner, 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. The Coptic alphabet's glyphs are largely based on the Greek alphabet, another help in interpreting older Egyptian texts, with 24 letters of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
, depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic). In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable or . As the Coptic alphabet is simply a
typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...
of the Greek alphabet, with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the
Icelandic alphabet Icelandic refers to anything of, from, or related to Iceland and may refer to: *Icelandic people Icelanders ( is, Íslendingar) are a North Germanic ethnic group and nation who are native to the island country of Iceland and speak Icelandic. ...
(which likewise has added letters), or the
Fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiqu ...
alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
, 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 , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...
than with the forms used in modern Greek.


Letters

These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language.


Letters derived from Demotic

In Old Coptic, there were a large number of
Demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (disa ...
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:


Numerals

Coptic numerals are an
alphabetic numeral system An alphabetic numeral system is a type of numeral system. Developed in classical antiquity, it flourished during the early Middle Ages. In alphabetic numeral systems, numbers are written using the characters of an alphabet, syllabary, or anothe ...
in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such as for 1. The numerical value of the letters is based on
Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to tho ...
. Sometimes numerical use is distinguished from text with a continuous
overline An overline, overscore, or overbar, is a typographical feature of a horizontal line drawn immediately above the text. In old mathematical notation, an overline was called a '' vinculum'', a notation for grouping symbols which is expressed in m ...
above the letters, as with Greek and Cyrillic numerals.


Unicode

In
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
, most Coptic letters formerly shared codepoints with similar
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
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 In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...
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.


Diacritics and punctuation

These are also included in the Unicode specification.


Punctuation

* Latin alphabet punctuation (comma, period, question mark, semicolon, colon, hyphen) uses the regular Unicode codepoints for punctuation * Dicolon: standard colon U+003A * Middle dot: U+00B7 * En dash: U+2013 * Em dash: U+2014 * Slanted double hyphen: U+2E17


Combining diacritics

These are codepoints applied after that of the character they modify. * Combining overstroke: U+0305 (= supralinear stroke) * Combining character-joining overstroke (from middle of one character to middle of the next): U+035E * Combining dot under a letter: U+0323 * Combining dot over a letter: U+0307 * Combining overstroke and dot below: U+0305,U+0323 * Combining acute accent: U+0301 * Combining grave accent: U+0300 * Combining circumflex accent (caret shaped): U+0302 * Combining circumflex (curved shape) or inverted breve above: U+0311 * Combining circumflex as wide inverted breve above joining two letters: U+0361 * Combining diaeresis: U+0308


Macrons and overlines

Coptic uses to indicate syllabic consonants, for example . Coptic abbreviations use to draw a continuous line across the remaining letters of an abbreviated word. 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. 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.


See also

*
Coptic pronunciation reform Coptic pronunciation reform, since 1850, has resulted in two major shifts in the liturgical pronunciation of Bohairic, the dialect of Coptic used as the language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Since Coptic had ceased to be spoken as a mother-ton ...
*
Institute of Coptic Studies The Institute of Coptic Studies (معهد الدراسات القبطية) was founded in 1954 by the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It is based in Cairo. Description The institute is the Egyptian church's main research centre in subjects ...


References

*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 The ''Coptic Encyclopedia'' is an eight-volume work covering the history, theology, language, art, architecture, archeology and hagiography of Coptic Egypt. The encyclopedia was written by over 250 Western and Egyptian contributing experts in th ...
'', edited by
Aziz S. Atiya Aziz Suryal Atiya ( ar, عزيز سوريال عطية, ; July 5, 1898 – September 24, 1988) was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic history, Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies. Atiya was the fou ...
. 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, .


External links

*
Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006. H ...
'
Revised proposal to add the Coptic alphabet to the BMP of the UCSFinal Proposal to Encode Coptic Epact Numbers in ISO/IEC 1064Copticsounds – a resource for the study of Coptic phonology
* ttp://ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/djm/coptic.html Coptic Unicode input*
Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006. H ...
'
''Antinoou'': A standard font for Coptic
supported by th
International Association for Coptic Studies

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

Copti
font support
– how to install, use and manipulate Coptic ASCII and Unicode fonts

(omniglot.com)
GNU FreeFont
Coptic range in serif face {{Authority control Coptic language
Copt Copts ( cop, ⲛⲓⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ ; ar, الْقِبْط ) are a Christian ethnoreligious group indigenous to North Africa who have primarily inhabited the area of modern Egypt and Sudan since antiquity. Most ethnic Copts are Co ...
Alphabets Writing systems of Africa Ancient Egyptian language Coptic Orthodox Church