Coptic alphabet

The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek 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.

History

The Coptic alphabet has a long history, going back to the Hellenistic period, when the Greek alphabet was used to transcribe Demotic 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. A number of 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 "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 to write their religious texts. All the Gnostic codices found in Nag Hammadi used the Coptic alphabet.

The Old Nubian alphabet—used to write Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language —is written mainly in an uncial Greek alphabet, which borrows Coptic and Meroitic letters of Demotic origin into its inventory.

Form

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 and to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex 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, 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 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 (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.

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 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 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. Sometimes numerical use is distinguished from text with a continuous overline above the letters, as with Greek and Cyrillic numerals.

Unicode

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.

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
* Institute of Coptic Studies

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'', 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, .

External links

*Michael Everson'
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'
''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
Alphabets
Writing systems of Africa
Ancient Egyptian language
Coptic Orthodox Church