Coptic script

The Coptic alphabet 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.

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History of the alphabet Egyptian hieroglyphs 32nd c. BCE Hieratic 32nd c. BCE Demotic 7th c. BCE Meroitic 3rd c. BCE Proto-Sinaitic 19th c. BCE Ugaritic 15th c. BCE Ancient South Arabian 9th c. BCE Geʽez c. 5th c. BCE Phoenician 12th c. BCE (see below) Hangul 1443 Thaana c. 1601 Adlam 1989 Phoenician 12th c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10th c. BCE Samaritan 6th c. BCE Aramaic 8th c. BCE Unknown Kushan script 600–200 BCE Kharosthi 3rd c. BCE Brahmi 3rd c. BCE (Brahmic) Pallava 4th century Cham 4th century Dhives Akuru 6th century Khmer 611 Tibetan 7th century ʼPhags-pa 1269 Devanagari 10th century Canadian Aboriginal 1840 Hebrew 3rd c. BCE Pahlavi 2nd c. BCE Avestan 4th century Palmyrene 1st c. BCE Nabataean 2nd c. BCE Arabic 4th century N'Ko 1949 Syriac 1st century Sogdian 2nd century Old Turkic 8th century Old Hungarian c. 650 Old Uyghur Mongolian 1204 Mandaic 2nd century Greek 8th c. BCE Etruscan 8th c. BCE Latin 7th c. BCE Deseret 1854 Great Lakes Algonquian 19th century Blackfoot 1888 Fraser 1915 Saanich 1978 Osage 2006 Runic 2nd century Ogham 4th century Lycian 5th c. BCE Coptic 3rd century Gothic 3rd century Armenian 405 Caucasian Albanian c. 420 Georgian c. 430 Glagolitic 862 Cyrillic c. 940 Old Permic 1372 Libyco-Berber 10th c. BCE Tifinagh 4th century Neo-Tifinagh 1970 Paleohispanic 7th c. BCE

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

ⲓ andⲩ to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex over any vowel for the same purpose.

The Coptic script'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 /ti/ or /di/.

As the Coptic script 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. 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.

These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language. Coptic did not originally have case distinctions—they are a modern convention, as is the case with other classical languages like Latin.

In Old Coptic, there were a large number of Demotic Egyptian characters, including some logograms. This was reduced to seven such characters, used for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet (plus their modern lowercase forms):

Coptic numerals are an alphabetic numeral system in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such asⲫ for 500. 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.

These are also included in the Unicode specification.

• 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

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 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

Coptic uses U+0304 ◌̄ COMBINING MACRON to indicate syllabic consonants, for exampleⲛ̄.

Coptic abbreviations use U+0305 ◌̅ COMBINING OVERLINE 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,ⲡ̅ⲛ̅ⲁ̅, a common abbreviation forⲡⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ '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. 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 inⲁ͵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 inⲁ̿ for 1,000.

• Coptic pronunciation reform
• Institute of Coptic Studies

• 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,ISBN 978-3-9524018-9-7.

• Michael Everson's Revised proposal to add the Coptic alphabet to the BMP of the UCS
• Final Proposal to Encode Coptic Epact Numbers in ISO/IEC 1064
• Copticsounds – a resource for the study of Coptic phonology
• Phonological overview of the Coptic alphabet in comparison to classical and modern Greek.
• Coptic Unicode input
• Michael Everson's Antinoou: A standard font for Coptic supported by the 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
• ⲡⲓⲥⲁϧⲟ Archived 2021-03-08 at the Wayback Machine: Coptic font support Archived 2021-01-25 at the Wayback Machine – how to install, use and manipulate Coptic ASCII and Unicode fonts
• Download Free Coptic Fonts
• The Coptic Alphabet (omniglot.com)
• GNU FreeFont Coptic range in serif face