Coptic alphabet
ⲡⲓⲥⲁϩ ⲛⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ
The Coptic alphabet is the writing system of the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, used by the Copts — native Egyptian Christians — from roughly the 2nd century CE to the present. It combines twenty-four Greek letters with seven additional signs borrowed from Demotic Egyptian for sounds Greek could not express.
All 31 letters
History
When early Christian missionaries translated scripture into Egyptian, the old hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts were inseparable from pagan religion. The solution was radical: write the Egyptian language with Greek letters instead, adding seven new signs for the sounds Greek didn't have. The result was the Coptic alphabet, which became the script of an entire Christian literature — including the Nag Hammadi library — and remains in liturgical use by the Coptic Orthodox Church today. Every modern reconstruction of how ancient Egyptian was pronounced leans heavily on Coptic evidence, because Coptic preserves the Egyptian vowels the hieroglyphs never wrote down.
Things you might not know
- Coptic is the only direct descendant of the language spoken by the pharaohs, pronounceable because it writes vowels (unlike hieroglyphic Egyptian).
- The demotic letters — ϣ, ϥ, ϩ, ϫ, ϭ, ϯ — were kept from the pre-Christian Demotic script because their Egyptian sounds (sh, f, h, dj, etc.) had no Greek equivalent.
- The Coptic word for "Egypt" (ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, khēmi) is the source of the word "alchemy" — the "black-earth" art of the Egyptians.
- Coptic Bohairic, the liturgical dialect still used in Coptic churches today, has been chanted without interruption for over 1,500 years.