Languages of Africa, with ነቢ
What is the language called in English and in itself?
• I think this one might be one of the easiest things I write in a while because it’s fairly common knowledge that the name “Egypt” is a mispronunciation of the original name of Memphis (*ħwt kʔ ptħ)—with Coptic being of a shared etymological origin. The widely known name in English literature Coptic is ultimately borrowed from Arabic [qubtˤ] ‘Copt’ which in itself is borrowed from Coptic, which borrowed from Greek, which ultimately borrowed from Egyptian. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. Of course, in the language it’s not referred to properly as Coptic and the common native term for it is ⟨ϯⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ⟩ [t(ə)metɾemənkʰeːmi] in the Bohairic variety, which means “speech of the people of Egypt”. Coptic of course has various dialects but the main one’s encountered historically and in the modern day in liturgy are Sahidic and Bohairic with the latter being the current dialect of as far as I am aware all Coptic churches.
• Coptic is a liturgical language so it’s spread is essentially wherever the Coptic Egyptian diaspora can be found, but when it was still a spoken language as late as the 17th century per some estimates—whatever be the case the Coptic Christian population were likely the last portion of the Egyptian population to be linguistically Arabized and unlike Egyptian Muslims, typically do not identify their ethnic identity with the language they speak although that’s a topic outside of linguistics to a large degree. I don’t really think a map of where Coptic was natively spoken is necessarily needed in this case, I think we all kinda have an idea of where it was spoken and considering it was spoken throughout the Egyptian Nile Valley from the Delta to Aswan.
How many speakers does it have?
• There’s no official count of people who speak Coptic; it’s essentially like asking how many people speak Ge‘ez or can read Old Kanembu. I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that individuals who know Coptic do use it as a spoken language between one another, but there’s nothing in the way of an actual number of speakers available. Liturgical languages tend to be studied with less focus on their current speech population, partially because in almost all cases it is an L2 and historically understanding the social aspect of Coptic as a language has come second if not last in regards to the academic study of it. There is of course revitalization efforts but those typically don’t show up on the radars of many linguists.
Does it have a writing system?
• Yeah, the Coptic alphabet, which is in itself a Greek originated alphabet with some characters carried over from the Demotic Egyptian script—this script would actually later be borrowed by Nubian Christians and used, with some minor alterations, for Old Nubian.
What language family does it belong to? What are some of it’s notable relatives?
• Okay let me specify at least one thing: no, Egyptian and Coptic are not the same language. Coptic is the descendant of Egyptian, and thus indeed continuous of it and inextricably linked to it, but it is not the same language. That really shouldn’t take away from its status, but it’s important to clarify the taxonomy there because a lot of the time Coptic is just outright called Egyptian when in reality the language of ancient Egypt and Coptic have a vast amount of differences. That being said, Coptic is an Egyptian language and is a member of Afroasiatic—depending who you ask the question of where it stands in Afroasiatic is rather open; I personally see it plausible from my knowledge of Egyptian and Amazigh that the two are probably two of the closer branches within Afroasiatic, but we might never know. Academic stagnation kinda comes into play there and I’d rather not turn this into a rant about how frustrating Afroasiatic linguistics can be because the studies of a language are rooted in academic traditionalism. Just to help illustrate when Egyptian becomes Coptic, here’s a chronology of Egyptian from Haspelmath, Grossman, & Richter ed. (2014):
What is it like phonologically?
• So I’m just going to show a comparative inventory of the consonants between dialects and Common (Old) Coptic, Coptic vowels are a bit more tricky of a topic because of the quality vs. length debate—what I will note though is that it’s generally agreed Coptic varieties in the past generally realized ⟨b⟩ as the bilabial fricative *β:
What is it like grammatically?
• Coptic is of course grammatically similar to Egyptian: broken plurals, grammatical gender, so forth. In specific the broken plural feature can be found to have developed throughout Afroasiatic, such as in Semitic, South Cushitic, and Beja. Egyptian is a standout for restructuring its inherited verbal morphology and this follows into Coptic as well—unlike Semitic, Amazigh, and Cushitic there is no verb conjugation for instance. All nouns in Coptic have grammatical gender, marked with a prefixed definite article—rather similar to how Amazigh languages typically mark the feminine plural with a prefixed [t-] and the feminine singular with circumfixed [t-...-t] although Amazigh languages on average don’t mark masculine nouns and this is something that is done in Coptic.
What personally interests you about the language?
• I’m sure anyone intimately familiar with Afroasiatic would agree, it’s pretty easy to write about Coptic. Not because Coptic is vastly similar to other Afroasiatic languages, because it isn’t, but it’s one of the best known members of the phylum. When people talk about Afroasiatic they typically think of a handful of languages and Coptic is usually one of them. Outside of the ease of the ability to approach Coptic, it’s a genuinely interesting language. The last time there was sound changes in the languages, in the liturgy, was in the late 19th century! It has the longest continuous written history of any language given it’s a direct continuation of Egyptian which is something I think we can all appreciate. It went from being the language of all Egyptians to be safeguarded and preserved by the ethnoreligious group who remained despite the cultural and linguistic Arabization of the Nile Valley—that’s enough of an anecdote to initiate interest in the language.
• So as always, here’s a book, this time it’s “Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective” (2014), and a thesis “Modern Spoken Coptic and Community Negotiation of Linguistic Authenticity” (2015). As always as well, a cool word; doesn’t have to be long to be cool:
(Just in case; this is supposed to be a light overview post. No, no, this is not supposed to be an in-depth analysis of Coptic—I know some people might want that but yeah, no.)
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