Coptic script

The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the latest stage 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.

History

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 BCE and as late as the second century CE, 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.

Form 
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  and  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  or .

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.

Letters 
These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language. The distinction between capital and lowercase is a modern invention.

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 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.

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'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
: Coptic font support – 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

Coptic language
Copt
Alphabets
Writing systems of Africa
Ancient Egyptian language
Coptic Orthodox Church