[1] THOUGHTS ON THE MODERNISATION OF THE COPTIC LANGUAGE: THE SO-CALLED “SIXTH COPTIC LETTER”, CO-OU, MUST GO FROM COPTIC ALPHABET

The Coptic letters in Bohairic are 31: 24 Greek letters (starting with the alpha and ending with the omega) and 7 from Demotic added at to the end of the Greek letters (after the omega [which in some Coptic references is called ‘oo’]), and including shai, fai, khai, hori, djandja, tschima and ti. However, Coptic educational material still insists that Coptic Bohairic alphabet contains 32 letters! They insist on including ‘co-ou’ as the sixth letter, though it is never part of any Coptic word. The reason for that is the Coptic numeral system is alphabetical, just as the Greek;[1] and ‘6 (co-ou)’ was used as the number 6 in Greek (they called it, digamma). The Copts borrowed this to indicate the number ‘6’ in their own language.

The origin of the letter ‘co-ou’ is Greek. Three letters which were originally Phoenician, and were used in Greek alphabet up until the 5^th century, are now obsolete as Greek letters, and modern Greek alphabet, made of 24 letters, does not include them (since the classic standard form of the alphabet was introduced in the 5^th century). These letters are the digamma (or wau), the koppa (or Qoppa) and the sampi. However, these letters are still used in Greek numeral system to indicate the numbers 6, 90 and 900 with the marker ‘keraia’ (a little horn after the letter to indicate they are numbers). In the Byzantine period, however, an overbar (together with other signs) was used for that function, which the Copts retained. The Greek koppa as a numeral was replaced by the Coptic fai, while the sampi was replaced by shai, both of Demotic origin.

Modern Western textbooks on Coptic omit ‘co-ou’ all together from Coptic alphabet (e.g., Malon)[2] but Coptic writers (e.g., Mattar[3] and Younan[4]) includes it, though they put it in the numeral form with the single overbar mark indicative of a numeral. Old Coptic artefacts (such as the one published above, most probably before the Arab invasion of Egypt in AD 640) do not contain co-ou in the alphabet, but in the Middle-Ages, it seems to have crept into it.

Figure 1: A rock with old writing of Coptic alphabet

The first printed Coptic alphabet is dated to 1486, when the German Bernhard von Breydenbach (1440 – 1497) and Erhard Reuwich (1445 – 1505) published their book, Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, in which they gave an account of their journey to the Holy land in 1483. The Coptic alphabet is produced in woodcut, and contains 32 letters, including co-ou (they give it a rather curious form, and call it zso).

Figure 2: Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctum, from the 2^nd edition (Peter Drach in Speier, Mainz, 1490), p. 59

The reader can check, e.g., the Coptic alphabet in Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus by Athanasius Kircher (1601 – 1680), which was published in 1636:

Figure 3: Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus (1636), page 283

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Holland , there is prints collection by Jan Luyken (1649 – 1712) titled Koptisch, Armeens en Chinees alfabet that dates to 1690.[5] The engraving which shows the Coptic alphabet includes 32 letters, including the sixth letter, co-ou, which is given the name, so:

Figure 4: Jan Luyken’s print showing the Koptisch alphabet (1690)

When in the period between 1751 and 1772 the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, which was written by many, called the Encyclopédie, was published in Paris, its second volume, Caracteres et Alphabets de Langues mortes et vivantes (characters and alphabets from ancient and current languages), included a printed Coptic alphabet engraving, and it contains 32 letters, with co-ou being called so:

Figure 5: Coptic and Greek alphabet in Caracteres et Alphabets de Langues mortes et vivantes

What could account for the absence of co-ou in the earlier Coptic alphabet and its emergence sometime in the Middle-Ages? I think a lot of it has to do with the Coptic accountants and tax-surveyors, who became prominent in the Islamic administration after the Arab invasion of Egypt, and whose arithmetic was their business. Of course there is no way to prove that, but it is a plausible explanation. Anyway, it seems that Coptic children from that time on have been taught the Coptic alphabet, with co-ou (the so-called ‘sixth Coptic letter’) included in it, making the alphabet falsely 32 letters.

The inclusion of ‘co-ou’ in the Coptic alphabet is wrong, unoriginal, confusing and does not aid in learning Coptic. The ‘sixth letter’ must be taken out of the Coptic alphabet; and the Coptic alphabet must be seen as comprised of 31 and not 32 letters.

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[1] Modern Greeks have abandoned using the alphabetical numeral system for cardinal numbers, and now use the Indo-Arabic system for these; however, they still use it in ordinal numbers.

[2] Alexis Malon, Grammaire copte : avec bibliographie, chrestomathie et vocabulaire (Berouth, Imp. Catholique, 1907).

[3] Nabil Mattar, A Study in Bohairic Coptic (Pasasdena, Hope Publishing House, 1990).

[4] Sameh Younan, So, You Want to Learn Coptic? A Guide to Bohairic Grammar (St. Mary, St. Bakhomious, St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church in Kirrawee, Sydney, Australia, 2005).

[5] These were published in Amsterdam by Wilhelmus Goeree (1635-1711).