Ei ⲉ

Ei is the fifth letter of the Coptic alphabet, worth five in the numeral series, and it is the Greek epsilon under a different name. The Greek label epsilon means bare or plain e, a term Greek grammarians coined late in order to distinguish the letter from a competing two letter spelling of the same sound; Coptic never adopted that label and its own tradition calls the letter ei.

The letter writes a short e. What makes it important out of proportion to its plainness is the amount of grammatical work Coptic gives it. Coptic builds a great deal of its grammar out of short prefixed elements, and ei appears in a large number of them, in the definite and indefinite articles, in verbal prefixes, and as the vowel that breaks up consonant clusters an Egyptian speaker would otherwise have to negotiate unaided. Reading a line of Coptic aloud is possible in a way that reading a line of Demotic is not, and letters like ei are the reason. Egyptian had been written for three millennia in scripts that recorded consonants only, and the switch to the Greek alphabet made the vowels of the language visible for the first time. Coptic is therefore the single stage of Egyptian whose pronunciation can be read rather than reconstructed, and everything scholars think they know about the vocalisation of earlier Egyptian leans on it.

When Jean Francois Champollion worked out the reading of the hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, Coptic was the instrument that made it possible. He had learned the language from the liturgical books of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and he understood that Coptic was not a separate tongue but the last stage of Egyptian itself, written in a borrowed alphabet. That gave him a body of Egyptian vocabulary he could actually pronounce and translate, against which the consonantal skeletons yielded by the hieroglyphic script could be tested. Letters like ei were central to that work, because the vowels they record are exactly the information the older scripts withhold. The debt runs in both directions and has not stopped.

Modern Egyptology still uses Coptic evidence to reconstruct how earlier Egyptian words were vocalised, and the argument moves from Coptic backwards rather than the other way round. At the same time the Coptic Orthodox Church has continued to use the language in worship without interruption, so the letters have never become purely archaeological. A Coptic child learning the alphabet in a church school is learning the same signs that a fourth century scribe used at Nag Hammadi and that Champollion learned in Grenoble, in a chain of transmission that has not been broken, even though Coptic ceased to be a language of the street in Egypt many centuries ago.