Laula ⲗ

Laula is the twelfth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value thirty. Its shape is the Greek lambda, but Coptic did not keep the Greek name, and grammars record the letter as laula or in the Bohairic tradition as lavda. It writes the l sound, and in doing so it settles something the older Egyptian scripts left permanently unclear. Egyptian certainly had an l, but hieroglyphic and the cursive scripts derived from it had no sign reserved for it, using instead the signs that also wrote r, so that for most of the recorded history of the language it is not possible to say from the writing alone whether a given word contained an l or an r. Egyptologists work around this with transliteration conventions and with evidence from foreign transcriptions of Egyptian names, which is indirect and incomplete.

Coptic ends the problem. Once the Greek alphabet supplied a lambda and a rho as separate letters, words that had been indistinguishable on the page separated, and the Coptic form of a word became one of the standard pieces of evidence for reconstructing the consonants of its ancient ancestor. Laula is a small letter carrying a large methodological point: a change of script can preserve information that the previous script destroyed, and the gain is not only in vowels.

It is usual to say that the Coptic alphabet gave Egyptian its vowels, and that is true and important, but it undersells what happened. The older Egyptian scripts were not merely vowelless; they were a system in which one sign could cover several distinct sounds, in which the reader supplied a great deal from knowledge of the language, and in which the classifier signs at the end of a word did as much work as the phonetic ones.

Writing Egyptian in the Greek alphabet meant giving up all of that and starting from a strictly phonetic principle: one letter, one sound, spelled out. The Egyptian sounds Greek could not cover were supplied by seven letters brought in from Demotic. What this bought was a language that can be read aloud by someone who does not already know it, which is precisely the condition for Coptic to serve as the key to earlier Egyptian. The separation of l from r, which laula makes possible, is one instance among many. Others include the visibility of vowel quality and length, the marking of syllabic consonants with the superlinear stroke, and the plain display of grammatical prefixes that Demotic writing runs together. The cost was the loss of a three thousand year graphic tradition, and there is no evidence that anyone regarded the exchange as a loss at the time; the people who made it were writing scripture in their own language for the first time.