Ne ⲛ

Ne is the fourteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value fifty. Like me it is a Greek letter under a Coptic name, it writes the n sound, and it is one of the most heavily used letters in the language. Coptic grammar depends on it: it marks the genitive relation between two nouns, it forms the plural article, it introduces the direct object in a common construction, and it appears in numerous verbal prefixes. A student learning Coptic learns ne as a piece of grammar long before thinking of it as a sound, and a page of Coptic will carry it many dozens of times. Ne shares with me the ability to stand as a syllable without a vowel, marked by the superlinear stroke, and the two letters together account for most of the strokes on a typical page.

In the numeral series ne closes the first half of the tens at fifty, which makes it frequent in dates and in the numbering of psalms, chapters and the gatherings of a codex. Its ordinariness is the point: a letter this common is a letter whose behaviour has to be understood before anything else can be read, and Coptic grammars accordingly spend a great deal of space on the several distinct jobs ne performs. Ne also sits inside one of the quiet difficulties of reading Coptic. Because the language allows the letter to carry a syllable alone, and because a stroke above it can equally mark a numeral or a contracted sacred name, a reader has to decide from context which of three things the mark is doing. Modern printed editions resolve that silently, which is one of the reasons close work on a Coptic text still returns to the manuscript rather than to the edition.

Coptic grammar is Egyptian grammar. The alphabet is Greek with Egyptian additions, and the vocabulary carries a heavy Greek layer, but the structure of the language is the last stage of a continuous Egyptian development running back through Demotic and Late Egyptian. Ne is a good illustration, because almost everything it does is Egyptian.

The genitive marker, the plural article, the object marker and the verbal prefixes it appears in are all inheritances from earlier Egyptian, visible in Demotic and traceable further back, and they are written with a Greek letter only because that is the alphabet that came to hand. This matters for how Coptic should be understood. It is not a Greek dialect of Egyptian and it is not a hybrid language; it is Egyptian written in a new script, with a large body of Greek loanwords, in a Christian setting. The point was obvious to Champollion, who used Coptic as his route into the hieroglyphs precisely because he recognised it as the same language, and it remains the foundation of Egyptian linguistics. A page of Coptic therefore reads as two histories at once: a Greek alphabet carrying an Egyptian grammar, with Egyptian letters filling the gaps the Greek letters left, and a vocabulary drawn from both. Ne belongs to the Egyptian half, wearing a Greek shape.