Phi ⲫ

Phi is the twenty second letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value five hundred; Coptic Orthodox usage names it fi. In classical Greek it wrote an aspirated p, a p with a following breath, and by the Roman period the sound had become an f. Coptic took over the later value, which is another instance of the general rule that Coptic borrowed the Greek alphabet as it was actually being spoken and written in Roman Egypt rather than as a classical textbook describes it. Phi belongs to the group of Coptic letters that also serve as compressions, standing for the sequence pi plus hori just as theta stands for tau plus hori and khi for kappa plus hori. Coptic may write either the single letter or the two, and manuscripts differ along dialect and workshop lines, so the preference is usable evidence when a book has to be placed.

Phi also appears in the fused definite article that turned so many Egyptian nouns into fixed names, and through Greek those names reached Latin and the modern languages of Europe. In the numeral series phi is worth five hundred, sitting in the rank of hundreds with the Greek value it has always had. The doubling of the f sound between phi and the Egyptian letter fai is not a defect in the alphabet but a record of how it was assembled. Coptic acquired phi as part of a complete Greek series in which it had once written an aspirated p, and acquired fai separately because Egyptian needed an f of its own. Where a word takes each of them is therefore a piece of etymological information sitting openly on the page, visible to a reader who knows the two layers of the vocabulary and invisible to one who does not.

It is worth being precise about which Greek Coptic borrowed. The alphabet came into Egyptian use in the first centuries of the common era, in a country that had been Greek speaking at the administrative level since the conquest of Alexander and where Greek and Egyptian had been living side by side for three hundred years. The Greek available to the people who made Coptic was the Greek of Roman Egypt: written in the letter shapes of the period, pronounced with the sound changes that had already happened, carrying the numeral conventions of the manuscript tradition and the reading aids that went with them.

Every one of those things came across. The letter shapes are those of the Roman and early Byzantine hands, not the classical inscriptions. The sound values are the later ones, which is why beta is soft and phi is an f. The numeral system arrived complete with the signs for six, ninety and nine hundred that write no sound. And the scribal marks, the two dots above a vowel, the stroke above an abbreviated sacred name, came with the alphabet as part of the package. What Coptic added was its own: seven letters from Demotic for Egyptian sounds, the superlinear stroke for syllabic consonants, and the whole grammar of the language underneath. The result is not Greek and not a compromise; it is Egyptian, equipped.