Pi ⲡ

Pi is the seventeenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value eighty, closing the tens before ro opens the hundreds. It writes the p sound, which Egyptian had possessed throughout its recorded history, so unlike gamma or zeta the letter went straight into native service and is among the most frequent consonants in the language. Its grammatical weight is what a reader notices first. Coptic marks a masculine singular noun as definite with an element built on pi, and the same letter appears in demonstratives, in possessive constructions and in a number of verbal prefixes, so it turns up in the opening lesson of every Coptic grammar and thereafter on every page. That definite article had a long afterlife outside Coptic. In many Egyptian words the article fused permanently to the noun, so that the compound became the ordinary name of the thing, and a great many Egyptian place names and personal names entered Greek in that fused form.

From Greek they passed into Latin and into modern European languages, which is why a family of names beginning with a p syllable can be traced back through Coptic to an Egyptian noun with its article attached. Pi in the numeral series is worth eighty, and like every Greek derived letter of the Coptic alphabet it holds exactly the value it held in Greek, since Coptic borrowed the numeral series along with the letters rather than devising one of its own.

One of the more curious legacies of Coptic is a set of words in European languages that carry a fossilised Egyptian definite article. The mechanism is simple. Late Egyptian and Coptic mark a definite noun with a short prefixed element, and in many words that element stopped being felt as separable and became part of the noun itself.

When Greek speakers in Egypt took such a word over, they took the fused form, and Greek passed it on. Place names are the largest group, since a Greek administration in Egypt had constant occasion to write them down, and the same happened with the names of individuals and of institutions. The process is a reminder that Coptic was not a sealed liturgical language. For several centuries it was the ordinary spoken language of most of Egypt, in daily administrative and commercial use alongside Greek, and the enormous body of Coptic documentary material from monastic settlements, ostraca, letters, contracts, accounts and receipts, shows the language doing ordinary work rather than only carrying scripture. Arabic gradually displaced it after the seventh century, over a long period rather than at a stroke, and by the later medieval centuries it had ceased to be spoken generally. It never ceased to be read. The Coptic Orthodox Church has used it in worship continuously, and the letters have therefore been in unbroken use for something close to two thousand years.