Ro ⲣ

Ro is the eighteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the first of the hundreds in the numeral series, standing for one hundred. It writes the r sound and is common in both the Egyptian and the Greek layers of Coptic vocabulary. Its interest lies in what it makes visible. For three thousand years Egyptian was written in scripts that used the same signs for r and for l, with no way of marking which sound a given word contained, so that a fundamental consonantal distinction was simply absent from the page. Egyptologists compensate with transliteration conventions and with evidence from the way Egyptian names were spelled in other languages, all of it indirect.

Coptic ends the difficulty at a stroke, because the Greek alphabet supplied a rho and a lambda as separate letters and Coptic took both. From that moment the words separate, and because Coptic is a late stage of the same language, the Coptic form of a word became a standard witness for reconstructing the consonants of its ancient ancestor. That evidence has limits. Two thousand years of sound change separate Coptic from Middle Egyptian, the dialects disagree with each other, and a Coptic form is a descendant rather than a photograph. But it is direct evidence of a kind the earlier scripts do not supply at all, and letters like ro are the reason it exists.

The alphabetic numeral system Coptic inherited from Greek works in three ranks of nine, and ro opens the third. The units run from alpha to theta with sou filling the sixth place, the tens from iota to the numeral sign for ninety, and the hundreds from ro to the numeral sign for nine hundred. That last rank needs the Greek derived letters through omega plus one further numeral sign, which is why the Greek alphabet in ordinary use, at twenty four letters, is three short of the twenty seven the system requires.

The seven letters Coptic added from Demotic have no place in the arrangement and carry no numeral value, because the values come with the Greek series and those letters were never part of it. Coptic scribes marked a letter used as a figure by drawing a line above it, so a reader met no ambiguity even in continuous script. Numbers appear constantly in Coptic books: quire signatures so a binder can assemble the gatherings, folio and page numbers, chapter and psalm divisions, and dates in the Coptic calendar. The colophon at the end of a manuscript, where a scribe recorded who copied the book and when and for whom, is often the single most useful line in a codex, and it is written substantially in letters used as figures. Ro at one hundred is where the largest of them start.