Semma ⲥ

Semma is the nineteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value two hundred. It is the Greek sigma, and Coptic grammars give its name in more than one form, semma and sima among them. Two things distinguish it from its Greek parent on the page. Coptic writes it in a single rounded shape, descended from the lunate sigma that had become standard in Greek writing of the Roman and Byzantine periods rather than from the angular classical form; and Coptic has no separate final sigma of the kind Greek uses at the end of a word. Both differences follow from when the borrowing happened. Coptic took the Greek alphabet as it stood in Roman Egypt, in the hands actually being written there, not as it appears in classical inscriptions, and several Coptic letter shapes make more sense against that background than against the textbook Greek of an earlier era.

Semma writes the s sound, a sound Egyptian had, so it works in native vocabulary as well as in the Greek layer, and Coptic grammar gives it steady employment in pronominal elements. In the numeral series it is worth two hundred, and like every Greek derived Coptic letter it holds exactly the Greek value. The absence of a final form is worth dwelling on. Greek distinguishes a sigma at the end of a word from one inside it, a distinction that assumes the reader can see where words end. Early Coptic manuscripts are written in continuous script with little or no word division, so a final form would have had nothing to mark, and Coptic did without one. That is a small piece of evidence that the borrowing was made by people who understood what they were taking rather than copied wholesale.

Coptic writing has a look of its own, and semma is one of the letters that gives it. The oldest Coptic literary manuscripts are written in a broad, upright, carefully separated uncial hand, letters of even height standing apart from one another with little or no space between words, a style built for reading aloud from a lectern rather than for speed. Alongside it, and far more abundant, is a cursive documentary hand used for letters, contracts, accounts and the thousands of ostraca, potsherds and limestone flakes used as scrap, that survive from monastic settlements in Egypt. The two hands can look almost like different scripts.

Over the medieval centuries the literary hand grew more angular and more decorated, and later liturgical manuscripts carry ornamented initials, coloured headpieces and interlace of a kind shared with the wider Christian book cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Coptic printing began much later and had to settle on typeforms, so the shapes familiar from modern Coptic service books and from alphabet charts in church schools are a standardisation of a much more varied handwritten tradition. Anyone comparing a Nag Hammadi codex of the fourth century with a printed Bohairic liturgy will recognise the letters immediately and see at once that the intervening sixteen centuries left marks on every one of them.