Beta: The Coptic Letter (Value 2), from Greek Beta

Beta is the second letter of the Coptic alphabet, worth two in the alphabetic numeral series, and it is a good illustration of the fact that Coptic borrowed the Greek alphabet at a particular moment in the history of Greek pronunciation rather than from the textbooks of classical Athens. By the Roman period the Greek beta had already begun to soften from a full stop consonant towards a fricative, and it is that later sound, not the classical one, that Coptic took over.

The Bohairic tradition preserved in the services of the Coptic Orthodox Church names the letter vida and reads it as a v before most vowels, hardening it towards a b in certain positions. Grammars of Sahidic, which no longer has living speakers, describe the sound more cautiously as somewhere between the two, reconstructed from spellings, from Greek transcriptions of Coptic words and from the way Coptic scribes rendered Greek loanwords. Beta is a common letter in Coptic. It appears in native Egyptian vocabulary and in the very large Greek component that entered the language along with Christianity, so a page of Coptic scripture will carry it repeatedly. In the numeral series it does steady work for the number two, and because Coptic manuscripts number the quires of a codex with letters, beta commonly marks the second gathering of a bound book. That is a quiet reminder that in a manuscript culture the alphabet was as much a system of counting as a system of sounds.