Ei and the Recovery of the Egyptian Language

When Jean Francois Champollion worked out the reading of the hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century, Coptic was the instrument that made it possible. He had learned the language from the liturgical books of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and he understood that Coptic was not a separate tongue but the last stage of Egyptian itself, written in a borrowed alphabet. That gave him a body of Egyptian vocabulary he could actually pronounce and translate, against which the consonantal skeletons yielded by the hieroglyphic script could be tested. Letters like ei were central to that work, because the vowels they record are exactly the information the older scripts withhold. The debt runs in both directions and has not stopped.

Modern Egyptology still uses Coptic evidence to reconstruct how earlier Egyptian words were vocalised, and the argument moves from Coptic backwards rather than the other way round. At the same time the Coptic Orthodox Church has continued to use the language in worship without interruption, so the letters have never become purely archaeological. A Coptic child learning the alphabet in a church school is learning the same signs that a fourth century scribe used at Nag Hammadi and that Champollion learned in Grenoble, in a chain of transmission that has not been broken, even though Coptic ceased to be a language of the street in Egypt many centuries ago.