Gamma, Loanwords and the Shape of the Coptic Alphabet

The Coptic alphabet is usually described as the Greek alphabet plus a handful of extra letters taken from Demotic, and gamma is a good place to see why the description needs care. Coptic did not select from the Greek letters; it took all twenty four of them, plus the numeral sign for six, and then added signs for the Egyptian sounds Greek could not write. That is why a script devised for an Egyptian language contains several letters that Egyptian words scarcely use. The additions run the other way and are the more interesting half of the arrangement.

Shai, fai, hori, janja, kyima and ti were brought in from Demotic to write sounds no Greek letter covered, and the Bohairic dialect uses a seventh, khai, which Sahidic does without, so the alphabet is thirty two letters in Bohairic and thirty one in Sahidic. Counting gamma alongside those additions makes the point that an alphabet records a history as well as a phonology. Gamma is there because of where the letters came from; hori is there because of what the language needed. A reader who knows only the modern Coptic Orthodox liturgy meets both kinds of letter on the same page without any hint that they arrived by different routes and for different reasons, and the alphabet chart hanging in a Coptic church schoolroom presents them in a single unbroken series.