Gamma: The Coptic Letter (Value 3), from Greek Gamma

Gamma is the third letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value three. It belongs to a small group of Greek letters that Coptic adopted without any pressing need for them, because the Egyptian language of the period had no sound that gamma naturally wrote. The alphabet was taken over as a series rather than assembled letter by letter, and gamma came with it, so its distribution in a Coptic text is not random: it clusters in Greek loanwords, in the names of biblical persons and places, in the technical vocabulary of theology, and in the Greek phrases that punctuate Coptic service books.

Coptic scribes also inherited the Greek Christian habit of abbreviating sacred names, the nomina sacra, and gamma appears in some of those contracted forms. The letter is therefore something of a diagnostic. A Coptic page dense with gamma is a page dense with Greek, and one virtually without it is likely to be running on native Egyptian vocabulary. Its numeral value is put to full use regardless of that, since three is a number Coptic manuscripts have unceasing occasion to write, from the numbering of gatherings and chapters to the Trinity itself, and a scribe reaching for gamma as a figure was doing something completely independent of whether the letter appeared as a sound anywhere on the page.