Hori and the Sounds the Greek Alphabet Had Lost

It is easy to think of a borrowed alphabet as a straightforward gain, and mostly it was, but Greek brought its own gaps. Greek had once had a letter for h and had discarded it, marking initial aspiration instead with a small hook above the vowel, and by the period when Coptic was formed even that was fading from ordinary practice. Greek had also lost the letter digamma from the spoken alphabet while keeping its numeral value in the sixth place, which is why the Coptic numeral sign sou exists and writes nothing.

Egyptian, meanwhile, was a language with a rich set of consonants made at the back of the mouth and in the throat, several of which Greek had never had. So the alphabet that arrived in Egypt was in one respect over-equipped, with letters for aspirated stops and consonant clusters Egyptian did not need, and in another respect under-equipped, missing an h and several other basic Egyptian consonants. Hori is the answer to the second problem and the seven Demotic letters together are the full answer. The first problem was solved by simply keeping the extra letters and using them for loanwords, numerals and optional compressions. Neither solution is elegant, and both are exactly what happens when a real writing system is put together by people who need it to work rather than designed by anyone.