Janja: The Coptic Letter Taken from Demotic

Janja is the thirtieth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the fifth of the seven taken from Demotic. It carries no numeral value, standing with the other Egyptian additions outside the Greek alphabetic numeral series. The letter writes an affricate, a consonant formed by a stop released into a fricative, of a kind Greek had no single letter for, and it is common in native Egyptian vocabulary and in a number of grammatical elements, so it is not a marginal sign. Its exact value is one of the harder points of Coptic phonology. It differs across the dialects, and the reconstructed Sahidic value and the Bohairic reading used in Coptic Orthodox services today are not the same, which is a distinction worth holding on to.

Sahidic has had no speakers for something close to a thousand years, so what is said about its sounds is reconstruction from spellings, from the way Coptic words were rendered in other languages and from the internal logic of the system. Bohairic as read in church is a living practice, but it has its own history, including a nineteenth century reform in Egypt that brought liturgical reading closer to modern Greek pronunciation. Neither is a direct witness to the other, and confusing them is one of the standard traps in describing how Coptic sounded.