Khi and the Contracted Sacred Names

The habit of writing certain sacred words in contracted form, first and last letters with a stroke above, appears in Greek Christian manuscripts from very early and spreads with the scriptures into every language Christianity was written in. Coptic took it over completely. The words treated this way are a short and stable list, the names and titles of God and Christ chiefly, and the contraction is not an abbreviation for the scribe convenience so much as a way of marking the word as holy, since it makes the sacred names look different from every other word on the page. Khi stands at the head of the contraction for Christ, which is among the commonest of them.

The practice raises a question for anyone reading Coptic that is worth stating plainly: the same overline mark does more than one job. It marks a contracted sacred name, it marks a letter used as a numeral, and in Coptic it also marks a consonant carrying a syllable without a vowel, which is a use Greek never had. A reader tells them apart by context and by which letters are underneath. This is the sort of thing that makes early manuscripts hard to read and makes reading them a trained skill, and it is also the sort of thing a modern printed edition silently resolves, which is one reason serious work still goes back to the page.