Kyima: The Coptic Letter Taken from Demotic

Kyima is the thirty first letter of the Coptic alphabet, the sixth of the seven taken from Demotic, and it carries no numeral value. Coptic grammars record its name in several forms, and its sound is among the more difficult points of Coptic phonology. It writes an affricate related to but distinct from janja, the pair of them covering sounds that Greek had no letters for, and the relationship between the two across the Coptic dialects has occupied specialists at some length.

In the Bohairic reading used in Coptic Orthodox services today kyima is given a value clearly distinct from janja; for Sahidic the distinction has to be reconstructed from spelling evidence, since the dialect has had no speakers for around a thousand years. What is entirely clear is why the letter is in the alphabet. Egyptian had a sound the Greek letters could not write, and rather than press an existing letter into service or invent a shape, the tradition took a sign from Demotic, the script Egyptian was already written in, and added it after the Greek series had run out. Six other letters arrived by the same route and for the same reason, and together they are the reason Coptic works as an orthography for Egyptian rather than as a rough transliteration of it.