Laula and What the Change of Script Preserved

It is usual to say that the Coptic alphabet gave Egyptian its vowels, and that is true and important, but it undersells what happened. The older Egyptian scripts were not merely vowelless; they were a system in which one sign could cover several distinct sounds, in which the reader supplied a great deal from knowledge of the language, and in which the classifier signs at the end of a word did as much work as the phonetic ones.

Writing Egyptian in the Greek alphabet meant giving up all of that and starting from a strictly phonetic principle: one letter, one sound, spelled out. The Egyptian sounds Greek could not cover were supplied by seven letters brought in from Demotic. What this bought was a language that can be read aloud by someone who does not already know it, which is precisely the condition for Coptic to serve as the key to earlier Egyptian. The separation of l from r, which laula makes possible, is one instance among many. Others include the visibility of vowel quality and length, the marking of syllabic consonants with the superlinear stroke, and the plain display of grammatical prefixes that Demotic writing runs together. The cost was the loss of a three thousand year graphic tradition, and there is no evidence that anyone regarded the exchange as a loss at the time; the people who made it were writing scripture in their own language for the first time.