Me: The Coptic Letter (Value 40), from Greek Mu

Me is the thirteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value forty. It is the Greek mu, renamed in Coptic, and it writes the m sound. Coptic works it exceptionally hard. The language builds much of its grammar from short elements attached to the front of a word, and me appears in a large share of them: in forms of the definite article, in prepositions, in the particle that marks a direct object, and in a range of verbal prefixes that carry tense and aspect. The result is that me turns up on almost every line of almost every Coptic text, and a reader learning the language meets it as grammar before meeting it as a sound.

Me also belongs to the small group of Coptic consonants that can form a syllable without a vowel beside them. When one does, the scribe draws a horizontal line above it, the superlinear stroke, and that stroke is the single most recognisable feature of a Coptic page to someone who has never read the script. It has no counterpart in Greek writing. It is one of the clearest signs that Coptic did not merely copy the Greek alphabet but adjusted it, adding letters where Egyptian sounds required them and adding marks where Egyptian syllable structure required those.