Ne and the Grammar Coptic Built on Borrowed Letters

Coptic grammar is Egyptian grammar. The alphabet is Greek with Egyptian additions, and the vocabulary carries a heavy Greek layer, but the structure of the language is the last stage of a continuous Egyptian development running back through Demotic and Late Egyptian. Ne is a good illustration, because almost everything it does is Egyptian.

The genitive marker, the plural article, the object marker and the verbal prefixes it appears in are all inheritances from earlier Egyptian, visible in Demotic and traceable further back, and they are written with a Greek letter only because that is the alphabet that came to hand. This matters for how Coptic should be understood. It is not a Greek dialect of Egyptian and it is not a hybrid language; it is Egyptian written in a new script, with a large body of Greek loanwords, in a Christian setting. The point was obvious to Champollion, who used Coptic as his route into the hieroglyphs precisely because he recognised it as the same language, and it remains the foundation of Egyptian linguistics. A page of Coptic therefore reads as two histories at once: a Greek alphabet carrying an Egyptian grammar, with Egyptian letters filling the gaps the Greek letters left, and a vocabulary drawn from both. Ne belongs to the Egyptian half, wearing a Greek shape.