Ne: The Coptic Letter (Value 50), from Greek Nu

Ne is the fourteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value fifty. Like me it is a Greek letter under a Coptic name, it writes the n sound, and it is one of the most heavily used letters in the language. Coptic grammar depends on it: it marks the genitive relation between two nouns, it forms the plural article, it introduces the direct object in a common construction, and it appears in numerous verbal prefixes. A student learning Coptic learns ne as a piece of grammar long before thinking of it as a sound, and a page of Coptic will carry it many dozens of times. Ne shares with me the ability to stand as a syllable without a vowel, marked by the superlinear stroke, and the two letters together account for most of the strokes on a typical page.

In the numeral series ne closes the first half of the tens at fifty, which makes it frequent in dates and in the numbering of psalms, chapters and the gatherings of a codex. Its ordinariness is the point: a letter this common is a letter whose behaviour has to be understood before anything else can be read, and Coptic grammars accordingly spend a great deal of space on the several distinct jobs ne performs. Ne also sits inside one of the quiet difficulties of reading Coptic. Because the language allows the letter to carry a syllable alone, and because a stroke above it can equally mark a numeral or a contracted sacred name, a reader has to decide from context which of three things the mark is doing. Modern printed editions resolve that silently, which is one of the reasons close work on a Coptic text still returns to the manuscript rather than to the edition.