Omega and the Break in the Middle of the Coptic Alphabet

A Coptic alphabet chart looks like a single unbroken series, and it is not. Everything up to and including omega came from Greek: twenty four letters in the Greek order, with the Greek numeral values, plus the numeral sign sou inserted in the sixth place for counting alone. Everything after omega is Egyptian, seven letters taken from Demotic to write sounds no Greek letter could reach, carrying Egyptian names and carrying no numeral value at all. The break falls exactly at omega, and nothing on the chart announces it. That structure is the whole history of the script in one line.

Egyptian speakers in the early centuries of the common era took the Greek alphabet as it stood in Roman Egypt, complete with its letter shapes, its later sound values, its numeral conventions and its scribal marks, and then extended it where their own language required. The extension is what makes Coptic a working orthography rather than a transliteration. A borrowed alphabet applied without adaptation produces something a native speaker can hardly use, and the seven Egyptian letters, together with the superlinear stroke that marks a syllabic consonant, are the adaptations. The alphabet as it stands has served the Egyptian language for its entire remaining written life and continues to serve the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which has never stopped using it.