Phi and What Coptic Took from Roman Egypt

It is worth being precise about which Greek Coptic borrowed. The alphabet came into Egyptian use in the first centuries of the common era, in a country that had been Greek speaking at the administrative level since the conquest of Alexander and where Greek and Egyptian had been living side by side for three hundred years. The Greek available to the people who made Coptic was the Greek of Roman Egypt: written in the letter shapes of the period, pronounced with the sound changes that had already happened, carrying the numeral conventions of the manuscript tradition and the reading aids that went with them.

Every one of those things came across. The letter shapes are those of the Roman and early Byzantine hands, not the classical inscriptions. The sound values are the later ones, which is why beta is soft and phi is an f. The numeral system arrived complete with the signs for six, ninety and nine hundred that write no sound. And the scribal marks, the two dots above a vowel, the stroke above an abbreviated sacred name, came with the alphabet as part of the package. What Coptic added was its own: seven letters from Demotic for Egyptian sounds, the superlinear stroke for syllabic consonants, and the whole grammar of the language underneath. The result is not Greek and not a compromise; it is Egyptian, equipped.