Semma: The Coptic Letter (Value 200), from Greek Sigma

Semma is the nineteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value two hundred. It is the Greek sigma, and Coptic grammars give its name in more than one form, semma and sima among them. Two things distinguish it from its Greek parent on the page. Coptic writes it in a single rounded shape, descended from the lunate sigma that had become standard in Greek writing of the Roman and Byzantine periods rather than from the angular classical form; and Coptic has no separate final sigma of the kind Greek uses at the end of a word. Both differences follow from when the borrowing happened. Coptic took the Greek alphabet as it stood in Roman Egypt, in the hands actually being written there, not as it appears in classical inscriptions, and several Coptic letter shapes make more sense against that background than against the textbook Greek of an earlier era.

Semma writes the s sound, a sound Egyptian had, so it works in native vocabulary as well as in the Greek layer, and Coptic grammar gives it steady employment in pronominal elements. In the numeral series it is worth two hundred, and like every Greek derived Coptic letter it holds exactly the Greek value. The absence of a final form is worth dwelling on. Greek distinguishes a sigma at the end of a word from one inside it, a distinction that assumes the reader can see where words end. Early Coptic manuscripts are written in continuous script with little or no word division, so a final form would have had nothing to mark, and Coptic did without one. That is a small piece of evidence that the borrowing was made by people who understood what they were taking rather than copied wholesale.