Theta and Coptic Spelling Practice

A Coptic manuscript is a document of choices. The language was written across several dialects, over roughly a thousand years of active literary use, by scribes trained in monastic scriptoria with their own habits, and the result is a body of text with real orthographic variety inside a broadly stable system. Theta is one of the places where that variety is easiest to see, because a scribe could write it or write out the two letters it stands for, with nothing riding on the choice except habit. Editors of Coptic texts collate those choices systematically. A manuscript that consistently prefers the compact spelling, that treats certain vowels one way rather than another, and that uses a particular set of abbreviations, can be assigned to a dialect and often to a region, and sometimes grouped with other manuscripts from the same workshop. This is ordinary philology, but Coptic offers it in unusually rich form because so much of the surviving material comes from a small number of monastic libraries whose contents were buried or abandoned together.

The White Monastery near Sohag in Upper Egypt is the outstanding case: its library was dispersed across European and Egyptian collections in the nineteenth century, leaf by leaf, and reconstructing which leaves belonged to which codex has occupied scholars ever since. Spelling habits, theta among them, are part of how the leaves are put back together.