Coptic

Coptic may refer to:

See also

Coptic (Unicode block)

Coptic is a Unicode block used with the Greek and Coptic block to write the Coptic language. Prior to version 4.1 of the Unicode Standard, Greek and Coptic was used exclusively to write Coptic text, but Greek and Coptic letter forms are contrastive in many scholarly works, necessitating their disunification. Any specifically Coptic letters in the Greek and Coptic block are not reproduced in the Coptic Unicode block.

See also

References

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian (Bohairic: ⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙ̀ⲛⲭⲏⲙⲓ met.rem.ən.khēmi, Sahidic: ⲙⲛⲧⲣⲙⲛⲕⲏⲙⲉ mənt.rəm.ən.kēme, Greek: Μετ Ρεμνχημι Met Rem(e)nkhēmi) is the latest stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afroasiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written in the Coptic alphabet – an adaptation of the Greek script with some letters inherited from Demotic – in the 1st century AD. The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six or seven signs from the demotic script to represent Egyptian sounds the Greek language did not have. Several distinct Coptic dialects are identified, the most prominent of which are Sahidic, originating in parts of Upper Egypt, and Bohairic, originally from the western Nile Delta in Lower Egypt.

Coptic and Demotic Egyptian are grammatically closely related to Late Egyptian, which was written in the Hieroglyphic script. Coptic flourished as a literary language from the 2nd to 13th centuries, and its Bohairic dialect continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the early modern period, though revitalization efforts have been underway since the 19th century.