COPTIC LANGUAGE. Amongst the Egyptian natives, Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language (q.v.), survived the formidable inroads of Greek both in its pagan and Christian forms, and only succumbed at length to the overwhelm ing influence of Arabic, dying out finally in the 16th century. Early in the end century A.D., pagan Egyptians, or perhaps for eigners settled in Egypt, essayed to write the native language for magical purposes in Greek letters with some necessary supple ments borrowed from demotic. This "Old Coptic," as it is termed, was still almost entirely free from Greek loan-words, and its strong archaisms are doubtless accounted for by the fact that the literary language, even in its most "vulgar" forms, moved more slowly than the speech of the people. Christian literary Coptic, though at first contemporary with some of the documents of Old Coptic, is very different. The unknown evangelizers who must have perfected the adaptation of the alphabet to the various dia lects of Egypt and translated the Scriptures out of Greek, flung away all pagan traditions, adopting, however, eight letters from demotic writing. The basis which they chose for the new litera ture was doubtless the simple language of their intercourse with Christians and others among the peasants. They found this already charged with expressions from Greek, and the Greek ele ment was reinforced by words borrowed from the books which they were translating, until written Coptic became full of Greek words, including even particles of the most varied kinds ; some of these were very useful additions to the language, while others were really superfluous. Written Coptic, once established, did not greatly change with time, although after the Muslim con quest it began to borrow scantily from Arabic and eventually took or the character of a dead language.
Four leading dialects of Christian Coptic are recognized : Sa hidic (formerly called Theban) spoken in the Upper Thebais; Akhmimic, in the neighbourhood of Akhmim ; Fayumic, with which are associated the dialects of Middle Egypt as far as Mem phis—Fayumic was wrongly identified as "Bashmuric" by early scholars; Bohairic, the dialect of the "coast district" (formerly named "Memphite") spoken in the north-western Delta. The last, in accordance with its geographical position, shows wide differ ences from all the others. Native writers record also a special dialect among the rude inhabitants of the marshes in the province of Bashmur in the north-east of the Delta, but no remnant has come down to us. The fragments of Old pagan Coptic show an Akhmimic colouring, and in Akhmimic and "sub-Akhmimic" there are some very old translations from the Old and New Testa ments and various Apocrypha. But the immense literary and other influence of the "archimandrite Shenute" and his monastery near Akhmim was exerted to spread its rival Sahidic ("Upper Egyp tian") as the sole literary dialect throughout the south, and Akh mimic disappeared in the 5th or 6th century even as far as the Fourth Cataract. The survivor actually penetrated far into Nubia, Nubian tomb-stones down to the 11th century being usually in scribed in Sahidic, even as far south as the Fourth Cataract. Mid dle Egyptian continued to be used longer than Akhmimic at least for business purposes. Nothing is known of the early history of Bohairic which survives only in literary texts, beginning with an ms. of the end of the 9th century, and others somewhat later from the monastery of St. Macarius in the Nitrian desert. But Bo hairic (with Arabic interpretations) has been the language of the sacred books of Christianity throughout the country since the i4th century. When Coptic ceased to be spoken or understood, Bohairic assumed this position owing to the hierarchical impor tance of Alexandria and the influence of the ancient monasteries established in the north-western desert.
Literature.—Coptic literature (apart from mere business doc uments and letters in Sahidic and Fayumic expressed in monkish language) is almost entirely religious and consists mainly of trans lations from Greek. Such was the enthusiasm for Christianity amongst the lower classes in Egypt that versions from the Old and New Testaments were made into Sahidic, Akhmimic and Fayumic before the Council of Chalcedon (451) ; they probably date back at least as early as the middle of the 4th century, and are therefore of considerable textual importance. For dwellers in and about the Delta the Greek version was probably sufficient, until the break with the Greek (Melkite) Church in the 5th cen tury induced them to make a separate Bohairic translation. The Gnostic heresy, otherwise known only through the works of its opponents, is illustrated in some Coptic mss. of the 4th century, the so-called Pistis Sophia, and the Bruce Codex, respectively in the British Museum and Bodleian libraries. According to Schmidt and Harnack they are translations dating from the 3rd century and belong to an ascetic or encratitic sect of the Gnostics which rose in Egypt itself. There is abundance of apocryphal works, of apocalypses, of patristic writings from Athanasius to the Council of Chalcedon, homilies, lives of saints and anecdotes of holy men, acts of martyrs extending from the persecution of Diocletian to that of the Persians in the 7th century, and lives of later ascetics and martyrs reaching down to the 14th century. Unless some of the Egyptian acta sanctorum et martyrum should prove to have been originally written in Coptic, almost the only original works in that language of any importance are the numerous sermons and letters of Shenute, the long-lived and now celebrated monk of Atrepe near Akhmim, written in the Sahidic dialect in the 4th and 5th centuries. Af ter the Arab conquest, as a defence to the threatened Church language and nationality, versifications of the Proverbs, of Solomon's Song and of various legends were com posed, with other religious songs. They are mostly antiphonal, the numbers of stresses in a line marking the rhythm. There is no musical notation in the mss., but traditional church tunes are gen erally referred to or prescribed for the songs. Of secular literature strangely little existed or at least has survived; only a few magical texts and fragments of a medical treatise, of the story of Alex ander, and of a story of the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses are known. According to all the evidence available, the Coptic por tion of the great library in the monastery of St. Macarius, made after its restoration in the 9th century, was bare of everything but religious books.
Coptic was occasionally employed for literary purposes as late as the i4th century, but from the loth century onwards the Copts wrote mostly in Arabic. Severus of Eshmunain (c. 95o) who wrote a history of the patriarchs of Alexandria, was one of the first to employ Arabic ; Cyril ibn Laklak and others in the i3th and i4th centuries translated much of the older literature from Coptic into Arabic and Ethiopic for the use of the Egyptian and Abyssinian churches. From this period also date the Arabic gram mars of Coptic and vocabularies of Sahidic and Bohairic by Ibn eAssal and others. (See CoPTs.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Language: L. Stern, Koptische Grammatik (LeipBibliography.-Language: L. Stern, Koptische Grammatik (Leip- zig, 188o) ; Steindorff, Koptische Grammatik (Sahidic), 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 19o4, bibl.) ; A. Mallon, Grammaire Copte (Sahidic), 3rd ed. (Beyrouth, 1927) ; A. Peyron. Lexicon Copticum (Torino, 1835) ; W. Spiegelberg, Koptisches Handworterbuch (Heidelberg, 1921).