COPTIC LANGUAGES, the language for merly spoken by the Copts or Egyptian Chris tians awl regarded as the direct descendant of the ancient sacred language of the Egyptians. As such it has afforded to Champolhon, Dr. Young and others the key to the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. At the time of the introduction of Christianity among the Copts the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic modes of writing previously in use in Egypt were abandoned, and the Greek alphabet .was adopted, with the addition of six charac ters of the demotic alphabet, which were ro tained because the equivalents to them were wanting in the Greek alphabet These six let ters represented kh, h, f, the English j and two forms of sh. By the tiine that this change was made the Coptic language was no longer the same with the ancient sacred language, but had adopted a number of words from the ver nacular language which was spoken in Egypt alongside of the former, besides a large number of others from the Greek, the Latin, the Arabic and other sources., It still remained, howeve; essentially Egyptian. The Coptic language is monosyllabic in character. All its radical forms are monosyllables, and whenever a polysyllabic word is met with it may be at once affirmed that the word is either a derivative or a com pound. As a rule the radicals are capable of certain modifications of form, which always express a modification also of the sense. The meaning of the radical monosyllables is in fact changed by the juxtaposition of other monosyl lables, which are the usual signs of genders, numbers, persons, moods and tenses. The feminine is sometimes formed by a modification of the vowel of the masculine. In the Coptic root syllables there are often final consonants which do not form part of the root. These are called paragogic letters, and can only be ex plained as instances of the caprice of pronun ciation, or as being originally part of the root both in spelling and Pronunciation, although in course of time they have been dropped so far as the pronunciation is concerned. According to the German philologist, Schwartze, the Coptic may be taken as forming a family of languages analogous to the Semitic in its gram mar, and allied to the Indo-European languages in its roots. This opinion is supported by vari ous other philologists, such as Bunsen, Meier and Biitticher, but it is contested by others, among them Pott, Ewald, Wenrich and Renan.
The Coptic language is divided into three dialects— the Theban, which was spoken in Upper Egypt, and which is the best preserved of the three; the Memphitic, or Coptic, strictly so called, which was spoken in Lower Egypt; and the Bashmuric, which was spoken in the Delta. Of the last the literary remains are
very scanty, but it is that which comes nearest to the hieroglyphic language of the ancient Egyptians. After the Arabian conquest of Egypt the Coptic language gradually ceased to be spoken, and as early as the 10th century it was no longer in use in Lower Egypt, except in their church liturgies; in Upper Egypt, how ever, it maintained itself for some centuries longer, but here also it was at last obliged to give way to the Arabic. The theological writ ings in use among the Coptic Christians, how ever, are still written in the Coptic language, but an Arabic translation always accompanies them. In the schools the children learn the Gospels and the epistles of the New Testament in Coptic as well as Arabic, but they are no longer taught the former language grammati cally. In the various libraries of Europe there are numerous Coptic manuscripts, but most of them are of little interest. The Coptic litera tore is almost entirely of a religious character, the works written in it comprising portions of the Old Testament, the Acts, sermons and homilies, martyrologies, etc. Translations of the Pentateuch and some other books of the Old Testament and of the Gospels into Coptic have been published at Rome. One of the most valuable discoveries of Coptic literature—prac tically the whole library of the old Coptic monas tery of Saint Michael in the Egyptian Fayyhm, was acquired by the late J. Pierpont Morgan in 1911, and placed by him in the J. Pierpont Mor gan Library in New York city. It consisted of 50 volumes, and these are being edited for pub lication by Professor Hyoernat of the Catholic University of Washington. The larger part consists of manuscripts of books of the Bible of the 2d century of our era, and the remainder of liturgical books and treatises by the old monks of Alexandria. These are the oldest manuscripts known, and the fine bindings are the choicest and oldest existing in any library. Materials for the study of the Coptic language will be found in the grammars of Schwartze (Berlin 1850), Uhlemann (Leipzig 1854), and Stern (Leipzig 1880), and the dictionaries of Peyron (Turin '1835, still considered the best) and Parthey (Berlin 1844). Consult Loret, 'Manuel de la langue ligyptienne.)