Egypt in the early Byzantine period was a bilingual country where Greek and Egyptian (Coptic) were used alongside each other. Historical studies along with linguistic studies of the phonology and lexicon of early Byzantine Greek in Egypt testify to this situation. In order to describe the linguistic traces the language-contact situation left behind in individuals’ linguistic output, this study analyses the syntax of early Byzantine Greek texts from Egypt. The primary object of interest is bilingual interference in the syntax of verbs, adverbial phrases, and clause linkage as well as in semi-formulaic expressions and formulaic frames. The study is based on a corpus of Greek and Coptic private letters on papyrus, which date from the fourth to mid-seventh centuries, originate from Egypt, and belong to bilingual, Greek-Coptic, papyrus archives. The study shows that deviations from the standard pattern fall into three categories, i.e. bilingual interference, SLA-related errors, and internal confusion of patterns. There is a marked difference as to the extent to which deviations, and interferences in particular, affect syntactic domains. The degree of complexity of the syntactic structure in question as well as the degree of divergence from the corresponding Coptic structure seem to play a role. There is also a marked difference as to the extent to which deviations affect different types of contexts (i.e. free, semi-formulaic, and formulaic contexts). The degree to which constraints are imposed on structures in each type of context seems to play a role. Finally, it appears that the way writers assimilated patterns can explain a large number of deviations. Interferences account proportionately for fewest deviations vis-à-vis SLA-related errors and the internal confusion of patterns.

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Past research approached the origins of the Coptic alphabet sociolinguistically and empirically. Neither can fully explain the comparatively sudden and fundamental change from a supraphonemic to a phonemic writing system for Egyptian around the second century AD. This paper adds the cognitive-linguistic concept of the grain size of a writing system to the picture. In essence, by the second century, sound changes in Egyptian had resulted in a phonological structure of the language that mapped more easily onto a phonemic writing system than previous stages of the language. This coincided with socio-political developments favouring the Greek alphabet. As a result, multiple writing systems, which shared the underlying structure, alphabetic, and model, the Greek alphabet, emerged. Eventually, one of these prevailed, the Coptic alphabet.

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Chapter 9 explores the semi-formulaic expressions in our texts. These semi-formulaic expressions appear in the letter body and reflect a writer’s considerations as to the structure and tone of the letter. The chapter is divided into five parts: Section 9.1 sets apart semi-formulaic expressions from formulaic expressions and introduces the concepts of signposting and hedging. Section 9.2 describes the standard patterns and established variants and variations of each relevant semi-formulaic expression. Section 9.3 contains the analysis of errors, both phraseological and grammatical. Section 9.4 evaluates the distribution of the observed errors against the predictor variables set out in Chapter 2.