Did Greek Influence the Coptic Preference for Prefixing? A Quantitative-Typological Perspective

Grossman, Eitan

doi:10.1163/19552629-01101001

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…For example, Jacques (2011) argues that aspirated fricatives can develop from multiple sources, but due to perception biases, they are often merged with similar sounds. In a similar vein, Nikolaev & Grossman (2018) show that affricate-dense sound systems are unstable when isolated areally; they tend to be stable only in areas where they are supported by affricatedense neighbor languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…However, even though many of these changes are cross-linguistically frequent (TYPE) and involve cross-linguistically frequent source constructions (SOURCE) and multiple pathways (PATH), the prefixing macro-preference of Coptic is the result of many smaller changes, some of which involve multiple stages occurring in a particular sequence (STAGE). It does not seem that language contact played any role, as the main language with which Coptic was in contact -Greek -had a moderate suffixing preference, so DIFFUSABILITY is not likely to have played a role (Grossman 2018). Furthermore, even though affixing preferences show clear areal signals (Dryer 2013a), the role of area, as a proxy for language contact, has yet to be established as a predictor independent of inheritance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note that the free form lexical item that typically denotes 'hand' is cič; the older form from which toot-f is derived is rare as a free form. A corpus study (Grossman 2018) shows that the suffixed possessor construction is extremely rare, and is also limited in distribution. For example, for the noun ran 'name,' 87% of all occurrences in the New Testament (n=210) are possessed, 71% of these have pronominal possessors, and of these, 97% have possessive prefixes.…”

Section: Pronominal Possessive Affixes On Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These sections cover ground similar to that found inGrossman (2018); the main goal of which is to argue that Greek did not influence the Coptic prefixing preference, but which includes a detailed presentation of Coptic prefixes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Swimming against the typological tide or paddling along with language change?

Grossman

Polis

2018

JHL

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It has repeatedly been observed that there is a worldwide preference for suffixes over prefixes. In this article, we argue that universally dispreferred – or rare – structures can and do arise as the result of regular processes of language change, given the right background structures. Specifically, we show that Ancient Egyptian-Coptic undergoes a long-term diachronic macro-change from exhibiting mixed suffixing-prefixing to showing an overwhelming preference for prefixing. The empirical basis for this study is a comparison of ten typologically significant parameters in which prefixing or affixing is potentially at stake, based onDryer’s (2013a)969-language sample. With its extremely high prefixing preference, Coptic belongs to the rare 6% or so of languages that are predominantly prefixing. We argue that each of the micro-changes implicated in this macro-change are better understood in terms of changes at the level of individual constructions, rather than in terms of a broad structural “drift.” Crucially, there is nothing unusual about the actual processes of change themselves.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pronominal Possessive Affixes On Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Swimming against the typological tide or paddling along with language change?

Grossman

Polis

2018

JHL

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“…He also finds that there is an overt nominative marker, differing from the accusative and the citation form, and obligatorily marking highly accessible postverbal subjects. See also Grossman (2018) for some analysis about the diachronic formation of cases. 12 However, according to Grossman (2014: 208), e.g.…”

Section: Variation On the Morphological Level: Greek Inflection Of Eg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety

Dahlgren¹

2022

Ancient Indo-European Languages Between Linguistics and Philology

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In this paper I explore whether the Greek form used in Egypt in the Roman period could be considered a contact variety. This means it would be an independent variety separate from the standard Greek as we know it from literary sources that could be called Egyptian Greek.1 I will use Greek documentary texts from Egypt formerly analysed in Dahlgren (2017) as evidence as many of them have orthographic variation representative of spoken language.2 From the form of the misspellings it can be inferred that they represent phonological and phonetic transfer from Egyptian-Coptic, which can be verified by similar misspellings of Greek loanwords in native Coptic texts (Dahlgren 2017). This paper focuses on language use from the Roman period (1st c. ce) onward, due to the fact that before this there seems to have been no widespread societal bilingualism and Greek phonological development (in Egypt)was not yet as advanced (see e.g.

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Coptic Language

Reintges

2022

The Encyclopedia of Ancient History

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Coptic is the vernacular language of Late Antique Egypt, which shares historical and linguistic ties with the ancient Mediterranean world. The linguistic heritage from ancient Egyptian figures equally prominently. The Greco‐Egyptian hybridity of Coptic is the outcome of prolonged asymmetric bilingualism with the politically and culturally dominant language Greek. In replacing hieroglyphic writing and its cursive Hieratic and Demotic variants, the introduction of the Greco‐Coptic alphabet marks a turning point in Egypt's literary history. The Bible translations, which are datable to the late third and early fourth centuries ce , had a bearing on the proliferation of Coptic as a literary language, but the Manichean scholastic and literary traditions also played a role in the shaping of Coptic literature. Coptic emerged from late Roman Demotic in presumably less than three generations. The sudden appearance of a new Egyptian vernacular cannot directly be related to the vicissitudes of the Roman Egyptian religious marketplace and the advent of Christianity in Egypt. Out of the different Coptic dialects three gained supraregional importance: Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, Lycopolitan, the language of the Manichean literature, and Bohairic in the western Delta and Lower Egypt. In the Middle Ages, Coptic lost ground to Arabic in the course of a large‐scale language shift and was replaced by it in all public domains by the eleventh century. As part of its cultural legacy, the present‐day Coptic Orthodox Church retains a liturgy chanted in medieval Bohairic, while biblical lections are read in both Arabic and Coptic.

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Did Greek Influence the Coptic Preference for Prefixing? A Quantitative-Typological Perspective

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

Swimming against the typological tide or paddling along with language change?

Swimming against the typological tide or paddling along with language change?

Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety

Coptic Language

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