The missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle

Abstract

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.

Support‐Verb Constructions with Objects:Greek‐CopticInterference in the Documentary Papyri?1

“…The sources of interest come from fourth‐ to mid‐seventh‐century Egypt. By the fourth century, Greek and Egyptian (at this stage called Coptic) had co‐existed in Egypt for about a millennium and the latter was gaining ground with, for example, the expansion into nonprivate contexts of use (e.g., Garel & Nowak 2017), the establishment of an alphabetic writing system (e.g., Fendel 2021a), and the use by the increasingly prominent group of Christians (e.g., Houston et al. 2003).…”