Talk:Coptic language

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Contents 1 Seemingly greener grounds? 2 Neutrality and Copyright Issues 3 Proposed Changes 4 Page move 4.1 Coptic Language → Coptic language 4.2 "Coptic" refers only to the language 5 Examples 6 Coptic letters 7 Coptic Wikipedia 8 Coptic Grammar? 9 Problem with IPA 10 Revival

[edit] Seemingly greener grounds?

Quoth the article:

The number of Christians declined due to persecution and forced conversion to Islam. This can probably be attributed to the decline in Coptic which represented a cultural barrier for the Copts from the Arabic-Muslim Culture. But now the increasing use of Arabic bridged that barrier and made it easier for the border-line Christians to cross to seemingly greener grounds!

"Seemingly greener grounds!" If this is not a non-neutral point of view I don't know what is.--Abdousi 18:02, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality and Copyright Issues

I am adding the {{TotallyDisputed}} template to this page. There are a number of reasons for this.

• The article is almost totally lifted from http://www.stshenouda.com/coptlang/copthist.htm. This is almost certainly in violation of copyright
• The article is absolutely rife with pro-Coptic Church propaganda (in the older sense of wanting to propagate a religion; not in the political sense); e.g. referring to Mark the Evangelist as "Saint Mark", etc. This mainly derives from the page at http://www.stshenouda.com/coptlang/copthist.htm
• The article has numerous factual errors. Examples:
  • Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 332 BC, not 313 BC; see History of Greek and Roman Egypt
  • The teaching of the Coptic language is not confined to the American University of Cairo and Coptic schools; it is also taught at Cairo University and some of the other Egyptian universities offering training in Egyptology (Zagazig University, etc.)
  • The Greeks did not learn to write from the Phoenicians anymore than the Phoenicians learnt to write from the Egyptians. This 19th century view is no longer held by historians of the alphabet. It is a question of cultural influence, to be sure, but not direct learning
  • The article refers to Ptolemeus, which then redirects to Ptolemy; the intended target is Ptolemy I of Egypt
  • etc., etc., etc.
• The article seems to be more concerned with the cultural aspects of the Coptic language (no problem with that, if it is accurate; I have my doubts), but very little to do with the language itself.
• Much effort is expended writing about the "script" (why not just link to Coptic alphabet?). However it is primarily a romantic folk history, rather than anything scholarly or based on fact.

It is my view that this topic deserves a much more thorough and balanced treatment about the language itself and not about Coptic literature (that would, however, be an interesting article itself). —Nefertum17 10:55, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree with all of the above, and would like to add to the final point Nefertum17 mentioned: The Coptic language is another name for the Egyptian langauge, in a Greek-based script. Of course by the time of Ptolmies and early Christians it was influenced by different sources which caused the natural evolution expected in a language in its place, but doesn't make it distnict from Egyptian language. Arabic script would have been as suitable (or more) than greek to write the language --Alif 13:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Would you argue, then, that French shouldn't be called French, because it's just Latin that's evolved? The number of Greek loanwords in Coptic along with grammatical differences from older stages of Egyptian mean that Coptic can be treated as a distinct language from Egyptian proper. Two languages are distinct if speakers of each cannot understand one another, and that's definitely the case with Coptic and the older stages of Egyptian. And no, the Arabic script is actually less suitable for Coptic than the Greek script is; the Arabic script typically obscures vowels, and Coptic has at least five vowels. It wouldn't be any more successful than the past efforts at writing Turkish or Spanish in the Arabic alphabet. Also, the Greek script was what was used at the time: don't forget that Egypt was held by the Ptolemies (who were Greek) for an entire dynasty. Anyway, extra characters were added to the Greek script form so that it could represent Coptic, and the Coptic and Greek scripts are very distinct from one another, even though they have many similarities. thefamouseccles 01:34, 02 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The comparison between Latin/French can not be applied to ancient Egyptian/Coptic in my opinion. I'm not an expert in either old Egyptian nor Coptic, and hence cannot assert how much difference exists between the two, however when I said Coptic is another name for Egyptian I was referring more to the meaning of 'Coptic' itself. But while the Latin base of French came to France with Roman soldiers and was affected by other already existing languages and the languages of later invaders, Coptic evolved from Egyptian in Egypt under different evolutionary factors, not withholding Greek influence.

As for the suitability of Arabic script, I still believe it would not have been less suitable for writing Coptic. In all cases I was not necessarily referring to the base set of Arabic characters, but rather to an extended character set in which extra symbols and diacritics are added to suit the peculiar aspects of Coptic sounds. Much the same as the additions made to the Greek alphabet to write Coptic, or the Arabic based scripts that are used to write Farsi and many other African and Turkic languages, with the exception that there is much more common sound base between Arabic and Coptic than there's between Coptic and Greek, and hence an alphabet that was designed to write Arabic would suit writing Coptic more.

Saying that Arabic typically obscures vowels is either referring to the pre-diacritics phase or to the 'colloquial' writing in modern times, both of which do not represent the complete Arabic writing system. In the first case you might also like to refer to a time when there were no dots on Arabic letters, effectively reducing the symbols to less than half!

The conversion to writing Turkish in a Latin based script was not due to the unsuitability of Arabic script as you propose, but merely a political one, I thought this was a widely known fact. The same goes for writing many of the languages of the former Soviet Union: they were first forced to use Cyrillic, and now are pushed to accept Latin.

As for writing Spanish in Arabic, I don't see how this is much different than abandoning Anglo-Saxon for the favour of Latin in writing English! --82.201.232.219 15:44, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC) (that was my non-logged-in incarnation :-) --Alif 18:12, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Changes

I would like to propose that much of this article be rewritten with the aim of removing copyrighted material and also to focus more on the language.

• The section on the alphabet should, at most, give a very brief overview and then refer to Coptic alphabet
• The historical information consolidated into one section and bias removed
• Sections on phonology, grammar, and dialects

I have added some basic bibliography in the meantime. —Nefertum17 17:44, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't see anyone here more qualified than you are to do the job :-)

By the way: Do you write in Arabic? Arabic Wikipedia is in need for someone like you. --Alif 22:19, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I can read it (slowly) and speak a bit, but no writing. (Nefertum17)

I have added the basic info box for the language and will start a rewrite using the system at Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages. Comments and suggestions are welcome. —Nefertum17 11:34, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The phonological and grammatical sections are still wanting, as well as a reworking of the historical information. I will try to get to this in the next week or so. —Nefertum17 12:03, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The following sections still need to be added:

• Phonology
• Grammar
• Examples
• Total rewrite of the history section

However, as I have not had a chance to do this in a timely manner, I have removed the rewrite notice. Perhaps "soon" :-) —Nefertum17 22:01, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Alas, Nefertum17 (who seems to know what he's talking about) has left Wikipedia. A-giau 21:59, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

(from WP:RM)

[edit] Coptic Language → Coptic language

Justification: not only were Wikipedia:Naming conventions violated when Coptic language was moved for some unjustified reason to Coptic Language, the vast majority of links point to the old location at Coptic language ?Nefertum17 21:43, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Support: Nefertum17 21:43, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Support. The article pretty much seals its own fate as it's covered with links to Ancient Egyptian language, Egyptian language, Greek language, etc. What makes "Coptic Language" so special that it gets the exception? I'm not sure. It should be moved. --Sketchee 23:00, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)
• As much as I hate the naming convention rendering second and subsequent words as uncapitalized, I'll support while waiting for someone to come through and recapitalize things. —ExplorerCDT 00:14, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• It's worse than all that. It's User:Afanous munging things up. Look at the histories. I've reverted a little and added merge tags. - UtherSRG 00:48, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
  • It appears he has actually written most of the present article, or are the page histories fooling me? In any case, I moved the oddly-named Coptic Adj to Coptic (disambiguation). I hope I didn't do anything wrong in that. / up land 07:41, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Coptic Adj should be deleted. --Alif 00:31, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

• Support. Jayjg ^(talk) 00:50, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The point is mute now. User:Afanous took it upon himself to fix his error and moved everything back to Coptic language where it started in the first place. The only history being lost are his extensive edits at Coptic Language ?Nefertum17 08:06, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

To merge the edit histories, delete Coptic language, move Coptic Language over it, and undelete - but you'll need to wait for the compression bug to be sorted out first. -- ALoan (Talk) 14:16, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Coptic" refers only to the language

Please move this article back to Coptic and move the current dabpage to Coptic (disambiguation) and link it from the top of the page. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages#Structure for guidelines on naming of language articles. For similar examples, see Latin, Hindi, Urdu and many others. None of these use the "language" disambiguator and neither should this.

There's been consistent consensus for this method of naming for quite some time, so I don't feel there's a need to go through a formal RM process.

Peter ^Isotalo 13:16, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

• Just let it stay. In my opinion, keeping as much language articles as possible at the standard X language location is a good idea. — mark ✎ 13:28, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Not with the current disambiguation. Anyone typing in "Coptic" should wind up here, not at the dab page. And people seem to have a tendency to think that "XXX language" is actually how the term should be used in prose, not that it's there just for the disambiguation. / Peter ^Isotalo 23:09, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Examples

I have removed this from the list of Coptic words in Standard Arabic:

• sabeii سَبِيّ "captive" (sebi)

The reason is that سبى sabā "to capture" is found not only in Arabic but general Semitic, including Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Sabaic (Old South Arabian), etc. If related at all, it would likely be on the level of common Afro-Asiatic, but this needs checking. In any event, it is not a loan from Coptic into Arabic. —Nefertum17 09:43, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

You convinced me. --Alif 22:47, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have modified an earlier discussion regarding "ebony". The Coptic actually borrows it from Greek, though the Greek is of Egyptian origin. —Nefertum17 09:56, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have removed τ̀.μετ ρεμ.ν̀.κημε from the "language box" for 2 reasons.

• It uses the Greek, not Coptic, alphabet. Once Coptic is added to unicode later in 2005 and fonts such as Lucidia Grande support it, I agree it should be added back in, though in Coptic.
• It uses Bohairic orthography for a Sahidic phrase (the Bohairic is slightly different).

I have also broken up the translitation of the phrase to reflect actual words. While it would be written as one big word in the Coptic alphabet, in transliteration it is not. —Nefertum17 10:08, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

So do we have the Coptic scripts available now? Let's go check and see if there's an entire Wikipedia in Coptic yet.

[edit] Coptic letters

I have Coptic fonts installed and have no trouble viewing web pages in Coptic, but am still unable to display Coptic writing on Wikipedia. It shows up as the Unicode square typeface, not as Coptic. Does anyone know if I need to install something additional? Thanks in advance! - Zerida 22:59, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Full support for Coptic in Unicode is still quite new. It maybe that your Coptic fonts simply apply Coptic letters to the usual Latin codepoints, the old way of doing it. If so they are not much good for reading Unicode Coptic. Some 'Unicode' fonts don't yet support the Coptic codeblock. I think Code2001 has support for it. On the other hand, if you're using Internet Explorer, you will have dificulty anyway. — Gareth Hughes 23:09, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I downloaded a new Unicode Coptic set that's working with Netscape. Thanks for the tip! - Zerida 23:41, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I may have accidently deleted the Unicode Coptic characters. I assumed that since they did not correctly display in Firefox, that there was a problem. When I saw this message I attempted to restore the text, but since I evidently don't have the font on this machine, that may not be possible. --Blainster 12:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have a coptic-enabled font installed right at the moment. The coptic letters certainly aren't displayed as such on my system, which has a fairly mainstream Linux (Ubuntu) installed. In any case, the kind of person who would need to look up a very basic encyclopedia article on Coptic is most unlikely to need a Coptic font for any other reason. Would anyone be able to put an image or two here for the benefit of the fontless? Ireneshusband 08:16, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coptic Wikipedia

Has anyone thought of starting up a Coptic language Wikipedia? I don't speak Coptic, but I wouldn't mind helping with whatever I can. --Agari 10:39, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coptic Grammar?

If the main article has information on coptic grammar, I must have missed it. When I go to an encyclopedia to learn about a language, I most certainly expect some discussion about its grammatical features, like nouns and verbs, or substantives and participles, adverbs and adjectives, that sort of a thing. What kind of a language is the Coptic Language? I don't have the slightest clue from the main article. Does it care about word order? Are there prefixes, infixes, and suffixes? Prepositions or postpositions? Are there definite articles? Is the language rich in pronouns or is it poor in pronouns?

Maybe a knowledgeable individual could address these matters and improve the main article.

Somebody less knowledgeable posted some references under a paragraph titled "gammar" but that's a royal cop out.

It's clear that languages and alphabets are not the same thing. So why the emphasis on the Greek and Coptic alphabets in isolation of the grammatical features that make the Coptic language what it was - a vehicle for the transfer of information from individual to individual?

[edit] Problem with IPA

My computer does not display the IPA characters on this page, which is strange, since it displays them on every other Wikipedia page with IPA characters (and in general). Furthermore, they appear as boxes, despite the fact that my operating system (Mac OS X Tiger) shows unknown characters as diamonds with question marks, not as boxes. Does this page use some non UTF-8 form of Unicode, or perhaps IPA characters from a different set of codepoints than those typically used? --HunterX 05:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The Coptic Unicode range is quite new.

That's not enough reason to advocate it.

It is new enough so that you could probably be able to see all other Unicode ranges but this one. Details of the change can be seen at http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/. To view the new code points, you need a font that is compatible with Unicode 4.1.0. I believe that Code2001 should do the trick. — Gareth Hughes 10:51, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I can't get to that website. Why not just post a bunch of jpegs for the new characters, and let it go at that?

Somebody should go through the page and remove all instances of unicodes.

[edit] Revival

Removed this: "There is a group of over 130 members in favour of the revival of the Coptic language; for details, see Remenkimi: [1]."

130 members of a website doesn't exactly make for a revival, and the link doesn't really support this statement much beyond taking the reader to the group's homepage. However, more information on revival attempts would be interesting