Beta ⲃ

Beta is the second letter of the Coptic alphabet, worth two in the alphabetic numeral series, and it is a good illustration of the fact that Coptic borrowed the Greek alphabet at a particular moment in the history of Greek pronunciation rather than from the textbooks of classical Athens. By the Roman period the Greek beta had already begun to soften from a full stop consonant towards a fricative, and it is that later sound, not the classical one, that Coptic took over.

The Bohairic tradition preserved in the services of the Coptic Orthodox Church names the letter vida and reads it as a v before most vowels, hardening it towards a b in certain positions. Grammars of Sahidic, which no longer has living speakers, describe the sound more cautiously as somewhere between the two, reconstructed from spellings, from Greek transcriptions of Coptic words and from the way Coptic scribes rendered Greek loanwords. Beta is a common letter in Coptic. It appears in native Egyptian vocabulary and in the very large Greek component that entered the language along with Christianity, so a page of Coptic scripture will carry it repeatedly. In the numeral series it does steady work for the number two, and because Coptic manuscripts number the quires of a codex with letters, beta commonly marks the second gathering of a bound book. That is a quiet reminder that in a manuscript culture the alphabet was as much a system of counting as a system of sounds.

One of the striking things about Coptic is how much Greek it contains. Estimates vary by text and by genre, but a Coptic biblical or monastic work can carry a fifth of its vocabulary from Greek, borrowed complete with Greek inflectional endings in some cases and fully naturalised in others. Beta sits at the meeting point of the two layers, because it writes a sound that both languages had, so words spelled with beta may be Egyptian, Greek, or Greek so thoroughly domesticated that the distinction has stopped mattering. That mixture was not a sign of weakness.

The translators who created Coptic Christian literature were working from Greek scripture, Greek liturgy and Greek theology, and they took over the vocabulary of that material rather than coining Egyptian substitutes for terms that already had settled meanings. The result is a language that can carry Greek doctrinal precision inside Egyptian grammar. Beta is also the letter around which the clearest sound change in the history of Coptic reading can be observed.

The Bohairic pronunciation used in Coptic Orthodox services today was itself reformed in the nineteenth century, when a movement to bring Coptic liturgical reading closer to modern Greek pronunciation was promoted in Egypt, and the older reading survives in some communities and in the accounts of earlier travellers. The change is a matter of record rather than of dispute, and it means that how beta sounds in a Cairo church now is not automatically how it sounded there three hundred years ago.