Alphabet Letters
Coptic Letters
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Origin Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue
Eta is the eighth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value eight. In classical Greek it was a long e held distinct from the short epsilon, and Coptic preserved a real distinction between the two vowels, which is one of the reasons the adoption of the Greek alphabet was so productive for Egyptian: it allowed vowel length and vowel quality to be written for the first time in the language history of Egypt. In the Bohairic dialect used in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church the letter came to be read as a long i, following the same shift that turned Greek eta into an i sound in the Byzantine period, so the letter now sounds different in church from what the classical spelling implies.
Facts
Disputed
Origin PeriodGreek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp. Origins
Origin PeriodCoptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Place of OriginEgypt, where Greek letters were taken up to write the Egyptian language 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Origin of the NameCoptic kept the Greek letter names, reshaped by Egyptian speech 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Origin of the NameGreek eta, itself the Phoenician heth, meaning fence 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Sense of the Namefence (through Greek eta, from Phoenician heth) 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel; twenty-four of its thirty-two letters are the Greek uncial alphabet taken over directly, and the remaining letters, drawn from Demotic Egyptian sign-forms, write Egyptian consonants Greek had no letters for. 1 PositionEighth of the thirty-two letters of the Coptic alphabet, carrying the numeral value eight 1 Attributions
Associated SoundLong vowel e in Sahidic and the older tradition, distinct from the short e of ei; read as a long i in Bohairic liturgical pronunciation, following the same shift as Byzantine Greek 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceAlphabet of 32 letters in Bohairic, 31 in Sahidic, which lacks khai 2Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceValue 8 in the Coptic numeral series 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten as a long e, read as a long i in the Bohairic of the liturgy 3Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Learn More
Eta: The Coptic Letter (Value 8), from Greek Eta
Eta is the eighth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value eight. In classical Greek it wrote a long e, held distinct from the short e of epsilon, and Coptic maintained a genuine distinction between the two vowels. That distinction is one of the great gains the Greek alphabet brought to Egyptian. The older Egyptian scripts wrote consonants and left vowels unrecorded, so a word could not show on the page whether its vowel was long or short, front or back; Coptic can, and does, with the result that the vowel systems of the Coptic dialects can be described in a way that the vowel system of Middle Egyptian cannot. Eta carries part of that load.
The letter also demonstrates that the sound of a script and the sound of a liturgy can part company over time. Greek eta shifted towards an i sound during the Byzantine period, and the Bohairic reading used in the services of the Coptic Orthodox Church followed the same path, so the letter is now pronounced in church as a long i even though the spellings it appears in were fixed when it was a long e. Neither reading is a corruption of the other; they are two points on a line, and the manuscripts record the earlier one while the living tradition carries the later.
Eta and the Vowels the Older Egyptian Scripts Never Wrote
For three thousand years Egyptian was written in scripts that recorded consonants. Hieroglyphs, the cursive hieratic derived from them and the highly abbreviated Demotic of the later periods all worked this way, supplemented by signs that classified a word rather than spelled it. A reader who already knew the language supplied the vowels; a reader who did not was stuck, which is why the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian is conventionally supplied by Egyptologists inserting a neutral vowel between consonants, a convention of the discipline rather than a reconstruction.
Coptic ends that silence. Because the Greek alphabet has vowel letters and Coptic took them all, including both the short ei and the long eta, a Coptic word shows its vowels. This is why Coptic is treated as the key to the vocalisation of earlier Egyptian, and why arguments about how a New Kingdom word sounded so often end up citing its Coptic descendant. There is a limit to how far that evidence reaches.
Coptic is separated from Middle Egyptian by something like two thousand years of sound change, so a Coptic form is a late witness rather than a direct one, and the dialects disagree with each other in exactly the vowels at issue. Eta is a reliable witness to Coptic and a suggestive one to what came before, and the distinction between those two things is the whole methodological problem of the field in miniature.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Taken over with the long e distinction Egyptian scripts could not previously write
Related To
Coptic Eta is the Greek eta, and Coptic likewise preserves a real length distinction from the short e; both carry the numeral value 8.
The Greek letter H wrote the h sound in the oldest alphabets and had long since become a vowel by the time Egyptian was written in Greek letters. Greek therefore offered nothing for h, and hori was taken from Demotic to supply it.
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