Alphabet Letters
Coptic Letters
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Origin Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue
Kyima is the thirty first letter of the Coptic alphabet, the sixth of the seven taken from Demotic, and it carries no numeral value. Coptic grammars record its name in several forms, and its sound value is among the harder points of Coptic phonology, differing across the dialects and reconstructed rather than heard for Sahidic. In the Bohairic reading used in the services of the Coptic Orthodox Church it is given a value distinct from janja, and the relationship between the two letters across the dialects has occupied specialists at some length. What is straightforward is why the letter exists: Egyptian had a sound Greek could not write, so a sign was taken from Demotic and put in the alphabet after the Greek series had run out, along with six others of the same kind.
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 Origin PeriodTaken from Demotic, the cursive Egyptian script Coptic was replacing 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 NameAn Egyptian name, for a letter taken from Demotic rather than from Greek 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Sense of the Namefrom Demotic, for a sound Greek could not write 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. 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 SourceNo numeral value: the Egyptian additions stand outside the Greek series 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceWrites an affricate distinct from janja; the dialects divide the pair differently 2Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt 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 PositionThirty-first of the thirty-two letters of the Coptic alphabet, the sixth of the seven taken from Demotic; carries no numeral value 1 Open Questions
Associated SoundNot established; reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects
Kyima's sound value is among the harder points of Coptic phonology: it is reconstructed rather than heard for Sahidic, differs across dialects, and Bohairic reading gives it a value distinct from its neighbour Janja that specialists have not resolved into an agreed consonant. Learn More
Kyima: The Coptic Letter Taken from Demotic
Kyima is the thirty first letter of the Coptic alphabet, the sixth of the seven taken from Demotic, and it carries no numeral value. Coptic grammars record its name in several forms, and its sound is among the more difficult points of Coptic phonology. It writes an affricate related to but distinct from janja, the pair of them covering sounds that Greek had no letters for, and the relationship between the two across the Coptic dialects has occupied specialists at some length.
In the Bohairic reading used in Coptic Orthodox services today kyima is given a value clearly distinct from janja; for Sahidic the distinction has to be reconstructed from spelling evidence, since the dialect has had no speakers for around a thousand years. What is entirely clear is why the letter is in the alphabet. Egyptian had a sound the Greek letters could not write, and rather than press an existing letter into service or invent a shape, the tradition took a sign from Demotic, the script Egyptian was already written in, and added it after the Greek series had run out. Six other letters arrived by the same route and for the same reason, and together they are the reason Coptic works as an orthography for Egyptian rather than as a rough transliteration of it.
Kyima and the Demotic Script Coptic Replaced
Demotic was the everyday Egyptian script of the last thousand years before Coptic, a highly cursive and heavily abbreviated development of the older hieratic hand, itself derived from the hieroglyphs. It was fast, compact and extremely hard to read without training, and it wrote consonants only, in a system where a single group of strokes could stand for a whole word. It served administration, law, literature and religion in Egypt for centuries, and its last known inscriptions are from the fifth century of the common era, by which time Coptic was well established. The seven letters Coptic took from it are the direct link between the two systems, and kyima is one of them.
The relationship is worth stating carefully. Coptic did not evolve out of Demotic; it is a different kind of writing, alphabetic and fully phonetic, adopted from Greek. What it took from Demotic is a set of signs, not a principle, and those signs were adapted into the alphabetic system rather than carried over with their Demotic behaviour. The identification of which Demotic sign lies behind which Coptic letter is a technical question on which the literature is not uniform, and this atlas does not assert particular identifications for individual letters. That the seven came from Demotic is not in dispute.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The two affricate signs, both taken from Demotic and both carrying no numeral value. Which sounds they wrote is reconstructed differently by different scholars and differs between the Coptic dialects, so the pair is better described by its shape and source than by a phonetic value.
Kyima and Janja are the fifth and sixth of the seven Coptic letters taken from Demotic; Janja already carries a live edge to Kyima, and this is the missing outbound half from Kyima's own side, since the coverage view checks the subject direction only.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
What sounds did the Coptic letters janja and kyima write?
Both were taken from Demotic to write affricates that Greek could not, and both carry no numeral value, which is settled. Their phonetic values are not. Reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects, and the evidence is indirect, resting on transcriptions of Coptic words into other scripts and on comparison with earlier stages of Egyptian.
What would resolve this A systematic collection of Coptic words transcribed into Greek and into Arabic, set against the dialect distribution of the two letters and against the Demotic signs they descend from. Camps exist on this question, so what would resolve it is evidence that discriminates between them rather than a further reading of the same material.
Coptic phonology and Egyptian historical linguisticsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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