Omega ⲱ

Omega is the twenty fifth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the last of those taken from Greek, carrying the numeral value eight hundred. Its Greek name means great o, coined by grammarians to keep it apart from the short omicron, and Coptic kept the name where it renamed several of its neighbours. The letter writes a long o and forms a pair with ou. That pair does more work in Coptic scholarship than its plainness suggests, because the dialects divide the space between the two letters differently and a word written with omega in Sahidic may appear with ou in Bohairic or in one of the smaller regional forms. Tables of those correspondences are among the first tools an editor reaches for when a manuscript has to be placed, and they are only possible because the Greek alphabet made Egyptian vowels visible for the first time in the language history of Egypt.

Omega also carries into Coptic the Christian sense that the Book of Revelation fixed on it, where God and Christ are named the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The pairing of the first and last Greek letters as a title of eternity travelled everywhere Christianity was written, and Coptic funerary stelae, textiles and church fittings from Egypt carry the two letters flanking a cross exactly as Greek and Latin monuments do. In the numeral series omega closes the hundreds at eight hundred, with one further numeral sign after it for nine hundred that writes no sound.

A Coptic alphabet chart looks like a single unbroken series, and it is not. Everything up to and including omega came from Greek: twenty four letters in the Greek order, with the Greek numeral values, plus the numeral sign sou inserted in the sixth place for counting alone. Everything after omega is Egyptian, seven letters taken from Demotic to write sounds no Greek letter could reach, carrying Egyptian names and carrying no numeral value at all. The break falls exactly at omega, and nothing on the chart announces it. That structure is the whole history of the script in one line.

Egyptian speakers in the early centuries of the common era took the Greek alphabet as it stood in Roman Egypt, complete with its letter shapes, its later sound values, its numeral conventions and its scribal marks, and then extended it where their own language required. The extension is what makes Coptic a working orthography rather than a transliteration. A borrowed alphabet applied without adaptation produces something a native speaker can hardly use, and the seven Egyptian letters, together with the superlinear stroke that marks a syllabic consonant, are the adaptations. The alphabet as it stands has served the Egyptian language for its entire remaining written life and continues to serve the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which has never stopped using it.