Upsilon ⲩ

Upsilon is the twenty first letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value four hundred. This atlas names it with the Greek name deliberately. Coptic renamed several of the Greek letters, and for this one the authorities do not agree: scholarly grammars of the Sahidic dialect record one Coptic form of the name, alphabet charts in ordinary Coptic Orthodox use commonly print another, and the run that wrote these rows could not establish which had the better claim without asserting something it had not verified. The Greek name is used here as a neutral label and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.

Nothing about the letter itself is unclear. It writes the second element of the digraph Coptic uses for the u vowel, following ou, exactly as Greek does, and it appears independently in Greek loanwords. Scribes marked it with two dots above where it had to be read as beginning its own syllable rather than joining the vowel in front of it, a device Coptic also uses on iota and took from Greek manuscript practice. The mark is a reading aid and changes nothing about the sound. In the numeral series upsilon is worth four hundred, and it belongs to the run of hundreds that ro opens.

Coptic does not have a letter for every vowel it pronounces. It has the Greek vowel letters, and for the u sound it uses a digraph, the two letters ou written in sequence, exactly as Greek did by the period when Coptic was formed. That is a straightforward inheritance rather than a compromise, since Greek itself had long written the sound that way, but it has consequences for reading. A beginner who has learned that ou is worth seventy and upsilon four hundred meets the two letters together writing a single vowel and has to recognise that a digraph is one unit. The same difficulty arises with the diphthongs Coptic spells out letter by letter, which is why the two dots above a vowel matter: they are the signal that the letters are not to be taken together.

All of this sits inside the larger point about what the Greek alphabet gave Egyptian. The older Egyptian scripts wrote no vowels at all, so the question of how to spell a u never arose. Coptic had to answer it, and answered it by taking the Greek solution whole, along with the Greek reading aids that make the solution workable. The seven letters brought in from Demotic answer a different set of questions, about consonants Greek could not write, and the alphabet as it stands is the sum of both answers.