Coptic language

“ The same process was next extended to the plural, materiarum, materiabus, and materias became materierum, materiebus, and materies, and nothing remained but to assimilate nominative and accusative as in nouns of the third declension whose accusative plural also terminated in -es.
Analogy will sometimes alter the whole structural complexion of a language. The Coptic, formerly an affix-language like Old Egyptian or the Semitic tongues, has become a prefix-language, denoting by prefixes the relations of grammar ”

“ In the way of minute ethnology, the spread of the Arabs has engendered numerous complications; though the facts of a nation speaking the Arabic language, and exhibiting [Pg 516] an Arabic physiognomy are primâ facie evidence of Arab extraction, they are anything but conclusive. Thus, the extent to which the old Ægyptian stock may still survive in Ægypt has been indicated in the notice of the Copts, although the Coptic language has ceased to be spoken. Here, however, as the physical appearance bore a marked difference, the recognition of a Copt population was safe. ”

“ The order of words, in fact, is constantly liable to change, and the simple fact that the definite article is postfixed in Scandinavian, Albanian, Bulgarian, and Wallachian, while it is prefixed in those other members of the Aryan family which possess one, shows how impossible it is to ground any important conclusions upon it. The same language varies from age to age in the position it assigns to the words it uses. The modern moreover, for example, [372] appears as overmore in the Paston letters, and the Coptic, once a postfix language, has now become a prefix one. ”

“ In that work it is said (vol. i. p. 100.) :
"The roots of the Coptic language appear to have been generally monosyllabic, and the derivatives have been formed by a very simple system of prefixing, inserting, and affixing certain letters, which have usually undergone but little change, not having been incorporated with the root, nor melted down by crasis, nor softened by any euphonic rules."
Again (vol. i. p. 107.) , speaking of the supposed connexion between India and Egypt:
"The Sanscrit is the most polished and copious language ever spoken by man ”

“ V. The Present Use.—Of these three groups two, the Copts and Abyssinians, still keep their own liturgies. The Copts use that of St. Basil throught out the year on Sundays and weekdays, and for requiems; on certain great feasts they substitute the Anaphora of St. Gregory; that of St. Cyril is kept for Lent and Christmas eve. This order is common to the Monophysite and Uniate Copts. Very soon after the Arabs conquered Egypt (641) their language became they only one used ever by the Christians; in less than two centuries Coptic had become a completely dead language. ”

“ Even their language is dead; for though their liturgy is written in Coptic, Arabic is now the vulgar tongue, and multitudes, even of the illiterate priests, cannot understand the prayers in the dead Coptic which they have learnt to gabble by rote, as many of them cannot read. As to the laity, they cannot be supposed to be wiser than their teachers, and few understand a word of the service, though they join in responses to them meaningless. ”

“ Beside the remains of the picture symbols, the demotic writing employs seventeen simple phonetic symbols and some fifty symbols of syllables. The hieroglyphic and hieratic modes of writing are called on the monuments the "writing of the gods," the demotic is "the writing of the books." For us the difficulty of the hieroglyphics is materially increased by the fact that the Coptic language in the form [Pg 208] accessible to us is removed by thousands of years from the form of words represented by the hieroglyphics of the old and new kingdom. ”

“ But if the religion of Mohammed has failed to triumph over that of the cross, the language of the Arab Mussulmans now everywhere prevails in Egypt. The old Coptic tongue, which has afforded the key to the interpretation of the hierogly- phics, thus restoring the speech of the Pharaohs, from which it differs little, is no longer anywhere current. Most of the Copts learn the ancient language only for the purpose of reciting the prayers of a liturgy the sense of which they do not always understand. ”

“ It is clear that the basis which they chose for the new literature was the simplest language of daily life in the monasteries, charged as it was with expressions taken from Greek, pre-eminently the language of patristic Christianity. There is evidence that the amount of stress on syllables, and the consequent length of vowels, varied greatly in spoken Coptic, and that the variation gave much trouble to the scribes; the early Christian writers must have taken as a model for each dialect the deliberate speech of grave elders or preachers, and so secured a uniform system of accentuation. ”

“ She uses old Coptic in her liturgy although it has for centuries been a dead language and is no longer understood by any of her priests. As is the case with most of the Nestorians and Jacobites, the language of the Copts is Arabic. And like the sparsely scattered schismatics of Syria and Mesopotamia, the great majority of the Copts and Abyssinians live in a state of extreme poverty and ignorance, although their more fortunate countrymen and coreligionists are now making efforts to elevate them in the social scale and give them some of the benefits of an elementary education. ”

“ Champollion, whilst still a youth in the early years of the nineteenth century, realized the great importance of Coptic for the purpose of Egyptian decipherment, and he studied it to such good purpose that he became an authority on the language and literature of the Copts. In his studies of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, his knowledge of Coptic enabled him to deduce the phonetic values of many syllabic signs, and to assign correct readings to many pictorial characters, the meanings of which were made known to him by the Greek text on the Stone. ”

“ If we address an audience of ordinary men and women in the English language, but use such words as they cannot comprehend, we might as well speak to them in Coptic or Chinese, for they will derive no benefit from our address, inasmuch as the ideas we wish to convey are expressed in words which communicate no intelligent meaning to their minds. ”

“ It was probably about the beginning of the Christian era that the demotic finally disappeared before the Coptic, an alphabet derived from the Greek, of which Plate 3 gives an example. The Arabic heading which accompanies the Coptic rubric above the Psalm that begins below (the 118th ριη) , is in a hand of the latter part of the fifteenth century. Notwithstanding the lateness of the specimen, the script takes its proper place here as representing a script of the first century. ”

“ That is, from total ignorance of the machinery by which language moves, they fancy that every idea and word which exists, or has existed, for any nation, ancient or modern, must have a direct interchangeable equivalent in all other languages; and that, if the dictionaries do not show it, that must be because the dictionaries are bad. Will these worthy people have the goodness, then, to translate coquette into Hebrew, and post-office into Greek? The fact is, that all languages, and in the ratio of their development, offer ideas absolutely separate and exclusive to themselves. ”

“ The same lineaments, though in less degree, are also obvious in the effigies of Sheshonk (Shishak) and Osorkon II., of the twenty-second dynasty, and in a few others of different periods of time. I wish it to be understood that I do not say these sovereigns were of Coptic lineage; but merely that their physiognomy, as expressed on the monuments, has the Coptic character. The history of the Copts remains an enigma in Egyptian ethnography. ”

“ The terms Thebaic and Memphitic have been commonly adopted as a more convenient nomenclature, but, as will be shown below, the latter name at any rate is incorrect and misleading. Owing to the accident that the Memphitic dialect was the form of Coptic best known and earliest studied in Western Europe, the term Coptic has been sometimes confined to the Bohairic or Memphitic, as distinguished from the Sahidic or Thebaic, and was so used by Tischendorf; this usage also is erroneous and misleading; and the names Bohairic and Sahidic are almost universally employed by scholars at the present day. ”

“ They are found in various dialects of Coptic, the mutual relations of which are not yet certain, but the only ones which are preserved with Coptic. any completeness are the Bohairic, or Lower Egyptian, and Sahidic, or Upper Egyptian, though it is certain that fragments of intermediate dialects such as Middle Egyptian, Fayumic, Akhmimic and Memphitic also exist. ”

“ The old Egyptian affixes which denoted the object of the verb, are in general different. En-v-tu would be "he bringeth thee;" and en-ka-su, "thou bringest him." In Coptic, the former would be e-o-en-k; the latter, e-k-en-v. Probably the Coptic prefixes were originally auxiliary verbs, or prepositions. The old Egyptian affixes greatly resemble the Hebrew ones, especially if s be substituted for the Hebrew h; and it is very remarkable that the Assyrio-Babylonian affixes differ from the Hebrew principally in this same respect. ”

“ Our modern civilisation is signalised by the application of science to practice. We are no longer pure empiricists. Science penetrates into every department of daily life, and all enlightened people are aware that the age of pure empiricism is over.
The movement for a universal language possesses its epochs, like other things, but we may rest assured that the era of the attempts to solve the problem of auxiliary language in a purely empirical, or even indeed romantic, manner has passed away with the Volapük and Esperanto periods. ”

“ It is only, indeed, after many attempts that an experiment can be successfully carried through. But, without wishing to deny that very remarkable things have been accomplished, all these experiments prove one fact beyond question, namely, that the languages mentioned do not even approximately, and cannot indeed possibly, satisfy the requirements which science must demand of the artificial auxiliary language. Science could not, therefore, have chosen any of these languages as the artificial auxiliary language even had she wished, nor could she do so in the future without experiencing failure. ”

“ One might be inclined to emphasise the importance of the second criterion without paying any attention whatever to the first, and to regard a system constructed on a purely logical basis as alone worthy of science. But this would be a retrograde step, for indeed the question of artificial language originated with the idea of a so-called philosophical language in the mind of Leibnitz and afterwards. ”

“ Though at the time of the Arab conquest the Copts were reckoned at six millions, in 1820 the Coptic Christians numbered only about one hundred thousand, and it is improbable that their number can have been much greater at the close of the middle ages. Only in Abyssinia the daughter church of the Coptic church succeeded in keeping the whole people in the Christian faith. This fact, however, is the sole outcome of the history of a thousand years; a poor result, if measured by the standard of the rich history of the Western world, yet large enough not to exclude the hope of a new development. ”

“ There exists here a field of work for those who are interested in the idea of an artificial language which is as fertile as it is interesting. As is well known, we scientific men suffer a good deal from the fact that the same words are frequently employed for the vague ideas of daily life as well as for the perfectly definite concepts of science. This is indeed one of the most important reasons why new designations for scientific concepts should, as far as possible, be taken from the dead languages, such designations being thereby already international. ”

“ The fact is that science, philosophy, and technology are constantly waging a fierce battle with existing languages. What they want is a language as simple and clear as the fundamental laws of nature, as logical as the precision of experiment, and as many-sided as the complexity of the facts which it has to describe. And so they are constantly working at the creation of this language, all the words invented by science finding their way unceasingly through the channels of technology into the general vocabulary. ”

“ Some success can indeed be obtained in the expression of the higher trains of thought of philosophical reasoning, but here already considerable uncertainty exists. It is clear, for instance, that a paper in organic chemistry can only be successfully written in the international language after the translations of the different names for substances occurring in different languages have been mutually agreed upon. ”

“ The point of view which the Delegation has taken is that the solution of the problem of an international auxiliary language is a purely scientific and technical question. Scientific in a double sense of the word: in the first place, because the living germ of an international language is already to be found in science and as an expression of the civilisation of Europe and America, requiring only an artificial development to bring it to maturity and to give us the international auxiliary language in its final form ”

“ Differences occur only in the case of the well-known elements, where the words employed in daily [63] life have found their way into science, whilst the newly discovered elements all possess international names. It follows from this that the further problem of assigning an international system of sounds to scientific concepts has been in certain departments of science already approximately solved. It is true that the sound is still somewhat dependent on the speech basis of the particular nation, so that, for example, not inconsiderable deviations may occur in English. ”