I agree ET. I believe that Abouna Shenouda's pronunciation is accurate, but I also think it reflects a Coptic that had already been influenced by Arabic. This is apparent in things like the softening of the 'p' to 'b' and also in the vowels like changing 'e' to 'a' (as in 'apple'). This is from a paper written by an American Phd on that very subject:
"An interesting result in this system is that the Eta and Epsilon are both taken to be pronounced æ, as in English "bat" (indeed, the a-e ligature, æ, was borrowed into the International Pronunciation Alphabet from Old English) -- though the Eta could also be pronounced i (as noted with Sahidic above). Now, æ is not a sound that occurs in every language. It is present in Modern English, Arabic, and Persian, but not, for instance, in French, German, Italian, or Spanish. There is no particuar reason to doubt that æ was the pronunciation of Epsilon and Eta in Coptic at the time of the Greco-Coptic "reform," but there is good reason to wonder if this was the pronunciation before the effect of phonetic bias introduced by the dominance of Arabic. The evidence, indeed, for the pronunciation is from transcriptions of Arabic and from living speakers whose first language, of course, is Arabic."
The full paper can be found here, its an interesting read:
http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htmIf we were to one day officially revert to Old Bohairic, I would suggest that we left, Ⲡ and Ⲉ as 'p' and 'e' respectively because of they are likely the result of Arabic influence. That said, Pi is often pronounced as 'b' anyway just because we say it quickly, I don't think it will really matter in the end (neither will Tau as 'd' for the same reason.)
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