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How many people is there who can talk coptic in the whole world?

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Admin:
No doubt, all languages develop and change by the time
even Egyptian language, it passed through many changes
but there is a different between natural change/development and artificial one
here is the differences:
* natural development happens only while the language is still alive, not 400 years after its death
* natural development happens because people find better/easier or simpler way to express what they want to say by the time this simpler way dominates and become part of the language, In case the "invented" Coptic the language became harder for the Egyptian to pronounce since "th" and "V" are not native to their tongue.
* natural development has no creator/inventor unlike artificial development which is someone's idea/teaching.

u can not make catholic churchs pronounce the letter V in Latin as W and yet insist that Latin develop like any language.

and this development has bad side effects too
for example the two letters ⲩ v and ϥ  f became very similar (since Egyptian pronounce the V as F)
so now post Coptic students fail to distinguish between ⲁⲩϧⲱⲧⲃⲉϥ they killed him (or he was killed) and ⲁϥϧⲱⲧⲃⲉϥ which means he killed him(self).
that caused many Coptic books to mistakenly write that Jesus "Crucified himself" ⲁϥⲉⲣⲥⲧⲁⲩⲣⲟⲛⲓⲛ ˋⲙⲙⲟϥ instead of "was Crucified"  ⲁⲩⲉⲣⲥⲧⲁⲩⲣⲟⲛⲓⲛ ˋⲙⲙⲟϥ
in the past those two letters had very different pronunciation ⲩ was W and ϥ was F.

Canis Majoris:

--- Quote from: bonnah on 15 August , 2010, 09:21:11 AM ---How many people is there who can talk coptic in the whole world?
I read that it was 300 and that they all live in canada and us and some family in egypt..
but now when they are learning coptic in the chuchres and internet its gotta be moore than 300?
thank u for answering.

--- End quote ---

A major problem with Coptic is the lack of accessible vocabulary as well as resources to learn it; the language died in the 1700's, and by that point the Egyptian language and culture were already heavily Arabized. Coptic only exists now in the archaic form written during the late Roman Empire.

I expect the number of actual speakers to be close to or exactly 0.

Admin:
You are correct in your estimation. No more speakers unfortunately.

While Arabs certainly take big part of the blame for the disappearance of Egyptian language, the language had already deteriorated a lot by the time they conquered Egypt with lots of Greek vocab entering the language and Egyptian original writing systems were pretty much forgotten by that time.

I think shutting down the Egyptian temples (among others) by Constantine II, was the beginning of the end for Egyptian language.
Without temples there was no place to teach the language nor it's writing system. Church became the main source of education but Church was so much into Greek that eventually the language lost lot of it's vocab to it's equivalent Greek words.
Final Arabs came and gave the final blow to what was already weak language at that point.

Coptic Advocate 3:
Wait a second aren't there native and fluent speakers in al zenneya village near luxor?

Admin:
I know about al zenneya people that they didn't adopt the altered Coptic pronunciation introduced by the church so their pronunication is much more authentic however there are no native Coptic speakers there. Fluent speaker I don't know but no native for sure.

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