Ayin letter (voiced pharyngeal fricative) in Ancient Egyptian

[ET]

you know, since we have brought up the subject, I was reading on wikipedia the topic of "hieroglyohic transliteration". They were mentioning that the letter '3ein' is present in the old Egyptian. If so, why we dont have it in Coptic ?

Makes sense to me, names like "toot 3an7' amoon" has the '3ein'. Of course I am not sure how they knew about the presence of that letter.

Another question, it's a bit philosophical one: Are we allowed to add to the Coptic language? Every language evolves with time, but "danacbe " have been static for a while. Why don't we (I dont mean by 'we' the ppl in this forum, but I mean the coptic community as a whole) start to add some improvments to the language? For example like adding the 3ein to the Coptic alphabet (especially if it proves that it was native to the earlier versions of the language). That letter is native now to all Egyptians, I guess it would be a plus if it is present in the Coptic alphabet (Actually my name starts with 3, not E  ) 

Another question: does anyone knows about 'demotic' ? Is it purely an alphabetic system or is it like Hieroglyphs, alphabets + logographs ? I know that  it is hard to get the exact pronunciation from the demotic as vowels were not written, but I guess that the demotic can become invaluable for settling many debates over the the original pronunciation of the language (for example, the debate of "Theta" or "teta"; 9th letter)


One last question: We know that we have dumped some of our original words n favor for their Greek equivilent.  I guess that mainly these words had something to do with our old pagan religion, and we have swapped these terms with their Greek Christian equivalent. Is there any source for the original words?

[Admin]

1. the letter 3ain disappeared from the Coptic language, don't know why
2. we can't add to the Coptic language at the current time, we are already divided between Old and New pronunciation supporters the last thing we want now is another division.
3. I have read a little about it, its just a very simplified form of hieroglyphics (and the simple here is the shape of the letters not reading it)
4. Coptic writing system existed before Christianity, we have few Coptic text about our old gods
Maybe we can find something in them (I didn't see one myself but they are mentioned in crum)

[epchois_nai_nan]

I would love to replace some the Greek words we use with their pagan equivalents, just because its kind of symbolising how we have all turned from paganism to worshipping the One True God. I think the reason they had to use the Greek words instead of the Egyptian ones is because the Egyptian Pagan religion was still alive and strong and they needed to dissociate themselves...but that's hardly a problem now

Things like ⲡⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ into ⲫⲁ (pron. Ba), ϩⲓⲣⲓⲛⲏ into ϩⲟⲧⲉⲡ or ϩⲟⲧⲡⲉ (as in peace like in the name ImHOTEP as you mentioned before ). There are Egyptian words for soul, body and paradise as well but we use Greek for them now. I think it would be nicer if we could pray with real Egyptian religious words.

Btw about demotic, I think it has about 400 letters...but a lot of them were more than one sound. I'm not sure how well we know how to read it...I remember reading somewhere that modern linguists are put off by Demotic because its so complicated. Be interesting to look up some more though.

[Admin]

How did you know that
Ba is written ⲫⲁ and
Peace is written ϩⲟⲧⲉⲡ or ϩⲟⲧⲡⲉ
is there any old Coptic text that support this?
we can't reply on hieroglyphics because we won't know the vowels

[epchois_nai_nan]

I was just guessing about 'ba' - I have no idea how its spelled...

[ET]

For some reason my browser cant read all the coptic letters in the unicode format (some would appear... I can see the "hory", others appear as rectangles )

Maybe we should launch in the project section a topic about gathering the original Egyptian words that were replaced by the Greek in the Coptic language.

IMHO, I see it very hard for a language to lose two of its sounds (7ah and 3ein)... this really puzzles me. For the 'hory' to be pronunced as '7' in the sahidic, what did they do when they wanted to pronunce the 'h' ? In only one day of discussion, I started to have a strong belief that the answers lie in:
1- Demotic
2- Older non-Christian Coptic texts

[Admin]

Hori is admitted to be pronounced either H or 7
for example the word ⲧⲱⲃϩ we pronounce it Tob7 (even crum mention its pronunciation that way)
generally speaking old pronunciation supporters are very open to pronounce Hori 7ah in some words
however 3ain is another issue, because we can't figure out which Coptic letter was used for 3ain (if 3ain was pronounced at all)

[epchois_nai_nan]

Actually I know that ⲁϣⲁⲓ used to be pronounced 3ashai - according to Wikipedia. In fact according to wiki, this symbol was once used to indicate the sound: (ⳍ)  and lo and behold, it looks a lot like the Arabic 3ein
Wiki reckons that if an alpha is placed at the beginning of a word, it represents a 3ein...that's an interesting theory no? Unfortunately there are no sources cited for that section so there's no way to verify it.

Btw, you mentioned collecting some Coptic words? Well I'll post this in the projects section soon but I'll just mention it here now. Several years ago somebody started a Coptic Wiktionary and put about 2 words in it, but I found it a couple of days ago and put in about 6 or 7 more. I think Wiktionary is a great place for us to start collecting all these words we've been talking about...it'll help us start modernising the language. I think we should start focusing our efforts in word collection there. If it grows big enough, they might finally allow a Coptic Wikipedia (which they denied twice because not enough people spoke it). If we get a big enough community of people adding to it, we will have taken a massive step forward in legitimising Coptic as a modern language. What do you think?
 

[Admin]

We have been working on a dictionary of our own
http://danacbe.com/Wiki/index.php/Main_Page
I didn't want to use wikitionary because I don't know who will manage the Coptic section if it will be managed at all
there is a board in the forum dedicated to the dictionary project http://kame.danacbe.com/index.php/board,13.0.html
the problem we are currently facing is that, "we don't know how to put/organaize the examples of each word"
please check the topic on the board, we need more contributors and suggestions too

regarding the letter 3ain,
what you said is interesting we also have ⲁⲡⲁⲥ عباس which means "old"
also ⲁϥ عف which means fly دبانه and we say عف عليه الدبان
but I can't say that this is always true
we also have ⲣⲏ shouldn't it be pronounced r3 instead of ra ?
so both ⲁ,ⲏ can be used to represent 3ain ?

[epchois_nai_nan]

I've found something very interesting here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/remenkimi@yahoogroups.com/msg00581.html

In summary, the responder suggests that in all dialects except Bohairic (unfortunately) the 3ein is indicated by doubling the vowels (but only INSIDE a word). So I got out my Sahidic dictionary and discovered that  this applies to some very common words...

E.g. The Sahidic form of ⲉⲑⲃⲏⲧ// (as in concerning, about, because of) is spelled ⲉⲧⲃⲏⲏⲧ//
Also, ˋⲙⲙⲁⲩⲁⲧ// (as in alone/only) is spelt "ˋⲙⲙⲁⲩⲁⲁⲧ//"
Even one of the most common verbs we use in everyday matters: the Bohairic ⲙⲉⲩⲓ is spelt ⲙⲉⲉⲩⲉ in Sahidic.
(The 'e' on the end is because Sahidic words swap 'i' for 'e' in word endings in Bohairic it would be ⲙⲉⲉⲩⲓ)

Could it be that these words are actually pronounced 'etba3at//" "emmawa3at//" and "me3wi" instead of what we usually say?

[Admin]

I know about that the double alpha is pronounced 3ain
but I didn't know that it also applies to any vowel
in my opinion it doesn't make any sense that ⲏⲏ and ⲉⲉ and ⲁⲁ are all pronounced 3ain
what I know it that, the repeated vowel indicates stressing on it
I am not good enough in Sahidic to judge, so I can't say your are wrong or right

[ET]

there is something that i dont get from your post epchois_nai_nan. did your dictionary indicate that these words are pronunced with a 3ein ? if so, is your dictionary a soft copy or a hard copy ?

the other thing, i dont understand why i cant see the coptic fonts here in the forum. i can see them on almost any other site . I am using the converter, but after a while it becomes annoying just going back and forth between the forum and the converter.

[epchois_nai_nan]

Oh sorry I've made a mistake! After I checked my dictionary as you said I realised, the double vowels aren't 3ein, they're glottal stops. Like the colloquial pronunciation of the letter qaf in arabic. So for example it seems ⲙⲉⲩⲓ was not "me3wi" but "me'wi" and ⲉⲑⲃⲏⲧ// not "etba3at//" but "etba't//" (the apostrophe represents a glottal stop, where you kind of cut off the flow of breath for a second). 3ein doesn't seem to have been indicated at all - we'll have to rely on the words that we know are pronounced that way 

[Admin]

ET: please go to this link http://www.moheb.de/unicode_coptic_fonts.html
and download/Install either  "GNU FreeSerif" Or "Arial Coptic"
the reason you can't see coptic here while seeing it everywhere else
because this forum is one of few places that uses "Real" Coptic letters
to know what I mean try to search google for this word ⲫⲛⲟⲩϯ
you will find a lot of coptic text
but try with this vnou] and tell me what you found

[ET]

ok, thanks for your reply; works great. actually i did install before the athena font but the problem persisted. now it works just fine.

but i wonder why are some letters in the coptic unicode are visible while others are not. the hory and ti were visible while others were not. anyway, not a big deal . thanks again.