In the late 19th century and early 20th century, a revival attempt of Coptic language emerged spearheaded by Pope Cyril IV. One of the aims was to have a union with the Greek church in Egypt. The revival attempt did not really revive Coptic language, but, instead there has been a few issues, that when combined led to emergence of a different product. I shall call it Neo-Coptic lingo just for distiniction the main aspects of this Neo-Coptic lingo are:
Phonetics
1. Greco-Bohairic pronunciation(s): a different pronunciation scheme designed by Iryan Moftah c.1860 in his book Al-Adella Al-Rabteyya fi Sehat Al-logha Al-Qibtyia. The author highlights an issue of Coptic pronunciation lacking clarity, and to maintain that, the author reverted to Modern Greek phonetic values to try to restore Coptic pronunciation. The outcome was a hybrid between both, that was criticised by Georgy Sobhy, Worrell, Vicychl, Emile Maher Ishak or ignored by most Coptologists in favour of more authentic forms of pronunciation.
The Greco-Bohairic pronunciation is not a singular entity, after Moftah, there were noticeable changes in its phonetic values by Labib, creating certain voices for words of Greek etymology that are different from Coptic words eg phi as /v/ in Coptic words, but /f/ in Greek words. Later, beta was changed to b at the end of words, the combination of NT became pronounced as ND only in Greek words, these are all changes that were not in the original book by Iryan Moftah. Later, new rules emerged to pronounce delta as /d/ in names, and later theta as /t/ in names etc. These were followed by changing pronunciation regarding djinkim, presence of double consonants, stresses in Coptic language and accents etc.
Writing
2. Orthography: Coptic was written in scriptora continua in later writings spacing and some punctuation emerged to differentiate between entities (words or word equivalences). The Euchologion of Raphael El-Tukhi 1736 started showing treating Coptic as an analytic language rather than an agglutinative one, creating multiple spaces that were not seen before.
With the emergence of printing in the late 19th century, the shape of letters changed to conform to print restrictions, and also to conform to certain possible Eurocentric standards demonstrating initial capitalisation, capitalisation of names and proper nouns, and later nouns associated with scarosancts. Later, capitalisation started moving from the first letter of a nomina sacra which could be a definite article as in the Christ to involve the first letter of the name creating camel cases in Coptic. Proposals started pouring and each new edition of a book creates its own capitalisation, spacing and punctuations, including grammar books featuring question marks ?, exclamation marks !, etc. in Coptic language. These were predominantly orthographic norms that did not exist in Coptic language
Vocabulary
3. Relexification: Relexification of Coptic language has three aspects a) De-Hellinisation b) Neologisms c) Borrowing
3.a) De-Hellinisation: This is a movement that emerged in the early 20th century attempting to remove Greek loanwords predominantly from Coptic language, in the pursuit of 'linguistic purism'. The result was semantic widening of other words in Coptic and loss of nuances, leading to a poorer version of the language that is missing about 1/3 of its vocabulary.
3. b) Neologisms: There has been liberal inventions and reinventions of words, at points it seemed that coinage was easier than looking up the dictionary. The neologisms are either repurposed Coptic words or a newly borrowed word, or an invention ex-nihilo with no clear etymology.
3. c) Borrowing: There has been liberal borrowing from Egyptian Arabic, English and French into Coptic language, borrowing could be as simple as rewriting the word with Coptic letters or translating the word eg computer 'mouse' into Coptic without considering whether a Copt would have used this metaphor for a pointing object or not.
Grammar
4. Grammatical code interference (code mixing, grammatical Trojan horses)
The fourth aspect is that many compositions of short text follow the grammar of French, English and Arabic and just translating the words into Coptic, using clear grammar from another language and trying to mold Coptic into that fit. Essentially, thinking in another language and writing in Coptic
Style
5. Replacement of form and style
Coptic has its own literary style in writing hagiographies, martyrologies, epistolographies, encomia, panegyric, logos, thesis, canon, and using rhetorical styles of synkresis, appeal to ethos, logos and pathos etc. These have been largely abandoned in favour of the French, English and Arabic writing style of short stories, column, essay, letter etc. Even when forms like doxology and psali are preserved the content of does not draw from earlier rhetorical styles of writing
