Coptic Alphabet

The Coptic alphabet is the writing system used to represent the Coptic language, the latest historical stage of the Ancient Egyptian language. It developed during the first centuries CE, primarily from the Greek alphabet, with additional signs derived from Egyptian Demotic script. The traditional inventory contains 32 letters, most of Greek origin, with seven derived from Demotic. Some letters and forms vary according to dialect and writing tradition.

To encode a text using the Coptic alphabet, map each sound or letter in the source text to the corresponding Coptic grapheme, taking the intended language and dialect into account.

A less reliable alternative is to transliterate the text using the Latin alphabet. The following table shows a common set of correspondences:

To read or decode a Coptic text, identify the characters and associate them with their phonetic values or conventional Latin transliterations.

The traditional Coptic alphabet generally contains around 30 letters, although the use of certain letters varies according to dialect and transcription conventions.

The letters of Greek origin, presented in the traditional alphabetical order, are: alfa (ⲁ), vida or beta (ⲃ), gamma (ⲅ), dalda or delta (ⲇ), eie or epsilon (ⲉ), sou or stigma (ⲋ), zata or zeta (ⲍ), hate or eta (ⲏ), theta (ⲑ), iauda or iota (ⲓ), kapa or kappa (ⲕ), laula or lambda (ⲗ), mi or mu (ⲙ), ni or nu (ⲛ), ksi or xi (ⲝ), o or omicron (ⲟ), pi (ⲡ), ro or rho (ⲣ), sima or sigma (ⲥ), tau (ⲧ), he or upsilon (ⲩ), fi or phi (ⲫ), khi or chi (ⲭ), psi (ⲯ), and oou or omega (ⲱ). The sou sign (ⲋ), also called stigma, is primarily associated with numerical notation and is not an ordinary letter used in Coptic vocabulary.

The letters of Demotic origin are: shei (ϣ), fei (ϥ), khei (ϧ), hori (ϩ), gangia (ϫ), shima (ϭ), and dei (ϯ).

The letters were also used to represent numbers in the Coptic manuscript tradition, following a system of numerical values inherited from Greek alphabetic numeration.

Coptic epact numbers are specialized numerical signs used in certain Coptic manuscripts, particularly in administrative, accounting, and astronomical documents.

Unlike the traditional alphabetic numeral system, which assigns numerical values to alphabet letters, Coptic epact numbers form a distinct additive decimal system. It includes nine signs for units, nine for tens, and nine for hundreds. The thousands mark allows a value to be multiplied by 1,000; further applications allow higher orders of magnitude to be represented. The system has no standalone sign for zero.

The Unicode block Coptic Epact Numbers (U+102E0 to U+102FF) is reserved for these characters.

The Coptic alphabet can often be recognized by the combination of Greek-looking letters and distinctive characters such as ϣ, ϥ, ϧ, ϩ, ϫ, ϭ, and ϯ.

Context can also help identify the script, for example through liturgical texts, religious manuscripts, or historical Egyptian documents.