A new Coptic grammar.

• Author: Depuydt, Leo

SPOKEN IN EGYPT alongside the Greek of the upper classes from the early first millennium A.D., written mostly with Greek characters instead of the hieroglyphic signs of earlier stages of Egyptian, gradually replaced in daily usage by Arabic from about A.D. 640 and entirely sometime between by Arabic 1000-5000, but never abandoned for the liturgy of the Coptic or Christian-Egyptian church the Coptic language did not have to be deciphered. That hardly means, however, that it was adequately understood by many at the beginning of the modern age. A first milestone in the description of Coptic was the Grammatica linguae copticae (Turin, 1841) by Amadeo Peyron, who strangely combined (at least according to H. Brugsch's report in Mein Leben und mein Wandern [Berlin 1894 rpt. Osnabruck: Biblio Verlag, 1975], 104) an excellent knowledge of Coptic with a denial of Jean-Francois Champollion's achievements in hieroglyphic Egyptian, in which knowledge of Coptic played an obvious role. In 1880, Ludwig Stem, a student of Friedrich Ruckert, presented a monumental summation of Coptic grammar in his Koptische Grammatik. In the six score years that have passed since then, Coptic has never again been described on the same scale, until the publication of Bentley Layton's A Coptic Grammar (2000). Advances in our understanding of Coptic in recent decades might perhaps have made a new grand summation at a much earlier time premature. But now, the codification of Coptic in its most important dialect, Sahidic, has caught up twentieth century just as the twenty-first begins. Among the grammar's many virtues, one might single out for special praise the thousand of textual examples, effectively organized and accurately cited, translated, and referenced, which afford excellent material in which to observe directly Sahidic Coptic fully in action in all its diversity.

The book is the fruit of extraordinary efforts expended with increased intensity in the past decade but beginning as early as three decades ago when the author was on the faculty of the famed Ecole biblique de Jerusalem, the grammar's dedicatee, housed in the Dominican Monastery of St. Stephen just outside the Old City's Damascus Gate, and home to what may well be the Middle East's best library for ancient Near Eastern studies. In those days, the author first entered into close contact with H. J. Polotsky and A. Shisha-Halevy, whose acknowledged influence is seen on almost every page of the grammar.

The source material analyzed here consists of texts composed between ca. 300 and ca. 800. The manuscripts can be of later date, but hardly ever later than the eleventh-twelfth centuries. Since by different definitions the Middle Ages begin as early as ca. 300 (Diocletian) or as late as ca. 800 (Charlemagne), the time period to which the sources belong could be assigned entirely to Late Antiquity by one definition or entirely to the Middle Ages by another.

The present grammar describes the standardized idiom of the literary texts. Documentary texts, including private letters and all kinds of business documents, exhibit countless idiosyncracies of many different types that require attention in their own right. Gnostic texts are consciously excluded because of their many linguistic peculiarities. On the other hand, the voice of Shenute, the rambling, ranting, raving abbot of the White Monastery (d. 465), is for the first time heard loudly on the pages a grammar. His writings are cited more than eight hundred times. Reading Shenute is what separates the worn from the girls in Coptic scholarship.

As a subject of study, Coptic seems to belong nowhere and everywhere. It readily presents itself as the linguistic vehicle of popular early Egyptian Christianity More sophisticated intellectual pursuits were express in Greek and centered in Alexandria. Coptic literature would therefore at first seem to be attractive to few beyond the narrow circle of those who have chosen to make its sources scientifically accessible (in addition to any who regard these texts as their heritage), even if Manichaean and Gnostic texts unearthed from the 1930s to the 1950s and exhibiting beliefs related to Christianity added diversity to the source material, which in turn has attracted enormous interest in religious studies.

On closer inspection, however, the study of Coptic hardly appears isolated as a philological endeavor. Coptic is connected in several dimensions to other domains of philology. In one dimension, it is the last and best-known stage of Egyptian, which has the longest attested history of any language. In another, many texts have either been translated from Greek into Coptic or from Coptic into Arabic or Ethiopic (or through Arabic into Ethiopic), or both. In yet another dimension, many Coptic texts have versions or close parallels in a diverse range of Christian Oriental languages belonging to several language groups other than Coptic itself, including Armenian (Indo-European), Georgian (Caucasian and Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, and Syriac (Semitic). In a final dimension, Coptic is the language of one of the historically most important versions of the world's most widely read book, the Bible. In sum, Coptic may be recommended to the philologically minded as a wonderfully multi-faceted challenge. The present new grammar will serve as a reliable guide to anyone embarking on such a challenging journey. In itself it is a reason to undertake the journey in the first place.

The most widely used reference grammar of Sahidic Coptic, W. Till's, is now more than four decades old. (1) U.-K. Plisch recently provided an updated description of Sahidic in concise form. (2) With Layton's Grammar the same has now been done in full dress.

Layton's book has many virtues and no vices to speak of. Its lines of argument are rigorous and coherent. Its choice of words is sober and parsimonious. Its attention to organization, presentation, and style is meticulous. While devoted principally to the description of all the relevant facts, the grammar does exhibit theoretical ambition, as appears from the analytical discourse, the arrangement of the material, and the terminology. But almost everything conceptual is internally defined. No set of concepts is precipitously imported from outside. Perhaps this grammar's single greatest virtue is that it represents Sahidic Coptic as completely as one could hope for in all its manifold diversity. Grammatical phenomena are documented in abundance. Passages are quoted in full, fully referenced, and accurately translated. Not since L. Stem's grammar of 1880, (3) as whose successor the present grammar consciously styles itself, has the Coptic language been presented in such detail. An example may serve to illustrate.

When the question arose in a Coptic class taught by the present reviewer as to whether "It's you (plur.)" is to be translated as ntotn ne, with plural he, or ntotn pe, with singular pe, Layton's grammar readily revealed that usage varies. Singular pe appears in me ntotn an pe "Is it not you?" (p. 222), anon pe "It's us" (several instances on pp. 221, 226, and 230), but plural ne in n-anon an ne "It's not us" (p. 223) and ntoou name ne "It's truly them" (p. 222). Also relevant is the singular in ntoou ntoou on pe "They are always the same" (literally perhaps [see below], "It's them [and] again them") (p. 215), te=n-epistole ntotn pe "Our letter is you" (p. 229), and anon pe ntof "We are him" (p. 229).

The body of the grammar is subdivided into four parts and twenty-five chapters. These follow a preface (pp. ix-xiii), a select Coptic linguistic bibliography (pp. xiii-xv), a list of text editions consulted (pp. xvi-xix), an introductory characterization of the Coptic language (pp. 1-4), and abbreviations (pp. 5-7). They precede a chrestomathy of texts (pp. 443-51), a glossary to this selection (pp. 453-64), a listing of what features signal the basic sentence patterns and their conversions (pp. 465-67), a subject index (pp. 469-99), and an index of Coptic words (pp. 501-20). Part 1 is entitled "The Basic Components of the Sentence and Their Phrasal Syntax" and comprises twelve chapters, from "Fundamental Components: Phoenemes, Syllables, and Alphabet" to "Nexus Morphs and Negators." Part 2, "The Basic Clause Patterns and the Imperative," and part 3, "Complex Clause Patterning," each encompass six chapters, from "The Nominal Sentence" to "Predication of Possession: 'Have'" and from "The Conversions" to "Reported Speech and Cognition: Direct and Indirect Discourse." Part 4, "Time Reference," consists of the single chapter bearing the title "The Coptic Tense System."

Four general characteristics of the grammar may he singled out. They appear to be the result of conscious editorial and organizational choices that illustrate that no grammar can be everything to everyone.

The first characteristic is that footnote references to the history of research are omitted. Among the advantages of such a procedure are avoiding invidious comparisons by citing some works and omitting others and keeping attention focused on the grammar's main purpose, namely to show what Coptic looks like. A possible disadvantage is the seeming impression that the description at hand is created out of nothing. Perhaps...