When the Arabs entered Egypt in the 7th century, the Christian population of Egypt all spoke Coptic, which was the descendent of the language of the Ancient Egyptians rendered in the Greek alphabet (with some added letters). However, in the matter of a few hundred years the Coptic language began to disappear from the land of the Nile and even the Copts themselves spoke Arabic as their primary language. Coptic became a liturgical language, much in the same way as Latin in the Roman Catholic Church.
These Coptic Bibles serve as pretty nice examples of this transition: from Coptic to Copto-Arabic to Arabic to a modern attempt at reviving Coptic. I think that both the Arabic and Coptic scripts are beautiful.
A Coptic Codex:
Two Bibles with both Arabic and Coptic:
Bible written entirely in Arabic:
A more modern Bible with Coptic in the margins to encourage Copts to learn their ancestral language.
No comments:
Post a Comment