Fai ϥ

Fai is the twenty seventh letter of the Coptic alphabet and the second of the seven taken from Demotic. It writes an f sound in native Egyptian words and carries no numeral value, standing outside the Greek alphabetic numeral series along with the other Egyptian additions. Coptic gives it constant grammatical employment: fai is the letter of the third person masculine singular pronoun in a range of constructions, so it appears throughout narrative and in verbal forms, and a student of Coptic meets it in the first weeks. Its situation is complicated by the fact that Coptic also has phi. The Greek phi had written an aspirated p in classical Greek and had become an f by the Roman period, and Coptic took over the later value, so the language ended up with two letters for what a modern ear hears as one sound.

In practice they are not interchangeable. Which letter a word takes depends on the word, and broadly on whether it belongs to the Egyptian layer of the vocabulary or the Greek one, so the choice is a piece of etymological information sitting in plain sight on the page. Duplications of this kind are common in borrowed alphabets and are usually a sign of exactly this history: a sound covered twice because two systems were merged.

Coptic carries a heavy load of Greek vocabulary. Estimates vary by text and genre, but a Coptic biblical, theological or monastic work can draw a substantial minority of its words from Greek, some fully naturalised and some retaining Greek endings. That did not happen by accident or by pressure. The people who created Coptic Christian literature were translating from Greek scripture, Greek liturgy and Greek theology, and they took over the vocabulary of that material rather than inventing Egyptian equivalents for terms whose meanings were already settled by centuries of use. The result is a language in which Egyptian grammar carries Greek terminology, and letters like fai and phi mark where the seam runs.

The seam is visible elsewhere too. Coptic words for the ordinary business of life are Egyptian; words for doctrine, for the offices of the church, for kinds of virtue and vice, are often Greek. Documentary Coptic, the enormous body of letters, contracts, accounts and receipts surviving from monastic settlements, shows a lighter Greek load than literary Coptic does, which is what one would expect if the borrowing came in with the scriptures. Reading Coptic is therefore an exercise in reading two histories at once, and the alphabet, half Greek and half Egyptian, is doing the same thing.