Gamma ⲅ

Gamma is the third letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value three. It belongs to a small group of Greek letters that Coptic adopted without any pressing need for them, because the Egyptian language of the period had no sound that gamma naturally wrote. The alphabet was taken over as a series rather than assembled letter by letter, and gamma came with it, so its distribution in a Coptic text is not random: it clusters in Greek loanwords, in the names of biblical persons and places, in the technical vocabulary of theology, and in the Greek phrases that punctuate Coptic service books.

Coptic scribes also inherited the Greek Christian habit of abbreviating sacred names, the nomina sacra, and gamma appears in some of those contracted forms. The letter is therefore something of a diagnostic. A Coptic page dense with gamma is a page dense with Greek, and one virtually without it is likely to be running on native Egyptian vocabulary. Its numeral value is put to full use regardless of that, since three is a number Coptic manuscripts have unceasing occasion to write, from the numbering of gatherings and chapters to the Trinity itself, and a scribe reaching for gamma as a figure was doing something completely independent of whether the letter appeared as a sound anywhere on the page.

The Coptic alphabet is usually described as the Greek alphabet plus a handful of extra letters taken from Demotic, and gamma is a good place to see why the description needs care. Coptic did not select from the Greek letters; it took all twenty four of them, plus the numeral sign for six, and then added signs for the Egyptian sounds Greek could not write. That is why a script devised for an Egyptian language contains several letters that Egyptian words scarcely use. The additions run the other way and are the more interesting half of the arrangement.

Shai, fai, hori, janja, kyima and ti were brought in from Demotic to write sounds no Greek letter covered, and the Bohairic dialect uses a seventh, khai, which Sahidic does without, so the alphabet is thirty two letters in Bohairic and thirty one in Sahidic. Counting gamma alongside those additions makes the point that an alphabet records a history as well as a phonology. Gamma is there because of where the letters came from; hori is there because of what the language needed. A reader who knows only the modern Coptic Orthodox liturgy meets both kinds of letter on the same page without any hint that they arrived by different routes and for different reasons, and the alphabet chart hanging in a Coptic church schoolroom presents them in a single unbroken series.