Janja ϫ

Janja is the thirtieth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the fifth of the seven taken from Demotic. It carries no numeral value, standing with the other Egyptian additions outside the Greek alphabetic numeral series. The letter writes an affricate, a consonant formed by a stop released into a fricative, of a kind Greek had no single letter for, and it is common in native Egyptian vocabulary and in a number of grammatical elements, so it is not a marginal sign. Its exact value is one of the harder points of Coptic phonology. It differs across the dialects, and the reconstructed Sahidic value and the Bohairic reading used in Coptic Orthodox services today are not the same, which is a distinction worth holding on to.

Sahidic has had no speakers for something close to a thousand years, so what is said about its sounds is reconstruction from spellings, from the way Coptic words were rendered in other languages and from the internal logic of the system. Bohairic as read in church is a living practice, but it has its own history, including a nineteenth century reform in Egypt that brought liturgical reading closer to modern Greek pronunciation. Neither is a direct witness to the other, and confusing them is one of the standard traps in describing how Coptic sounded.

Coptic is the only stage of the Egyptian language whose vowels are written, which makes it the foundation for everything said about how earlier Egyptian was pronounced. That does not make its own pronunciation transparent. The written record shows which letters a word took; it does not show what those letters sounded like in a mouth.

For the Greek derived letters there is good comparative evidence, because Greek pronunciation of the Roman and Byzantine periods is itself well studied and Coptic borrowed a system already in motion. For the seven Egyptian letters the evidence is thinner, and janja and kyima are the hardest of the set, because they write sounds with no Greek counterpart and their distribution differs across the dialects.

Scholars work from several kinds of evidence at once: the way Coptic words were transcribed into Greek and later into Arabic, the spellings Coptic scribes used when they had a choice, the correspondences between dialects, and comparison with the wider Afroasiatic family to which Egyptian belongs. The result is a description with confident parts and uncertain ones, and honest grammars mark the difference. The living Bohairic of the Coptic Orthodox Church sits alongside all of that as a separate kind of evidence, continuous and real, but not a recording of the fourth century.