Me ⲙ

Me is the thirteenth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value forty. It is the Greek mu, renamed in Coptic, and it writes the m sound. Coptic works it exceptionally hard. The language builds much of its grammar from short elements attached to the front of a word, and me appears in a large share of them: in forms of the definite article, in prepositions, in the particle that marks a direct object, and in a range of verbal prefixes that carry tense and aspect. The result is that me turns up on almost every line of almost every Coptic text, and a reader learning the language meets it as grammar before meeting it as a sound.

Me also belongs to the small group of Coptic consonants that can form a syllable without a vowel beside them. When one does, the scribe draws a horizontal line above it, the superlinear stroke, and that stroke is the single most recognisable feature of a Coptic page to someone who has never read the script. It has no counterpart in Greek writing. It is one of the clearest signs that Coptic did not merely copy the Greek alphabet but adjusted it, adding letters where Egyptian sounds required them and adding marks where Egyptian syllable structure required those.

Early Coptic manuscripts are written in continuous script, letter after letter with little or no space between words and minimal punctuation, in a broad upright uncial hand. A modern reader finds this disorienting, and a Coptic reader managed it with the help of a small set of marks that the scribes supplied. The most important is the superlinear stroke. Coptic allows certain consonants, me and ne chief among them, to carry a syllable on their own, and the stroke tells the reader that the letter beneath it is doing that rather than waiting for a vowel. Drawn over a run of letters it can also group them.

A second mark, the same stroke used differently, signals a contracted sacred name of the kind Coptic inherited from Greek Christian books. A third, two dots above a vowel, tells the reader that the vowel begins its own syllable. None of these is decorative and all of them are as much a part of the writing system as the letters. Practice varied between dialects, between periods and between scriptoria, and editors of Coptic texts record it carefully because it is evidence. It also means that transcribing a Coptic manuscript into a modern printed edition involves decisions that a photograph of the page does not force, which is why serious work on a Coptic text still goes back to the manuscript.