Alphabet Letters
Coptic Letters
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Origin Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue
Shai is the twenty sixth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the first of the seven brought in from Demotic, the cursive Egyptian script that Coptic was replacing. It writes the sh sound, which Egyptian had and Greek did not, so no Greek letter could serve and a sign had to be found elsewhere. Shai carries no numeral value. That is not an oversight: the Coptic numerals are the Greek alphabetic numerals, taken over as a system along with the Greek letters, and the Egyptian additions were never part of the series the values come from. Shai is common in Coptic, since the sh sound is frequent in native Egyptian vocabulary, so it is one of the letters that most visibly marks a page as Coptic rather than Greek to a reader who knows both alphabets at a glance.
Facts
Disputed
Origin PeriodGreek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp. Attributions
Associated SoundVoiceless postalveolar fricative sh, a sound Egyptian had and Greek did not 1 Origins
Origin PeriodCoptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Origin PeriodTaken from Demotic, the cursive Egyptian script Coptic was replacing 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Place of OriginEgypt, where Greek letters were taken up to write the Egyptian language 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Origin of the NameAn Egyptian name, for a letter taken from Demotic rather than from Greek 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Sense of the Namefrom Demotic, for a sound Greek could not write 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel; twenty-four of its thirty-two letters are the Greek uncial alphabet taken over directly, and the remaining letters, drawn from Demotic Egyptian sign-forms, write Egyptian consonants Greek had no letters for. 1 PositionTwenty-sixth of the thirty-two letters of the Coptic alphabet, the first of the seven taken from Demotic; carries no numeral value 1 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceAlphabet of 32 letters in Bohairic, 31 in Sahidic, which lacks khai 2Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceNo numeral value: the Egyptian additions stand outside the Greek series 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceWrites the sh sound, which Egyptian had and Greek did not 2Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Learn More
Shai: The Coptic Letter Taken from Demotic
Shai is the twenty sixth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the first of the seven brought in from Demotic, the cursive Egyptian script that Coptic was in the process of replacing. It writes the sh sound. Egyptian had that sound and used it constantly; Greek did not have it and had no letter for it, so when Egyptian was written in Greek letters something had to be supplied, and the obvious place to look was the script Egyptian was already written in.
Shai carries no numeral value, and neither does any of the other six Egyptian additions. That is a point worth stating plainly rather than assuming, because the Coptic numerals are the Greek alphabetic numerals borrowed as a complete system, running through three ranks of nine from alpha to the sign for nine hundred, and the Egyptian letters stand outside that system entirely because they were never part of the Greek series the values belong to. It would be an easy error to assume that a letter in an alphabet with numeral values must carry one, and Coptic is a clean demonstration that it need not. Shai is frequent, since the sh sound is common in native Egyptian vocabulary, and it is one of the letters that identifies a page as Coptic at a glance to anyone who knows the Greek alphabet.
Shai and Why Coptic Needed Letters Greek Could Not Supply
The Greek and Egyptian sound systems do not match, and the mismatch runs in both directions. Greek had aspirated stops, a cluster letter for k plus s and another for p plus s, and a distinction between long and short e and o. Egyptian had none of those as a matter of necessity, which is why gamma, delta and zeta live almost entirely in loanwords in Coptic and why ksi and psi are optional shorthands. Egyptian in turn had a set of consonants Greek simply lacked: sh, an f distinct from anything Greek wrote, a throat fricative, two affricates and a syllable of its own.
Seven letters were taken from Demotic to cover them, shai first among them. The decision to borrow from Demotic rather than to invent new shapes or to press Greek letters into double duty is the most consequential thing about the Coptic script. It kept the new writing connected to the old one, it produced an alphabet that could actually write the language, and it meant that the letters look Egyptian at exactly the points where the language is most Egyptian. A modern reader of a Coptic Orthodox service book meets shai and hori on the same line as alpha and omega, in a single continuous alphabet with nothing to mark where one tradition ends and the other begins.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Semma, taken from Greek sigma, writes s. Greek had no letter for the sh sound, which Egyptian used constantly, so shai was brought in from Demotic to stand beside it. It is the first of the seven Egyptian additions and carries no numeral value.
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