Alphabet Letters
Coptic Letters
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Origin Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue
Tau is the twentieth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value three hundred, and Coptic Orthodox usage also names it tav. It writes the t sound, and it does very heavy grammatical work: the Coptic definite article for a feminine singular noun is built on it, as are a range of demonstratives, possessives and verbal prefixes, so it appears on nearly every line of Coptic text. Its Phoenician ancestor taw meant a mark, and the letter was written as a cross in the early Semitic alphabets, a fact with a long afterlife in Jewish and Christian symbolism that Coptic inherited along with the shape. Coptic also uses tau in combination, since the letter theta stands for the sequence tau plus hori and Coptic may write either, so the two spellings sit side by side across the manuscript tradition.
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 dental stop t 1 Origins
Origin PeriodCoptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, not a separate tongue 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 NameCoptic kept the Greek letter names, reshaped by Egyptian speech 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Origin of the NameGreek tau, itself the Phoenician taw, meaning a mark and drawn as a cross 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Sense of the Namemark or cross (through Greek tau, from Phoenician taw) 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 PositionTwentieth of the thirty-two letters of the Coptic alphabet, carrying the numeral value three hundred 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 SourceCarries the feminine singular definite article of Coptic 2Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Meaning in the Attesting SourceValue 300 in the Coptic numeral series 1Tradition: The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt Learn More
Tau: The Coptic Letter (Value 300), from Greek Tau
Tau is the twentieth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value three hundred; Coptic Orthodox usage names it tav. It writes the t sound and it is one of the busiest letters in the language, because Coptic marks a feminine singular noun as definite with an element built on tau, and the same letter appears in demonstratives, possessives and a range of verbal prefixes. Together with pi, which does the same work for masculine nouns, it is among the first things a student of Coptic learns.
The letter also has a symbolic history older than Coptic and inherited along with the shape. Its Phoenician ancestor was called taw and meant a mark, and in the early Semitic alphabets it was drawn as a cross. That form and that meaning gave the letter a long afterlife in Jewish and then Christian symbolism, in which the last letter of the alphabet, drawn as a cross and standing for a mark set on a person, carried a weight far beyond its phonetic value. Coptic Christianity, whose crosses appear on manuscripts, textiles, buildings and bodies, sits squarely inside that inheritance, although Coptic tau took its place in the middle of the alphabet rather than at the end because the Greek series had extended past it.
Tau, Theta and the Coptic Aspirates
Coptic has a small system of what look like single letters but are better described as compressions. Theta stands for the sequence tau plus hori, phi for pi plus hori, khi for kappa plus hori, and in each case Coptic could write the compressed letter or spell out the two letters instead. Tau is one half of the first of those pairs, which puts it at the centre of a question about the language that grammarians have argued over. The straightforward reading is that these are consonant plus h sequences, written compactly with a borrowed Greek letter because a convenient one was available.
A different reading treats them as genuine aspirated consonants in their own right, phonemes of Coptic rather than sequences, on the grounds that the distribution is not free and that the compressed spellings pattern in ways a mere abbreviation would not. The evidence is spelling, since no one has heard Sahidic spoken for a thousand years, and Bohairic as read in church today has been through its own changes. The practical consequence is straightforward regardless: an editor of a Coptic text records which spelling a manuscript uses, because the preference runs along dialect and workshop lines and is a real piece of evidence about where and when a book was made.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Taken over into heavy native use, since Egyptian had a t of its own
Related To
Coptic Tau is the Greek tau, also read tav in Coptic Orthodox usage and used to build the feminine definite article; both carry the numeral value 300.
Ti writes the sequence of a t and an i with a single sign, so the letter that supplies the consonant in that sequence is tau. The same sequence can also be spelled out with the two letters separately, which makes ti a convenience rather than a necessity.
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