Ti ϯ

Ti is the thirty second and last letter of the Coptic alphabet, the last of the seven taken from Demotic, and it carries no numeral value. It is unusual among the letters of any alphabet in that it does not write a single sound but a whole syllable, standing for t followed by i. That makes it a survival, inside a fully alphabetic system, of the older Egyptian way of writing in which a sign could carry a group of sounds rather than one.

Coptic can also spell the syllable out with tau and iota, so ti is optional in the same way that theta, phi, khi, ksi and psi are optional, and manuscripts differ over which they prefer. It is nevertheless common, and it does grammatical work, appearing in the first person singular verbal prefix among other places, so a Coptic text of any length will use it. Its position at the very end of the alphabet, after six other Egyptian letters that themselves come after the entire Greek series, is a fair summary of how the Coptic script was put together. Nobody designed it. Greek speakers and Egyptian speakers in Roman Egypt took an alphabet that was to hand, kept all of it including the parts that did not fit, added what the language could not do without, and stopped when the writing worked.

The Coptic alphabet reached its settled form in the fourth century and has not changed since. Thirty two letters in Bohairic, thirty one in Sahidic which lacks khai, of which twenty five come from Greek and carry the Greek numeral values, and seven come from Demotic and carry none. Three of the Greek derived signs write nothing at all and exist only for counting, and five more are optional compressions that a scribe may spell out instead. It is not a tidy system and it was never meant to be one. What it has is longevity. Coptic ceased to be the ordinary spoken language of Egypt over the centuries following the Arab conquest, displaced gradually by Arabic rather than at any single moment, and by the later medieval period it had largely stopped being a language of the street. It never stopped being read.

The Coptic Orthodox Church has used it in worship continuously to the present day, so these letters have been in unbroken use for something close to two thousand years, and children in Coptic church schools in Egypt and across the diaspora learn the same alphabet chart, ending at ti, that a fourth century scribe would have recognised. This atlas describes that tradition rather than instructing in it, and the material here is a description of a living liturgical script, not a guide to its devotional use.