James P. Allen. Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects. Eisenbrauns imprint of The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 2020.
Allen’s grammar forms the first entry in the Languages of the Ancient Near East: Didactica subseries, dedicated to “grammars and manuals geared particularly toward learners in various instructional settings,” including “works on languages or dialects of later periods, especially with regard to language history.” Intended “not to supersede any of the excellent Coptic grammars currently available,” this particular contribution instead has been “written primarily as a reference grammar,” especially in order to go beyond more typical treatments of Sahidic and Bohairic (p. vii). To this end, it offers twelve short chapters of eighty-one pages in all, organizing different variations side-by-side under largely grammatical headings and various subsections. To aid learners, each chapter ends with a short exercise, and the grammar culminates in a chrestomathy of six texts selected to represent the titular six major dialects (Sahidic and Bohairic, Fayumic, Mesokemic/Oxyrhynchite, Lycopolitan, and Akhmimic). Thankfully for those seeking self-study, an exercise key is provided, and the chrestomathy includes brief marginal notes for vocabulary and a handful of more obscure grammatical points.
Despite its high hardcover price and some pointed albeit minor mistakes that escaped editing – for instance, some chrestomathy notes lead to the wrong chapter subsections - the work is nevertheless pitched well towards the language learner who studies ancient religion. Coming from an introductory course that typically uses Bentley Layton’s Coptic in 20 Lessons (2007) or the late Thomas O. Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic (1983), such a learner will want to immediately venture into texts like the Nag Hammadi Codices, only to encounter surprising variation that at worst can grind study to a halt. Thus, by methodically reading through its chapters and working through its exercises and chrestomathy, a user of Allen’s grammar can rapidly increase their familiarity with a good amount of the variation found in Coptic texts, then have the book on hand as a quick initial resource for whatever they might happen to read afterwards. Although a specialized language course cobbling together disparate analyses and texts might lead to a more thorough knowledge, such a course is more time intensive and not always available, and the sheer convenience of this little book should not be underestimated.
Egyptologist James P. Allen’s new Coptic dialect grammar is therefore useful for anyone beginning to grapple with language variation, with the proviso that the study of Coptic dialects is a relatively underdeveloped discipline whose present state and shape do not yet allow for the creation of the more effective tools that should one day become possible. There does remain a justifiable frustration to studying Coptic dialects, but this is often attributable to the nature of the texts and the underlying disciplinary research.
Allen’s grammar does share the limitations of its field in two specific ways. First, it cannot transcend the difficulty caused by variant lexical items including different vowel correspondences, fricatives and representations of fricatives, and the letters deriving from what were aspirated Greek stops. Unfortunately, because language learners typically train with introductions like those of Layton and Lambdin, they have memorized single versions of words, and are thus forced to retrofit crosswise knowledge onto this initial stock in a much more inefficient way than if they had simply memorized a carefully selected group upfront. “Now which words have different fricatives, again?”, they thus continually ask themselves, “And which words have a phi, theta, or chi?” Allen properly gestures to such issues as with his observation that “it is often necessary to look for the Bohairic version of a word, or for its Egyptian ancestor, to determine aspiration” (p. 6), and yet this infuriating aspect of the material is beyond his grammar’s ability to easily rectify.
The second major issue with Allen’s grammar is its pervasive use of relatively monolithic dialect designations, in line with scholarship that is mainstream and current but ripe for reexamination in tandem with further research making use of insights from comparable disciplines. In Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction, Paola Buzi has recently deemed Coptic palaeography “a field which is still to be explored” (Buzi 2015: 286), a judgment a good deal applicable to the intersecting fields of Coptic dialectology and Egyptian historical linguistics.
Because most scholars of ancient religion learn Greek prior to Coptic, they may be under a mistaken impression that the linguistic study of each is similarly developed – that is, if they happen to wonder about some oddity and its history, that some answer must exist somewhere, or at least to the degree that it would in the study of Greek.
In recent years, Egyptologist Jean Winand’s underappreciated article “Teaching Ancient Egyptian: Between Linguistics and Philology” (2011) has straightforwardly and quite accessibly challenged this assumption. For instance, he has called attention to not only Egyptian grammatical terminology’s “stratification of concepts that do not always combine very harmoniously,” but also competing, unsettled theorizations of earlier language stages (Winand 2011: 176, 179). Very judiciously, he has observed, “Of course, one cannot deny that there is room for further linguistic research in the classical languages, but I am not sure whether this would have a significant impact on academic teaching[,] as the general agreement on basic issues is very strong” (Winand 2011: 176).
With Coptic, perhaps most salient is the primary filtration of the conceptualization of language variation through somewhat hazy and rather static Coptic dialect names like “Bohairic,” “Sahidic,” and “Achmimic,” as can be seen in discipline-typical maps from the introductory material of Allen’s grammar (p. 2) or Jean-Luc Fournet’s study The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity (2020) (Fournet 2020: 43).
From Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects (p. 2), by James P. Allen, 2020, University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns imprint of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Copyright 2020 by James P. Allen.
From The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity (p. 43), by Jean-Luc Fournet, 2020, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Copyright 2020 by Jean-Luc Fournet.
Although each individual map is plausible enough at first glance, the variance in sigla allocation provides a helpful reminder of the tentativeness of our grasp on underlying linguistic realities, as does the fact that the home region of the Sahidic dialect is still an active area of discussion (for example, see Carsten Peust’s recent article “Die Urheimat des Sahidischen” [2020]).
Despite passing references to changes in dialect prevalence (pp. 1-2), Allen’s dialect grammar still works with a chronologically flat conception of dialects, a presentation resonant with Winand’s remark in “Dialects in Pre-Coptic Egyptian” (2016) that “historic evolution within Coptic remains poorly understood” (Winand 2016: 232), not to mention Anne Boud'hors’ welcome attention to chronological variation in her recent article “Dialectes et régionalismes” (2018) (e.g. Boud'hors 2018: 24, 30, 33). Here, it should be remembered that per the analysis of Tonio Sebastian Richter in “Greek, Coptic, and the ‘language of the Hijra’” (2009), such a position seems odd given the difference between the earliest and the latest Coptic texts by native speakers of Egyptian is somewhere around a thousand years (Richter 2009: 405, 419) – a vast amount of time!
For just one instance of how even well-known variation can melt away into large, unsettled questions with the proportions of major research projects, take the use of letters deriving from what were aspirated Greek stops in what is termed Bohairic. In his Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (1995), Egyptologist Antonio Loprieno has posited that the underlying linguistic phenomenon is present throughout Coptic but only graphically differentiated in Bohairic (Loprieno 1995: 42-44), a possibility that Allen implicitly acknowledges when he states that “Bohairic distinguishes aspirated consonants from unaspirated ones, where the other dialects do not (or have lost aspiration)” (p. 6). In other words, it is not known with sufficient assurance whether a prominent dialect marker is actually just an orthographic convention, even prior to any attempt to figure out the range and spread of the one or the other.
In contrast, a more productive linguistic approach more often found in other disciplines is to focus on ascertaining as much as possible the geographical and chronological distribution of particular variations and then think through change and bundles of variation (e.g. Peust 2017). This more productive approach already informs widely-recognized, innovative linguistic atlases of Early Middle English and Late Medieval English, and there is no reason why many roughly similar maps that inform diachronic thinking could not eventually be assembled from rigorous examination of surviving documents in Egyptian, perhaps in a digital project taking its place alongside worthwhile work like PAThs and Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.
Until variation becomes carefully built into study, from initial memorization through acquaintance with the most pertinent mappings, it cannot be stressed enough that the best didactic books that we will have will be like those of Allen – that is, reading aides that collate textual variation alongside sometimes impressionistic categorizations that are to some degree liable for challenge. And thus, as a tool, Allen’s grammar is very useful, especially when supplemented with knowledge of the state of the discipline itself.
David Mihalyfy is an Independent Scholar. You can follow Dr. Mihalyfy on Twitter and learn about his work on his Website.
References
Benskin, M.; Laing, M.; Karaiskos, V.; and K. Williamson. 2013-. An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Edinburgh.
Boud'hors, Anne. 2018. “Dialectes et régionalismes: la langue des textes coptes documentaires.” In Written Sources About Africa and Their Study (ed. Mena Lafkioui and Vermondo Brugnatelli), Africana Ambrosiana 3, 19-34. Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Buzi, Paola. 2015. “Coptic Palaeography.” In Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (ed. Alessandro Bausi et al.), 283-286. Hamburg: Tredition.
Buzi, Paola, et al. 2015-. Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature (PAThs).
Fournet, Jean-Luc. 2020. The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Laing, M. 2013-. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150-1325, Version 3.2. Edinburgh.
Lambdin, Thomas O. 1983. Introduction to Sahidic Coptic. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
Layton, Bentley. 2007. Coptic in 20 Lessons: Introduction to Sahidic Coptic with Exercises & Vocabularies. Leuven: Peeters.
Loprieno, Antonio. 1995. Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peust, Carsten. 2017. “Zur Lokalisierung des sogenannten fayyumischen Dialekts des Koptischen.” In Labor Omnia Uicit Improbus: Miscellanea in honorem Ariel Shisha-Halevy (ed. Nathalie Bosson et al.), Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 256, 305-314. Leuven: Peeters.
Peust, Carsten. 2020. “Die Urheimat des Sahidischen.” Lingua Aegyptia 28 (2020), 191-232. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag.
Richter, Tonio Sebastian. 2009. “Greek, Coptic, and the ‘language of the Hijra’: the rise and decline of the Coptic language in late antique and medieval Egypt.” In From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (edited by Hannah M. Cotton et al.), 401-446. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schroeder, Caroline T.; Amir Zeldes; et al. 2013-. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM.
Winand, Jean. 2011. “Teaching Ancient Egyptian: Between Linguistics and Philology.” In Methodik und Didaktik in der Ägyptologie: Herausforderungen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Paradigmenwechsels in den Altertumswissenschaften (ed. Alexandra Verbovsek et al.), Ägyptologie und Kulturwissenschaft IV, 173-182. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Winand, Jean. 2016. “Dialects in Pre-Coptic Egyptian, with a Special Attention to Late Egyptian,” Lingua Aegyptia 23 (2015), 229-269. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag.