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Great Lent by Ibrahim Ayad

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  • imikhailimikhail
    Remenkimi,

    Pope Shenouda supported OB through sending Fr. Shenouda to Oxford to do research on the Coptic phonetics. When he came back after finishing the PHD, Pope Shenouda gave him the third floor of the teaching center in Cairo to teach the correct pronunciation. Pope Shenouda also handed out kami certificates to those who completed the course.

    Now as to why the Church is not adopting OB is entirely political.
  • RemnkemiRemnkemi
    [quote author=Father Peter link=topic=11113.msg135377#msg135377 date=1302097231]
    That's how it is pronounced in England.

    Really? You said Wuster. Here in New England, it's pronounced without any "r"s: "Wustah" Is that how it is in England?

    How about Haverhill? or Peabody? or Plaza? In Boston, they're all pronounced very strangly.
  • peterfarringtonpeterfarrington
    Well unless I hear what you mean I can only go by the words you type which don't give an unambiguous idea.
  • dzheremi
    [quote author=ophadece link=topic=11113.msg135368#msg135368 date=1302087080]
    My understanding is yes dzheremi, though I think they still communicate in Arabic with people outside their own families.
    oujai


    I see. I did a little searching and found this story. It says there are two families in Egypt. I'm not sure what to think about that. I'm not saying its wrong, but I am suspicious because of some obvious mistakes made in the article, e.g., "Coptic is a combination of the ancient Egyptian languages Demotic, Hieroglyphic and Hieratic" -- not exactly; these are different scripts for different stages of the same language, so this would be like saying "Modern Turkish is a combination of Arabic and Latin" because it has been written in these two scripts. It is not a combination of anything, and neither is Coptic a combination of anything.
  • dzheremi
    [quote author=Remnkemi link=topic=11113.msg135376#msg135376 date=1302096885]
    Fr Peter, Jeremy,

    You're both wrong. In New England, it's pronounced Wustah.

    Haha. Of course. Now I feel silly for making such an obvious mistake. Boston English is famously non-rhotic (no r's), but clearly MY dialect is not! So I probably hear r's when they are not actually there. Now that I think about it, my friend in Somerville did not have a Boston accent at all, but could affect one convincingly. Probably because she was born and grew up in NH (though I would think their accent conforms to "standard" NE English, which, if there is such a thing, could be non-rhotic; I really don't know).

    Jeremy, It's good to know we were really saying the same thing all along. And like other threads, I would respond to to your post while answering someone else's questions. Hence why you keep asking "Who is ignoring?" Or "I'm not talking about so and so". I have to learn to stop doing that. I apologize.

    Oh, okay. Sorry. I need to pay more attention to what part of the post actually corresponds to what I wrote. I apologize, too.


    The whole point I wanted to make was that there is no standard OB. So we can't definitively say how OB pronounces words. On the other hand, there is an official standard GB used in the Church. Like it or not.

    Well, as you might have noticed, in my view there are "Standards" (largely artificial, or the elevation of a particular dialect over others, generally for political reasons), and then there is actual language use. Standards are useful for comparative purposes (this is how we can say, for instance, that Cypriot Maronite Arabic is one of the most divergent dialects of Arabic that there is; it is deviates quite a lot from the standard), but I don't know too many people in my field who focus on them to the exclusion of dialects, since they are after all not natively spoken by anyone (barring the cases where an actual dialect is taken as standard, generally the dialect of a economic or social elite in the capital city). They function instead as a sort of register and a medium for communication between speakers of different dialects (e.g., the choice between an educated Arabphone Moroccan and an educated Arabphone Kuwaiti, if not French in a Moroccan setting, would probably be MSA; it depends on the context).
  • jydeaconjydeacon
    Ophadece,

    While laziness may play a part, its not the major reason. This pronunciation if supported by the Synod will not find as much resistance. People want an authority saying do so or move forward with this than to be in a limbo like state in not knowing which to use. This causes confusion. So what do people do? They go with the default setting and go with what they know. How can we spread this teaching if there is no support? Even if HH supports it, there hasn't been a synodal decision saying OB should be used and taught and that makes it very difficult to promote this.
  • imikhailimikhail
    jdeacon,

    The problem we have with Coptic is Copts are ignorant of their heritage and thus lack a nationalistic "urge" to revive their language.  As a result, Coptic use shrank to less than 10 minutes during liturgical prayers.

    To revert this people must believe in their heritage and be proud of it. The reason other peoples were able to keep their language is they felt different than the rest of the other nations surrounding them.

    We do not need the synod to approve of a language. What we need is a revival of Coptic nationalism.
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