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How the reading of Coptic was reformed in the 1850s, and what it changed

In the 1850s the Church in Cairo changed the way Coptic is read aloud, and it has read it that way ever since. The change was made under Patriarch Cyril IV by the teacher of Coptic at his new college, ʿIryān Effendi Girgis Muftāḥ, and written down a generation later by his pupils.12 Its own books call it the new reading, and the one it replaced the old reading.3 How the language came to need it is told in how Coptic stopped being spoken. This page tells what the reformers did, why, and what it cost.

What was wrong with the old reading

By the nineteenth century Coptic was read by people who did not speak it, and several of its sounds had fallen together. Yassa ʿAbd al-Masīḥ listed the differences in 1954.4 The old reading had no th as in thing: it said t. It had no th as in then: it said d. It had no v: it said b or f. It did not tell ⲁ, ⲉ and ⲏ apart, and read all three as a. And ⲧ, t in the new reading, was d in the old.5 Worrell and Vycichl add that the old reading had itself “fallen into confusion, particularly in Cairo and Alexandria, partly because of the introduction of current Greek values and of conceits arising from mechanical equations with Arabic letters, but broadly because of estrangement from Coptic village life.”6

The reformers named the problem themselves, and it was the meaning, not the sound. The Asās, a grammar of the new reading printed about 1888 by ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ṣalīb of Deir el-Baramus,7 has a chapter “on the history of adjusting the pronunciation of some of the Coptic letters, and the cause of it and its benefit.”8 The letters were adjusted, it says, “fleeing from the hearer’s failing to understand what the speaker or the reader meant,” and it gives its first example:9

حيث انه فى القراءة القديمة كان ينطق بحرف ⲉ كحرف ⲁ فكنت اذا قلت ⲡⲉⲓⲱⲧ مثلا ناطقا فيها بحرف ⲉ كالالف لا يعرف منك السامع هل هى بحرف ⲁ فيكون معناها أبى أم بحرف ⲉ فيكون معناها أباك

For in the old reading ⲉ was pronounced like ⲁ, so that if you said ⲡⲉⲓⲱⲧ, for example, sounding the ⲉ in it like alif, the hearer could not tell from you whether it had ⲁ, and so meant “my father,” or ⲉ, and so meant “your father.”10

The book runs on: with ⲏ as a, ϥⲛⲁⲩ, “he sees,” fell together with ϥⲛⲏⲟⲩ, “he is coming”; with ⲃ as w, ⲛⲟⲃⲓ, “sin,” sounded like a word spelled with ⲟⲩ. The new reading, it concludes, “is not free of ambiguity,” but it “has distinguished nearly all speech.”11

The old reading was taught by the cantors. A Coptic child learned to read in the kuttab, the church school, which Sulayman Nasim, in the Coptic Encyclopedia, describes as “principally run by the church cantor, or ‘arif, who taught the children the church liturgies”; its lessons began with the Psalms and the church hymnals. Cyril IV was himself a product of it.12 The priesthood, Mirrit Boutros Ghali writes, had until the middle of the nineteenth century passed from father to son, “irrespective of how educated his successor was, beyond the reiteration of the Coptic liturgy.”13

Who made it

Cyril IV, patriarch from 1854 to 1861, was the patron.14 Born in 1816 near Akhmīm in Upper Egypt, he is, in Atiya’s words, “universally acknowledged as the father of Coptic reform.”1516 Made metropolitan of Cairo on probation in April 1853, he began at once on a college beside the cathedral, where Coptic was taught with Arabic, Turkish, French, English and Italian, and he bought a printing press from Europe.17 ʿAwaḍ says he took up the teaching of Coptic by its rules “after it had all but died out,” in the school he founded in 1570 A.M. (1853).18 Nasim adds that the school was inaugurated in 1855 with Arabic and Coptic “as major disciplines,” that all Cyril’s schools were open “to Muslims as well as Copts,” and that at the press he “started with the publication of a Coptic grammar.”19 He made Abuna Takla, a blind young teacher at the school beside the cathedral, teacher of the hymns, and in 1859 Takla published The Services of the Deacon “with the help of Deacon ʿIryān Jirjis Muftāḥ, teacher of Coptic in the Patriarchal College.”20

ʿIryān Muftāḥ made the reform. The Asās names him “unique in his age in the science of Coptic,” compiler of The Service of the Deacon: when the pious deacon ʿIryān Effendi Girgis Muftāḥ was made professor of Coptic in the Patriarchal College, “about the year 1574 of the Martyrs” (1857/58), under Cyril IV, he “saw by his penetrating thought and sound judgement that he should adjust the pronunciation of some of the Coptic letters by returning to their Greek origin.”21 The Asās closes the chapter praying God to cover him with His mercy, so ʿIryān was dead when it was written;22 the Coptic Encyclopedia gives his death as 1888.23

His pupils carried it on. Ishak names ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ṣalīb (1848-1935), author of the Asās, as one of ʿIryān’s devoted students.2425 A grammar ʿIryān taught from, which ʿAwaḍ quotes, calls him the first to teach Coptic in the Great Coptic School and names Philotheos Ibrāhīm, later chief priest of the cathedral, as the second, who learned from him and taught Coptic at the patriarch’s school in Mansura until it closed at Cyril’s death.2627 Iqlādiyūs Labīb, from the province of Asyūṭ, was ʿIryān’s pupil too, according to Ishak.2829 Prince found him in 1902 teaching at the Patriarchal School in Cairo, printing primers and a dictionary on his own press, and teaching young people “to converse with ease in Coptic.”30 From 1900 to 1903 he also published a journal, ʿAyn Shams, “mainly for Coptic language and history.”31 Worrell and Vycichl say the reform was “instituted by the Patriarch Cyrillus IV (1854-61) and furthered by the late lamented Claudius Labib.”32

No source names a Greek who made it. It is often said that Greek priests or Greek teachers brought the new values into the Church. The Asās, ʿAwaḍ and Yassa name no Greek.333435 The only source read for this page that mentions one is Ishak’s article in the Coptic Encyclopedia (1991), which says the change “took place with the assistance of a teacher of the Greek language at the ʿAbīdiyyah School in Cairo.” He gives no name and no source for it.36 Nothing supports the Greek priests.

How it decided

The rule was to give each letter its Greek value, and the Greek meant was the Greek spoken at the time. The Asās grounds it in history: the Egyptians had taken the Greek letters and some Greek words, so the letters should go back “to their Greek origin.”37 ʿAbd al-Masīḥ was plainer in 1933, in a note Ishak reports, at second hand, from the end of a manuscript in the patriarchal library: ʿIryān “took the pronunciation from the Greek language because it is a living language, that is, in use.”38 Yassa says the reading was made “like the Greek pronunciation used in the Greek Church now.”39 So ⲑ became th as in thing, ⲇ th as in then, ⲃ v, ⲏ ee, ⲉ e, ⲡ p and ⲧ t.4041 Satzinger sums it up: “Consonants are more or less rendered according to the Neo-Greek values.”42

The reform kept more of the old reading than it is given credit for. All its grammars keep ⲭ as k in native Coptic words, and the Asās keeps the old d for ⲧ after ⲛ.43 ʿAwaḍ (1922) says hard g for ϫ was the old usage, still heard in ϫⲉ ⲡⲉⲛⲓⲱⲧ.44 Later grammars took back old values the Asās had dropped: it has ⲃ as v and ⲑ as th everywhere, but ʿAwaḍ (1916) and Binūb (1955) restore b at the end of a syllable and in names, and t after ϣ, ⲥ and ⲧ.45 Ishak describes it happening in stages: the old value of ⲑ was first “completely ignored,” then the exceptions were added.46

The reform’s own books disagree on several letters. Beyond ⲃ and ⲑ they differ on ⲇ (th everywhere in the Asās, d in names for ʿAwaḍ and Binūb), on ϭ (between j and sh in the Asās, a lengthened sh for ʿAwaḍ, ch for Binūb), and on ϫ and ⲫ.47 Each is set out, with every book’s words, in how the letters are read, under ⲃ, ⲇ, ⲑ and ϭ.

Why Greek was chosen is less certain than that it was. Yassa says Cyril IV meant it, with the Greek pieces he brought into the service, to draw the Coptic and Greek Churches together “so that they might be one Christian unity headed by one patriarch.”48 Ishak repeats this in 1978 on Yassa’s word.49 It fits Cyril, who, Atiya says, “entertained dreams of pan-orthodoxy.”50 But Yassa wrote ninety years later, and the Asās, by ʿIryān’s own pupil, gives no reason but the ambiguity.51 Steindorff (1951) says Cyril IV “ordered that the modern Greek pronunciation be used in all schools and churches” and so removed “the last remnants of the old tradition.”52 No earlier source read here records such an order, and the Asās credits the decision to ʿIryān.53

A large church interior with columns, hanging lamps, a spiral stair to a pulpit, and a carved screen at the far end
Inside “the Coptic cathedral” of Cairo, as the Maison Bonfils titled this photograph, taken between 1867 and 1899.Maison Bonfils. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-04066.

How it was received

Cairo took it up and the south did not. Ishak: “The modern pronunciation spread at first in Lower Egypt. The Upper Egyptians being more tenacious and traditionalist opposed the modern pronunciation and stuck to the old one.”54 Shoucri, in the Coptic Encyclopedia, says ʿIryān’s system “found opposition amid the clergy of Upper Egypt” and “spread rapidly in Lower Egypt and the metropolitan cities of Cairo and Alexandria.”55 Ishak, in the same encyclopedia, says it was “unopposed by the church authority”56: the patriarchate let it stand, and the southern clergy did not take it up. It had critics from the start; the Asās calls it a deed “which none faults but the heedless.”57

For fifty years the two readings lived side by side in Cairo. The Marquess of Bute in 1882 sets the “vulgar pronunciation which prevails among the common run of the clergy and singers” (ⲏ as a in fate, ⲑ as t, “a vulgarity,” ⲡ as b) against what “it seems generally agreed” the letters ought to be,58 and calls ⲡ as p “the practice of many educated persons.”59 Mallon in 1904: “Les Coptes instruits du Caire cherchent à adoucir et à se rapprocher du grec moderne; ceux de la Haute Égypte ont une prononciation plus forte et plus rude qui est, sans doute, plus voisine du parler de leurs ancêtres” (the educated Copts of Cairo try to soften it and bring it nearer to modern Greek; those of Upper Egypt have a stronger, rougher pronunciation which is no doubt closer to their ancestors’ speech).60

In the south the old reading was heard for another eighty years. Stern took down the letter names at Thebes for his grammar of 1880.61 De Rochemonteix collected his texts in 1876-1877 “dans les principales copteries du haut pays” and at Abydos and Edfu often heard those around the reader correct his mistakes.62 Prince in 1902 set the letter names as Labīb gave them in Cairo beside those of Asyūṭ, Abydos, Luxor and Aswan, and wrote that “in Upper Egypt the Boheiric is still uttered as if it were Sahidic.”63 In the 1930s Vycichl found the old reading near Luxor, but only just: of perhaps three hundred who read Coptic, “two who follow the ‘old’ pronunciation.”64 The villagers, they wrote, “are being ruined by the textbooks from Cairo.”65

The old reading was not only a village reading. Georgy Sobhy wrote in 1915 that “the Church pronunciation of Coptic is the same all over Egypt,” that in Alexandria it was “contaminated with modern innovations,” and that the Patriarch and two bishops dictated it to him, each separately.66 In 1918 he adds that he heard the Patriarch recite it several times.67 That Patriarch was Cyril V (1874-1927),68 and Yassa, who called the old reading the correct one, “since it brings us nearer to the origin of the Coptic language, which is ancient Egyptian,”69 remembered him:

والواقع أنه لفظ الكنيسة المصرية من الأسكندرية إلى أسوان قبل البطريرك المذكور، وقد سمعنا الطيب الذكر البطريرك أنبا كيرلس (١٨٧٥ - ١٩٢٧) فى آخر أيامه يصلى القداس باللفظ القديم بصوت رخيم ملائكى

In fact it was the reading of the Egyptian Church from Alexandria to Aswan before the said patriarch, and we heard the patriarch Anba Kyrillos of blessed memory (1875-1927), in his last days, pray the liturgy in the old reading in a sweet, angelic voice.70

Yassa adds that calling the old reading Ṣaʿīdī, southern, is a mistake that arose only because Cyril IV changed the reading in Cairo.71 ʿAbd al-Masīḥ’s note of 1933 agrees: the old reading had been current “in the Buḥayra and the Ṣaʿīd,” in Lower Egypt and in Upper.72

It was argued against in print. Sobhy in 1915: “All modern books written on Coptic by native authors adopt more or less a mutilated form of Greek pronunciation,” and “none of our native authors here knows sufficient Greek to realise the outstanding mistakes.”73 In his grammar of 1925, published by the Ministry of Education,74 he rejected parts of the reform: ϭ must not be read as a plain sh, the hard g for ϫ came into Cairo “under the influence of colloquial Arabic,” and ⲃ is best read b in every position.75 Ishak records that the elder clergy did not accept the new values but were “unable to show the validity of the old traditional pronunciation through scholastic research,” and that the reading survived because generations of ʿIryān’s students taught it in the one theological school in Cairo.76 Even there the rules were not fully kept: in 1975, he says, most priests and deacons still said ⲃ as v everywhere and ⲑ as th after ⲧ.77

What it changed

The reform gave the Church a reading that could be taught from a book. One value for each letter, or a short rule, could be learned in a school without a village cantor, and it let the patriarchal press and Labīb’s press put the liturgy into print.7879 It came with the first revival of the study of Coptic by Egyptians.80 ʿAwaḍ, in the preface of 1916, wrote of Cyril IV that he did not live to see his tree bear fruit, “but the little leaven he prepared has leavened the whole lump.”81 It gave the Church one reading that clergy, cantors and congregations could share: the one the cantors of the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies recorded, the one taught in hymns classes today, and the one Copts sing together in Egypt and abroad.

Coptic went back into the schools and into print. In January 1875 the Community Council opened a school beside the patriarchate to train educated priests, with Philotheos Ibrāhīm as its first headmaster. It closed for lack of funds and pupils, reopened in November 1893 with Arabic and Coptic among its compulsory subjects, and grew into the Clerical College; a patriarchal edict later limited the priesthood to its graduates. Among its publications Ghali counts “the complete and authorized Bohairic-Coptic text of the Bible,” and the liturgies.82 Martin Krause writes that in the second half of the nineteenth century Coptic laymen used the printing press “to make Coptic (Bohairic)-Arabic grammars and dictionaries available to their countrymen,” and printed liturgical books “that previously had been reproduced only by transcripts.” He singles out Labīb.83

The college also trained the cantor whose pupils helped make the recordings. Mikhāʾīl Jirjis (1873-1957), the blind master cantor of St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo, learned the hymns in the line of Abuna Takla’s pupils.84 He studied the Psalms, the hymns, Coptic and Arabic in a kuttab, then went on to the Clerical College, where he was made teacher of church music. Nasim says his work “extended from Coptic vocal music to Coptic elocution where he had to rectify the pronunciation of a language long dead and largely forgotten.” He does not say which reading Mikhāʾīl taught.85 Ragheb Moftah, later head of Coptic music at the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies, chose him to sing for the English musicologist Ernest Newlandsmith, who notated the Liturgy of St Basil and many hymns as the cantors sang them, and his pupils helped with the recordings of the liturgies that Moftah went on to make.8687 Their story is told in the cantors and the oral tradition.

Linguists count it a break with the older tradition. Satzinger calls these modern innovations “the greatest break in the history of Coptic pronunciation,” and says the traditional reading, heard as late as the twentieth century, had preserved “the ancient tradition ... in an astonishing measure.”88 Their objection is that the reform laid the values of one foreign language over native Egyptian words as well as Greek ones. Worrell and Vycichl, after the work at Zeniya, concluded that the “reform” pronunciation “has introduced errors and confusion,”89 and wrote that “reform should have been in the direction of the peasant tradition, but that was too much to expect.”90

The reformed reading is the one the Church uses today. Satzinger: “Present-day liturgical recitation follows the rules of a reformed pronunciation.”91 The teaching books of the diaspora follow it: Younan’s grammar (Sydney, 2005) “is based on the modern ecclesiastical pronunciation,”92 and the course of the Diocese of the Southern United States (2008) gives ⲑ as th, ⲏ as ee and ⲡ as p.93 The old reading’s advocate is Emile Maher Ishak, later Fr Shenouda Maher,94 who wrote in 1991 that he was teaching a return to it at the Clerical College in Cairo, a trend encouraged by Pope Shenouda III.95 This library writes the reformed reading because it is what the Church sings; how Coptic stopped being spoken says why. Where a church keeps the older reading, the advice on the Coptic letters holds: follow your church, in the spirit of unity.

Notes

  1. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  2. Ishak 1978, p. 12. ↩
  3. the Asās, pp. 97-99. ↩
  4. Yassa, p. 54. ↩
  5. Yassa, p. 54. ↩
  6. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 298. ↩
  7. Ishak 1978, p. 12. ↩
  8. the Asās, p. 96. ↩
  9. the Asās, p. 97. ↩
  10. the Asās, p. 97. ↩
  11. the Asās, p. 98. ↩
  12. Nasim, “Education, Coptic”, vol. 3, pp. 931-933. ↩
  13. Ghali, “Clerical College”, vol. 2, pp. 563-564. ↩
  14. Atiya 1968, p. 104. ↩
  15. Shoucri, “Cyril IV”, vol. 2, pp. 677-679. ↩
  16. Atiya 1968, p. 104. ↩
  17. Atiya 1968, pp. 104-105. ↩
  18. ʿAwaḍ 1922, the foreword. ↩
  19. Nasim, “Education, Coptic”, vol. 3, pp. 931-933. ↩
  20. Moftah, Robertson and Roy, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, pp. 1715-1747. ↩
  21. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  22. the Asās, p. 99. ↩
  23. Shoucri, “ʿIryān Jirjis Mūftāḥ”, vol. 4, pp. 1302-1303. ↩
  24. Ishak 1978, p. 12. ↩
  25. Atiya, “ʿAbd al-Masīḥ Ṣalīb”, vol. 1, p. 7. ↩
  26. ʿAwaḍ 1916, pp. 36-39. ↩
  27. Shoucri, “Philuthawus Ibrāhīm”, vol. 6, pp. 1962-1963. ↩
  28. Basta, “Iqlādiyūs Labīb”, vol. 4, p. 1302. ↩
  29. Ishak, “Coptic Language, Spoken”, vol. 2, p. 606. ↩
  30. Prince, p. 290. ↩
  31. Carter and Ghali, “Press, Coptic”, vol. 6, pp. 2010-2013. ↩
  32. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 298. ↩
  33. the Asās, pp. 96-99. ↩
  34. ʿAwaḍ 1916, pp. 36-40. ↩
  35. Yassa, pp. 52-54. ↩
  36. Ishak, “Coptic Language, Spoken”, vol. 2, pp. 604-607. ↩
  37. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  38. Ishak 1978, pp. 12-13. ↩
  39. Yassa, p. 52. ↩
  40. Yassa, p. 54. ↩
  41. How the letters are read, under ⲃ, ⲇ, ⲉ, ⲏ, ⲑ, ⲡ, ⲧ. ↩
  42. Satzinger, “Bohairic, Pronunciation of Late”, vol. 8, pp. A60-A65. ↩
  43. How the letters are read, under ⲭ and ⲧ. ↩
  44. ʿAwaḍ 1922, p. 13. ↩
  45. How the letters are read, under ⲃ and ⲑ. ↩
  46. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 81. ↩
  47. How the letters are read, under ⲇ, ϭ, ϫ, ⲫ. ↩
  48. Yassa, p. 52. ↩
  49. Ishak 1978, p. 11. ↩
  50. Atiya 1968, p. 106. ↩
  51. the Asās, pp. 96-99. ↩
  52. Steindorff 1951, § 10, p. 13. ↩
  53. the Asās, pp. 96-97. ↩
  54. Ishak 1975, vol. I, p. 6. ↩
  55. Shoucri, “ʿIryān Jirjis Mūftāḥ”, vol. 4, pp. 1302-1303. ↩
  56. Ishak, “Coptic Language, Spoken”, vol. 2, p. 606. ↩
  57. the Asās, p. 99. ↩
  58. Bute, pp. vii-viii. ↩
  59. Bute, p. viii. ↩
  60. Mallon, p. 10. ↩
  61. Stern, § 14, p. 16. ↩
  62. de Rochemonteix, p. 245. ↩
  63. Prince, p. 291. ↩
  64. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 299. ↩
  65. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 299. ↩
  66. Sobhy 1915, p. 15. ↩
  67. Sobhy 1918, p. 51. ↩
  68. Shoucri, “Cyril V”, vol. 2, p. 679. ↩
  69. Yassa, p. 52. ↩
  70. Yassa, p. 53. ↩
  71. Yassa, p. 53. ↩
  72. Ishak 1978, p. 13. ↩
  73. Sobhy 1915, p. 15. ↩
  74. Sobhy 1925, the title page. ↩
  75. Sobhy 1925, pp. 18-20. ↩
  76. Ishak 1975, vol. I, pp. 24-25. ↩
  77. Ishak 1975, vol. I, pp. 36, 81. ↩
  78. Atiya 1968, p. 105. ↩
  79. Prince, p. 290. ↩
  80. Yassa, p. 36. ↩
  81. ʿAwaḍ 1916, the preface. ↩
  82. Ghali, “Clerical College”, vol. 2, pp. 563-564. ↩
  83. Krause, “Coptological Studies”, vol. 2, pp. 613-616. ↩
  84. Moftah, Robertson and Roy, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, pp. 1715-1747. ↩
  85. Nasim, “Mikhāʾīl Jirjis”, vol. 5, pp. 1629-1630. ↩
  86. Moftah, Robertson and Roy, “Music, Coptic”, vol. 6, pp. 1715-1747. ↩
  87. Nasim, “Mikhāʾīl Jirjis”, vol. 5, pp. 1629-1630. ↩
  88. Satzinger, “Bohairic, Pronunciation of Late”, vol. 8, pp. A60-A65. ↩
  89. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 328. ↩
  90. Worrell and Vycichl, p. 298. ↩
  91. Satzinger, “Bohairic, Pronunciation of Late”, vol. 8, pp. A60-A65. ↩
  92. Younan, p. 11. ↩
  93. Diocese of the Southern United States, p. 15. ↩
  94. Younan, p. 11. ↩
  95. Ishak, “Coptic Language, Spoken”, vol. 2, p. 606. ↩

Sources

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