Coptic Authentic Pronunciation

Coptic Authentic Pronunciation

Coptic Demotic Egyptian are grammatically closely akin to Late Egyptian, which was written in Hieroglyphic script. Coptic flourished as a literary language from the second to 13th centuries, and its Behairic dialect continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the early modern period, though revitalization efforts have been underway since the 19th century .

The Coptic accent, its history, Originality and Superiority:

An overview about the old Coptic accent and the emergence of the new accent:

There were five or six main Coptic accents, in addition to them there were many other sub accents, each of which is derived from the Conversational language in specific distination of the Egyptian Country.

The main Coptic accents are the Upper Egypt(tribal) which is named Saidy.

The old accent was considered the cultural language in Egypt, and continued as the conversational language in upper Egypt till the end of the sixteenth century.

The Maqrizi, who lived in the fifteenth century said while he was talking about Moshe Monastery the following:

” And mostly on Egypt’s Christians is the knowlege of Saidy Coptic which is the origin ofCoptic language, followed by the Behairy Coptic language, and the Christian women in Al -Said and their children still not talking except with the Saidy Coptic language and have full knowlege of the “Greek language” . The use of Behairy accent became invalid as conversational language much earlier. But it continued the language of Churches’s prayers in lower Egypt especially in the region of Wadi Al Natrun.

The author: Fr. Shenouda Maher Ishak ( previously Deacon Dr. Emil Maher Eshak).

                              
Translated by Dr.Mariam Michael