MikeS
posted on Oct 13, 2005 - 11:43 AM
Ramez,
In answer to your question - which George posted an answer - yes, he's right, but the thing to keep in mind is that, although Coptic/Egyptian borrowed Greek graphemes (letters) as they were pronounced in Greek at the time, one must keep in mind that neither language was static; Egyptian kept on developing as well as Greek, but those developments were totaly independant of each other.
One of the things that happened in Egyptian shortly after Greek graphemes were borrowed is a major shift in stop consonants; this accounts for the major differences between Greek and OB. I have these changes outlined in a study I had done regarding Old/Traditional Bohairic pronunciation - if you's like I'd be happy to forward it to you under seperate cover(If I recall corectly, I think I converted it to PDF format so there's be no need of playing around with fonts on your PC). I also did one on Greek loans in Coptic (including the alphabet and the sound corespondenses) - I can send that along too.
As far as Greek 'chi' goes, that's a really interesting one! When the sound was borrowed from Greek to Coptic - well, let me back up a bit -Greek, as I'm sure you may know, didn't change overnight; it was very gradual, so you had a period where most of the changes between what we call Classical Greek and Koine had taken place but there were still some remnants of Classical Greek in Early Koine.
So, with 'chi' - it was in Classical Greek and Early Koine pronounced as 'kh', that is, an aspirated 'k'. Coptic borrowed this sound with the same pronunciation as Greek because at the time, Coptic had aspirated stops. We can, for the sake of convenience, call this period of Coptic "Early Coptic".
Eventually what happened in Greek is that it too lost it's aspirates (Aspirated stops seem to have been a common feature in early Indo-European languages, but for whatever reason, quickly died out as a phonemic feature) - In Greek, the aspirates over time became africates, so by the Late Koine period, 'chi' received the pronunciation of /x/, but had the allophone of /ç/ in the environment of front vowels.
In Coptic, 'chi' essentally lost its aspiration and became /k/ in native Coptic/Egyptian words. In Greek loans, it has the /x/ sound, however the allophone in the environment of front vowels is different; Coptic does not have a /ç/ sound so had to replace it with the closest thing which is the 'sh' sound. This three way pronunciation of 'chi' in Coptic is the same in OB as in GB.
Ecclesiastical Greek, by the way, is a very Late Koine, one could almost say a very Early Modern Greek. With the exception of a few sounds, it's almost the same as Modern Greek.
Anyway, these changes are outlined in much more detail in my little "studies", so let me know if you'd like a copy to take a look at.
Thanks on the explanation of the 'z' for delta by Arabic speakers!! I'm not at all overly familiar with Arabic, but I thought Classical Arabic had/has a 'dh' sound - or maybe it's just something that's dialectal depending on what "Arabic" one speaks (Saudi Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, etc. etc.)?
Mike S
Joined: Feb 19, 2003 | Posts: 213
Location: Manchester, NH - USA
it's very often pronounced as a 'z' by speakers of Arabic - I'm not quite sure why as Arabic (I think) has a perfectly good voiced 'th' sound!
