Module talk:Copt-translit

@Vorziblix From Joachim Quack’s How the Coptic Script Came About:

"Sometimes, n is expressed by a single horizontal stroke which goes back to a Demotic form of the n. Much more frequently attested in the papyrus, there is also a paleographical variant ⲳ of that n sign which has an additional vertical tick upon the middle of the horizontal sign. Kasser tried to show that this was originally a glottal stop (Aleph) going back to Demotic ꜣ or ꞽ. This is graphically plainly impossible; rather, the sign goes back to a variant form of Demotic n attested in late Demotic Theban manuscripts (e.g. pBM 10070+pLeiden I 383) especially for the preposition n and the adnexal ‘genitive’ n, but also for the ‘younger’ form of the conjunctive (n-ꞽ:ꞽr⸗k (20, 27) and n-st (2, 9) instead of mtw⸗k and mtw⸗w). In most cases there is no difficulty analyzing it phonetically as n; in other it might point to a sort of nasalization in the pronunciation of some words."

I’d recommend reading the whole paper if this sort of thing interests you, it’s a good overview of the different Coptic scripts and their evolution. As for the other letters, one conceivable solution would be to transliterate these letters as their Demotic equivalents: Ⳓ = ḫ, Ⳋ = h̭, Ⲹ = q. And is there any practical way we could handle transliteration differently for Bohairic text? ϭ = c and ϫ = č is right for most dialects, but strictly speaking Bohairic should be transliterated ϭ = čh and ϫ = č. Rhemmiel (talk) 00:26, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

@Rhemmiel: Ah, thanks! I’ve not seen that paper before; I’ve been working mostly from Kasser’s papers, which Quack here disputes. I wish he’d go into more detail about the “sort of nasalization” he proposes; Kasser claims that Ⲳ in such positions is equivalent to the geminate writing of vowels in later dialects, which of course is traditionally held to represent a glottal stop (now itself heavily disputed). Looking through some examples, I see both many places where it corresponds to ⲛ in other dialects and some where it corresponds to a doubled vowel. Not really sure what to make of it, but Quack is probably right from a historical perspective at least.

I do like the idea of using the Demotic transliterations for letters with clear Demotic ancestors (Ⳓ and Ⲹ); not so sure about Ⳋ, given that its most common use (as part of Dialect P) seems to have derived from flipping Ⳓ over rather than Demotic h̭, while its earlier uses apparently come from ḥ.

As to Bohairic, unfortunately there’s no feasible way to do that short of splitting it off into its own separate language. It’s not ideal, but we probably just have to live with remembering that c stands for an aspirated čh in that case, unfortunately. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 07:56, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

@Vorziblix: Hmm instead of splitting Bohairic into a separate language would it be possible to create a script variety boh-Copt similar to how Wiktionary handles the Arabic script as used for different languages (fa-Arab, ur-Arab, etc.)? That way we could at least tag sc=boh-Copt where appropriate instead of having to manually fix Bohairic transliterations. And yeah, Ⳋ is derived from an inverted Ⳓ, just thought h̭ would work better than ɥ̑ lol. Rhemmiel (talk) 07:31, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

@Rhemmiel: But then how would we handle cases like ϭⲱⲙ (cōm), where the headword is both Sahidic and Bohairic at the same time? — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 07:51, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

@Vorziblix: In that case it would probably be best just to use the standard transliteration and reserve boh-Copt for Bohairic specific headwords. But there are some instances where two headwords are necessary. I'm thinking of cases like:

• Sahidic: ϫⲱⲛ︤ⲧ︥ (čōnt, “to try”)
• Bohairic: ϫⲱⲛ︤ⲧ︥ (čōnt, “to be angry”)
• Sahidic: ϭⲱⲛ︤ⲧ︥ (cōnt, “to be angry”)
• Bohairic: ϭⲱⲛ︤ⲧ︥ (čhōnt, “to try”)

Typing these out made me realize there’s also the problem of transliterating superlinear strokes over more than one letter. Rhemmiel (talk) 09:00, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Transliteration of ⲃ

@Vorziblix Coptic ⲃ was clearly [v] or [β] rather than [b], so should we not transliterate it as ⟨v⟩, as we do with Cyrillic в and Modern Greek β? Rhemmiel (talk) 10:10, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

@Rhemmiel: Indeed you’re right that it was definitely not [b] in most cases, but then again [β] (the probable sound value) is neither [b] nor [v], and the sound probably was [b] at the end of a word in Bohairic — though apparently not in most other dialects. (AFAIK [b] is also the pronunciation in Greco-Bohairic, though I’d not put too much weight on that.) In such a case I’d rather stick with the traditional transliteration used by academics, which is almost always ⟨b⟩. However, if ⟨v⟩ is what modern Copts overwhelmingly use to transliterate the letter, I wouldn’t be averse to changing it for that reason; otherwise it seems like just putting ourselves at odds with well-established academic convention for little (if any) gain in phonetic accuracy. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 17:57, 31 May 2022 (UTC)